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In Colorado, 280 patients waiting to get into the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP) depend on a makeshift system of charity, pharmaceutical company help and clandestine drug exchanges to get the medicines they need. Experts say none of this group has died or had to go long without drugs, but some fear the crisis in Colorado and elsewhere could get worse.

The number of people on Colorado's waiting list amounts to about one-third of the total number on waiting lists nationwide, even though Colorado has less than 1 percent of the country's 385,000 people with AIDS. Estimates by the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors show roughly 800 people on waiting lists countrywide.

Hospitals and clinics provide AIDS drugs free to some patients, but they cannot keep doing so indefinitely. Other patients get help from drug companies' patient-assistance programs, said Scott Barnette, who heads the ADAP program at the state health department. Still others rely on illegal exchanges of leftover AIDS drugs donated by relatives and friends of those who have died or by patients who have changed prescriptions. By law, unused prescription drugs are to be discarded.

Editor's Note: from the Associated Press