Writing’s on the wall as officials get the word out about AIDS risk.

The cluster of abandoned buildings behind Ethel’s Soul Food are typical shooting galleries--shadowy, fetid hide-outs for the junkies who leave their bloodied syringes behind.

Outside, the weed-choked lot is filled with empty bottles of rotgut wine. There is an eerie sense of people watching from cracked windows, but there are no faces to be seen, just skinny cats prowling a littered alley.

Only the graffiti breaks the dreary mood.

Two young graffiti artists spent hours spray-painting the side of an old garage where addicts sometimes hang out. Their work brings more than a splash of color to the slum, though. The graffiti, it turns out, was commissioned by the state of Colorado. And its message is one of life and death:

“Don’t Share,” it reads, “Use Bleach.”

AIDS Education

Using graffiti to urge drug users to sterilize their needles is part of an unusual AIDS-education project by the Department of Health, which got the idea from a focus group of jailed hookers and junkies.

Secrecy and rampant illiteracy make intravenous drug users “one of the toughest groups to reach,” said Stephanie Marusich, a Health Department spokeswoman.

But they’re also among the most vulnerable when it comes to AIDS; the virus is spread through blood left in syringes that are passed from junkie to junkie.

So far, Denver has been spared the worst of the AIDS plague. The state has reported only 1,098 fully developed cases, but nearly 85% are concentrated in Denver’s six-county metropolitan area, with a population of 1.8 million. Fifteen percent of Colorado’s AIDS patients have a history of IV drug use. An additional 15,000 to 30,000 people are thought to be carrying the virus but showing no symptoms, Marusich said.

Drug Paraphernalia

By quietly providing free condoms, plastic vials of bleach and metal caps to cook dope--and by using the language of the street in spray-painted pleas--health officials here hope to keep the deadly disease at bay.

The paraphernalia is left at several drop sites in drug-ridden neighborhoods. One liquor store keeps bleach and condoms in a cigar box on top of the cigarette machine.

“I remember reading where New York’s AIDS statistics went from 139 cases in 1983 to 7,600 in 1989,” Marusich said. “We don’t want to be New York or Los Angeles.”

Similar distribution of bleach and condoms takes place in New York and San Francisco, but the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has twice voted down such a program.

Graffiti Artists

With the help of Project Safe, an AIDS research and community outreach group, the Colorado Health Department began recruiting graffiti artists a couple of months ago.

“It took a while to convince them this wasn’t a sting,” Marusich said. “We had to send business cards, invite them over for a Coke and draw up contracts.”

Four youths were hired for $100 apiece and promises of free paint and no hassles from police or business owners. Marusich and George Burke of Project Safe cruised Denver’s shabbier streets for the right walls.

Target Areas

“We targeted neighborhoods where people are not going into drug treatment centers,” Marusich said. “This is the population that’s not getting the message.”

Three walls were chosen--a garage, a Mexican diner and a neighborhood market. After listening to the peculiar pitch (the state wanted to pay them $100 for permission to spray paint graffiti on their walls?), the business owners all pledged cooperation.

Marusich then bought $250 worth of spray paint and set the artists loose a week ago. The only restrictions were that they make the message legible and include an AIDS hot line number. A sharp increase in the number of calls to the number after the graffiti went up has given the Health Department and Project Safe hope that the method is working.

“We really had to baby-sit the paint in one neighborhood,” Marusich said. “People kept coming up to us and asking for the empty cans so they could huff the fumes.”

Art With Message

Two of the artists--Vince Manalo, a 17-year-old who uses the tag of Zoom One, and Rasta, 20, who declined to give his full name--spent eight hours on the garage wall, painting a Max Headroom-type character clutching a bottle of bleach. Time bombs with lighted fuses drove the message home.

“It might not stop people from shooting up,” Rasta said later, surveying his work, “but it’s going to make people open up a little and get them thinking.

“If this was in a newspaper or magazine, not very many people are going to see it,” he said. “But if you put it on a wall, people don’t have a choice not to see it. Graffiti makes a statement.”

Manalo, who scrawled the message in Spanish on the diner wall, agreed.

“In these neighborhoods, little kids are into the rap scene and graffiti is a part of that. They respect graffiti. They’ll look at graffiti and study it and who knows, maybe they’ll listen to it.”