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MartinB comments on Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2 - Less Wrong
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So as an addendum to this, I found this blog which I am now reading as it has an updated view from the HIV skeptic position. Here is a post analyzing a recent study showing that cocaine can cause AIDS
CONCLUSION: Use of crack cocaine independently predicts AIDS-related mortality, immunologic and virologic markers of HIV-1 disease progression, and development of AIDS-defining illnesses among women
The 1st commenter had an inside view which I thought was especially interesting:
This certainly supports my eyewitness accounts of back in 1987 when several friends and acquaintances consciously or subconsciously decided that an HIV positive diagnosis surely meant death in 2 to 5 years, which led them onto severe crack and cocaine binges up until they were finally put on AZT monotherapy. Sad to say what the results were. Now they’re all part of the statistics. Can I say self-fulfilling prophecy?
Cocaine is a drug that a) can damage the immune system and b) reduce appetite. It isn't at all unreasonable that HIV positive individuals who were heavy cocaine users would therefore progress to full AIDS faster than others. Note also that a 2-5 timespan isn't that far off from the timespan one would expect from HIV infection to emergence of AIDS given no treatment. Note that the study authors don't seem to think that this is at all unusual and nowhere do they claim that the use of crack cocaine was somehow causing AIDS.
Sure, but it makes it more difficult to dissociate what the cocaine and virus are doing independent of each other, ie it makes it difficult to tease out the cause and effect from the correlation.
Right, but that makes it just weak evidence. So it isn't very useful for the claim that cocaine somehow causes AIDS.
Well not quite, because cocaine was causing AIDs-like symptoms before HIV was presumed to be around, even if the great rise of cocaine use in the 80's in the west happens to correspond exactly with the rise of AIDS.
What's your source for this? Looking at the cocaine statistics and AIDS statistics myself, I'm not seeing this correspondence. What I do see is that cocaine use dropped to a fraction of its peak level by 1990, while AIDS kept rising.
Just go down to the graph in your first link and look at the emergency room drug mentions and see the cocaine serge - it does indeed correspond to the AIDS epidemic. Deusberg's 2003 paper has more on this, but it's in the data you linked. From the emergency room data it looks like cocaine use was still growing up to 2001, but my point was with the rise. AIDS peaked in the mid 90's from your data link.