Last week, researchers announced that in a tiny study, they treated a handful of SIV-infected monkeys with cannabis. The researchers reported in a journal called AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses that upon examining the monkeys’ intestines, they observed less inflammation and a lower viral load than they saw in control monkeys.
Competent medical reporters know better than to raise hopes regarding any disease following a single, tiny trial in animals, or even for that matter a more substantial trial in animals. In this case we don’t even know if the treatment would have allowed the monkeys to live longer or stay healthier.
And yet, a couple of news outlets ran with headlines declaring that pot fights AIDS, and suggested that the lack of enthusiasm in the medical community was all due to the illicit nature of the drug – rather than caution because it was just a small study in animals.
Here’s the Huffington Post, which ran with the headline, Can Marijuana Stop the Spread of AIDS?
Amazing new research from the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center suggests daily cannabis use could slow the spread of HIV.
The bad news is that the experiment used rhesus monkeys, so it's not entirely clear if this stuff would really work on humans. But it's promising.
Here’s it’s not clear who thinks this study is amazing or promising, since no outside researchers are quoted. Is this the reporters opinion?
The Daily Beast decided to skip the question mark in the headline and just make a statement: Weed can block HIV’s spread – no, seriously.
The story strongly suggests that the only thing standing between AIDS patients and an effective drug is prudishness and irrational fear of pot.
And yet, the only positive comments on the study come from people who aren’t experts in basic AIDS research. The one infectious disease expert quoted is skeptical, but that doesn’t stop the Daily Beast from strongly implying pot would help human AIDS patients, not just by ameliorating the symptoms but by fighting the infection. For the first quote from an outside source, the story uses a policy manager for a group called the Drug Policy Alliance. Readers are never told what this organization does or why this person is being quoted about AIDS research:
Amanda Reiman, California policy manager for the Drug Policy Alliance was at the conference in 2011 when Dr. Molina presented her results. “It was groundbreaking. Everyone was in awe,” she tells The Daily Beast.
But if you read the story carefully, the “awe” allegedly happened not at an AIDS conference, but at a cannabinoid research conference. Big difference.
There’s one person with relevant expertise in the story and here’s what he says:
Dr. Carl Dieffenbach, Director of the Division of AIDS (DAIDS) of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), had just read the study when we talked. “In my mind, I don’t see its relevance to the human condition,” he said. “I’m speaking as a taxpayer and a scientist.”
It’s odd. A reporter calls the director of the division of AIDS at NIH, he says the study in question isn’t relevant to humans, and she either doesn’t ask him to explain or doesn’t share his explanation with readers.
The author, Abby Haglage, attempts to explain most of the science herself, rather than quoting the author of the paper or some other source. Is she an immunologist? Her bio says she’s an editor for the Daily Beast homepage and covers drugs, drones and comedians.
So many questions are left unanswered in the story. How big was the effect? How many monkeys were in the trial? Have there been other potential treatments that worked this way in animals? How well do monkey SIV studies generally translate to human beings with HIV? What do the observations of the monkeys’ intestines tell them about the effectiveness more generally as an HIV drug? Is the effect they observed an important indicator that a treatment is likely to work in people? The story doesn’t say.
It’s too bad because there’s probably a good story to be written on potential medical benefits of THC that have gone unexplored. And there’s probably a good story to be done in this particular paper. But to suggest marijuana would be helping AIDS patients if not for the prudishness of the scientific community is not justified by the information presented. This piece seems particularly unfair to the AIDS research community, suggesting they are letting an irrational abhorrence of marijuana stand in the way of the needs of patients.
The way to think about this issue is to ask whether AIDS researchers would use this finding to move forward with a clinical trial had the substance been some other drug – something non-illicit. That question goes unanswered.
The only other coverage I saw was in the San Francisco Chronicle’s blog, where there was a short, reasonably straightforward story under the headline, Pot fights AIDS, study suggests.
AIDS-infected monkeys treated with THC, the main active ingredient in marijuana, had lower viral loads, and more immune cells, according to a ground breaking new study published in the journal AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses.
This piece was able to get at the news, which is interesting, without overselling it or suggesting that AIDS researchers are letting patients down.
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