Marijuana. As Safe as You Think?

AIDs was indeed once a death sentence with most people living a matter of months after the symptoms were fully manifested. Now, using multidrug antiviral therapies there are many people with very low if not undetectable titers of HIV and some have now been free of symptoms for over 10 years. The case fatality rate is the measure of the lethality of a disease and presenting the inversion of that data, the case survival rate, for AIDS the 1 year survival was 12.8% in 1985, 54.2% in 1990, 75% in 1995, 94.7% in 2000, and 96.1% in 2005. The diagnosis as such can hardly be considered a terminal illness in those that a. have access to current multi-antiviral therapies and b. are compliant with the regimen.
It is absolutely a miraculous turnaround in the treatment and survival of AIDs over the past 20 years. Now that being said, the drugs themselves can make you sicker than a dog, and have their own set of associated and severe side effects. The disease remains a horrible disease that has profoundly harsh effects on the body. It is a serious, chronic illness, but is only rarely a terminal illness anymore in the US. Contrast that with Sudan where it IS a terminal illness due to lack of access to drug treatment, sexual promiscuity, and bizarre cultural beliefs about AIDS.
Now the real question is what would any of us do if we had acquired the disease and were wasting away due to lack of appetite? I think if any of us had tried other drugs that were ineffective, we would resort to whatever we could find available in order to survive, including smoking marijuana. Of course it is illegal, but under the circumstances, it may indeed save a person's life. So, we would become advocates for its legalization, and I would agree that it should be legal if it is the only thing that will stop the symptoms of corporal wasting. The real problem comes in when we want to legalize it for "medical uses" when there are millions of people in the US waiting in the wings with manufactured maladies that would come under the banner of legal medical marijuana use. What would be the harm in legalizing it for all uses? Well, that is what we debate on this forum, and many have presented compelling arguments for its use due to the relative paucity of side effects. Perhaps you are right....perhaps it should ultimately be legalized regardless of the side effects as long as people are informed as to those in full. In most countries it is considered a minor infraction to smoke marijuana and in some, it is completely legal. Recently I visited Amsterdam and went inside a marijuana shop that was well kept, well organized, and other than the "Highlife" T-shirts and magazines mounted on the walls, you would not initially know it was a shop that sold a product that is illegal in the US.
Perhaps we should be more tolerant of a drug that does kill people but probably in far fewer numbers than current legal drugs. NSAIDs in 1995 killed 16,500 in the US alone. Methadone killed over 4,000 last year. Marijuana? Well we don't really know, but the death from the drug would be masked by other more acute causes. It is possible we need as a society a paradigm shift. Certainly politically, one is coming. Perhaps that will translate into a different attitude within the DEA and law enforcement, however it will require federal legislative action to change the way the US government perceives the drug.