Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
San Francisco Chronicle; Saturday, May 23, 1998
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Physicians at San Francisco General Hospital are recruiting 63 patients for the clinical trial examining how marijuana smoking may influence the immune system and the levels of AIDS virus in the body. They will also seek to learn whether marijuana cigarettes are safe for AIDS patients who are being treated with the new protease inhibitor drugs.
One group of the volunteer patients will be smoking three rolled marijuana cigarettes a day for 25 days; a second group will receive an oral tablet containing Marinol, a drug made of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, and the third group will receive a placebo.
The patients will live for the 25 days in specially ventilated rooms at the hospital, and will be paid $1,000 for participating.
Both THC and the protease inhibitor drugs are broken down in the liver, so to be eligible the volunteers must be under treatment with either indinavir or nelfinavir, the two protease inhibitors commonly prescribed to combat HIV, the AIDS virus.
"We know many AIDS patients use marijuana to relieve nausea and loss of appetite brought on by the disease and its treatments," said Dr. Donald I. Abrams, professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, and director of the study. "But we don't know how THC interacts with HIV drug therapies. We want to see if THC alters the metabolism of protease inhibitors and therefore changes the concentration of the drug in the blood, either creating a level that is too high, producing toxicity, or is too low and renders the drugs ineffective."
The study is a combined project of UCSF and the Community Consortium, a group of 200 physicians and other health workers who care for AIDS patients in the Bay Area.
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