STUDY OF HOW POT AFFECTS AIDS PATIENTS

$1 million 2-year trial being conducted in S.F.

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor Saturday, May 23, 1998 1998 San
Francisco Chronicle

The first federally funded effort to study the effects of marijuana on AIDS
patients has begun in San Francisco with a two-year $1 million grant from
the National Institutes of Health.

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.

1998 San Francisco Chronicle Page A2

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski