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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Taking a number of drugs, from antidepressants to benzodiazepines, that produce effects which she says may be altered by marijuana use. Though specific marijuana-medication interactions haven’t been studied, she says they can be theorized based on how the body processes, or metabolizes, marijuana along with how medications are metabolized. This includes the psychoactive ingredient THC and what’s called cannabidiol, or CBD, found in cannabis, though not in synthetic medications that contain only THC, such as dronabinol and nabilone.Marijuana use isn’t legal in Tennessee. “We don’t really have medical marijuana quite yet, except for the CBD oil for seizures, but I’d say 50 percent of my patients that have mental health issues smoke marijuana every day,” Melton says. “So it’s really important for me to ask about that.” She talks about this routinely with those filling prescriptions, just as she asks about whether they smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol.Melton says one example of medicine that could interact dangerously with marijuana is benzodiazepines – like Valium or Xanax or Klonapin; a class of drugs primarily used to treat anxiety, these can be prescribed for other things as well like managing insomnia. CBD in marijuana (or CBD oil) can inhibit an enzyme the liver uses to metabolize medicine like benzodiazepines, she says, so that levels of the medication in the body go up. “So [that] can actually increase the blood levels of those benzodiazepines and cause more sedation” and even lead to problems like overdosing on the medication, Melton says.CBD can slow down metabolization of cholesterol medications like Lipitor, too, Melton says, adding that's important because some people have bad reactions to cholesterol medicines like pain in their muscles. “So that could actually make those reactions worse," she says.Conversely, she says marijuana use may reduce the effectiveness of other medications including antidepressants like Cymbalta, or duloxetine. “What I’ve noticed just in clinical practice – and there’s no data out there that says this is true yet, because nobody’s done the studies – but I have noticed that patients that smoke a lot of marijuana and that are on something like Cymbalta, they need higher doses to really get a good effect; and that’s because the marijuana is speeding up the metabolism of that antidepressant,” Melton says. That’s in addition to worries about marijuana’s psychoactive effects compounding mental health issues, she notes, as well as other health concerns.The dearth of data on marijuana-medication interactions certainly concerns Brennan. “There really haven’t been any rigorous studies out there that allow us to weigh in one way or the other on the way cannabis interacts with other product,” he says.On the other hand, many patients find relief using the marijuana in medical settings.“In my patient population, I’ve had good success getting people on lower doses and sometimes off opioids completely with the use of medicinal cannabis,” Carter says; and there are other uses for medical marijuana, too. “Cannabis can help relieve pain. It can also relax muscles, help with sleep, improve appetite, reduce inflammation," he says. "So
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