TOPIC:

I am in 3rd week of my Epclusa treatment and only small symptoms nothing major except insomnia. Very difficult to go to sleep. I started smoking marijuana at night which helps me out alot to go to sleep. My question is if is it ok for me to smoke Marijuana during treatment. Does Marijuana interfere with Epclusa and my final result to achieve SVR. Thanks.

Hello Mike,

Relax, the evidence says smoking marijuana or drinking alcohol during treatment will not reduce the treatment success rate.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30944519

Sadly about 1 in 5 patients get some insomnia. Here's my quick tips on how to deal with insomnia

fixhepc.com/blog/item/82-how-do-i-fix-my-insomnia.html

Weed's not listed in the medication options but, hey, it's natural and if it's working for you...

We currently have very little data regarding possible drug interactions associated with marijuana use; however, based on our knowledge of the metabolism of the major cannabinoids it contains, we can theorize about possible interactions not yet studied. Side effects can be observed with agents such as cytochrome of all kinds. As for using Epclusa with marijuana, having personally tried it, I can say that there is no change. I buy medical marijuana from an old friend who has built a business on it. As I understand it, you can use it with the parsl.co platform, the purpose of which is to track the movement of cannabis products and related financial activity.

Hi StefGrim,

While we can hypothesise about the impact of Marijuana on the Hep C drugs I would estimate in excess of 20% of my patients used it while on treatment and their success rates were similar to non smokers.

Veterans Affairs in the USA have also found similarly (although > 50% had a substance abuse problem)

www.japha.org/article/S1544-3191(20)30439-8/fulltext

As you can see for the group with defined substance abuse the SVR rate was 95.5% and without substance abuse 96.5%. The p value of 0.580 says that difference is not statistically significant.

The VA defines substance abuse as illicit drug (i.e., marijuana, heroin, methamphetamines, cocaine, non-prescribed opioids, etc.) and alcohol.