Answer to your Question

Answered By: Addiction Specialist

Answer: The amount of time THC (the major psychoactive chemical in marijuana) stays in your body varies a lot between people, possibly more than for any other drug of abuse. This is because THC gets deposited in fat tissue and can be released back into the blood stream days or weeks after the marijuana was used. So THC may be detectable in your urine for as short as 3 days or longer than a month. As far as the effect of suboxone, there is a possibility that it may interact with your body's clearance of THC. I have been unable to find any studies looking at this specifically; however, both THC and burprenorphine (the active drug in Suboxone) are broken down by the same enzyme called CYP3A4. One study found that buprenorphine slowed the breakdown of a chemical that is broken down by CYP3A4. So, based on this study you could guess that buprenorphine might also slow down the breakdown of THC. That being said, studies looking at this question directly would need to be performed before we could know for sure.

Answered on: December 10, 2008