Will the recent study findings cause a stir in the controversy over the health risks of marijuana use?

Professor Reto Auer of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland led a team of researchers, and together they found that the long-term use of marijuana might cause harm to a user’s verbal memory. They reported their findings in the online edition of JAMA Internal Medicine.

Auer and his colleagues conducted a study on about 3,500 Americans who were 18 to 30 years old in the 1980s. More than 80% of them reported past marijuana use, and just 12 percent said that they had continued to use marijuana into their middle ages. Auer and his team analyzed data from a test that covered verbal memory, processing speed, and executive function over a 25-year period.

The test measured the ability of participants to memorize and recall a list of 15 words, and for every five years of marijuana exposure, one in two of the middle-aged participants were able to remember one word less from the list of words.

In an interview with Reuters, Professor Auer said the following:

Recreational marijuana users use it to get high to benefit from the transient change it produces. But this transient effect might have long-term consequences on the way the brain processes information and could also have direct toxic effects on brain’s neurons.

 
Opinions are still split on whether marijuana use causes damage to human health. Some people insist that marijuana is harmless relative to other legal substances like tobacco and alcohol. The findings of this study may have no small influence on an American society that is currently decriminalizing marijuana use.

The U.S. Is Legalizing Marijuana Use

Now more and more states in the U.S. are legalizing marijuana use. 23 states, including California, Washington, and Washington D.C. have already legalized marijuana for medicinal purposes or recreational use. Marijuana is now becoming a big business in the U.S. For example, 2015 adult-use marijuana sales increased 184% from the previous year.

Drugs Cause Spiritual Phenomena

However, it is to be noted that marijuana does not only cause damage to the physical body itself.

In his book, “Introduction to Exorcism”, Ryuho Okawa, the founder and CEO of Happy Science, talks about the danger of drugs from a spiritual perspective.

The use of narcotics drugs often causes a kind of abnormal state of consciousness, which sometimes makes you experience pseudo spiritual phenomenon or something like a disembodied feeling. In some cases, you actually see the spirit world. I think this happens because drug use interferes with the function of the “silver code” that connects the physical body with the soul, causing the soul to easily become detached from the body. For this reason, you sometimes see the spirit world. Some people may see the heavenly world, but quite a few people see the hellish world.

 
When viewed from the spiritual perspective, human beings consist of a body and a soul. Drug use has a negative influence on the connection between the physical body and the soul, which constitutes a major cause for attracting evil spirits. When your mind is attuned to hell, you come under negative spiritual influences, and become out of shape; sometimes you fall into a state of depression — or even worse, you commit crimes.

A spiritual perspective like this is necessary in arguing the pros and cons of marijuana use.