Although the suits behind the governmental façade have worked hard to convince the general population that smoking marijuana turns the brain to mush, a new study finds that it is actually the abuse of America’s favorite legal intoxicant, alcohol, that can result in deteriorated brain function.
Researchers from the University of Colorado in conjunction with the Oregon Health & Science Center recently published a study in the journal Addiction, which finds that the consumption of alcohol is more of a detriment to the mind than the use of cannabis could ever be.
This scientific exploration into the truth behind the potential mental hazards associated with the consumption of theses two substances led researchers to discover strong evidence that alcohol manipulates the structure of the human brain, while cannabis does not.
“Alcohol use severity is associated with widespread lower gray matter volume and white matter integrity in adults, and with lower gray matter volume in adolescents,” the study authors wrote in their conclusion. “No associations were observed between structural measures and past 30-day cannabis use in adults or adolescents.”
The study, which was first reported by NORML, falls right in line with others studies of this kind, showing that the cognitive deterioration often attributed to marijuana use is more than likely the result of alcohol abuse.
In fact, a 2015 study in the Journal of Neuroscience found that marijuana did not cause any changes in brain chemistry, but alcohol “has been unequivocally associated with deleterious effects on brain morphology and cognition in both adults and adolescents.”
More recently, a study published in the June edition of the British Medical Journal shows that even moderate alcohol use can lead to “adverse brain outcomes including hippocampal atrophy,” a process involving the disintegration of the part of the brain that controls memory and spatial navigation.
