Recent findings that have been published in Frontiers in Pharmacology have indicated that ,marijuana does, indeed, improve cognitive performance.

Researchers from McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Tufts University have begun preliminary investigations that have found incredible benefits from the plant’s use, including the improvement to “our ability to utilize the knowledge acquired by mental processes in our brains.”

24 patients were studied over a three-month history.  The patients were consistently measured with cognitive testing, including the Stroop Color Word Test and the Trail Making Test.

They found the patients did extremely well on the tests.

From a McLean Hospital report:

After three months of medical marijuana treatment, patients actually performed better, in terms of their ability to perform certain cognitive tasks, specifically those mediated by the frontal cortex,” explained Staci Gruber, PhD, director of the Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery (MIND) program at McLean Hospital.

Study participants also reported improvements in their specific clinical conditions, sleep, and overall health as well as a decreased use of conventional medications, particularly opiates.

We saw a 42 percent reduction in opioid use,” reported Gruber. “This is significant, particularly for those of us in Massachusetts and other areas of the country where the opioid epidemic is ravaging so many. This preliminary finding certainly warrants deeper and broader investigation.

More tests continue to be implemented and required to fully figure out what, exactly, this herb can do for us.  As part of our history and shoved into an irrational prohibition for most of the 20th century, it can bring us our health back in so many ways if we start taking it seriously.

And, as Gruber points out, “people are going to use it.  It’s up to us to figure out the very best and safest ways in which they can do that.”

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