Marijuana is listed as being among the most abused psychoactive drugs in the US today. Cannabis shares that distinction with the designer drug called Ecstasy and the easily-produced variant of cocaine known as Crack. However, cannabis differs from most other abused narcotics and drugs in that it has a sizable number of people who are pushing for it to be legalized. Theoretically, weed has a number of medical uses that serve as the main reason for it to be made legal. However, for every study dedicated to finding a medical use for marijuana, there is also a study that has managed to find detrimental side effects to the use of it. In most cases, researchers have found the effects to have ties to mental health and cognitive abilities.
The first of the many side effects listed would be poorer attention span and loss of memory retention skills. According to studies conducted by the American Medical Association, long-term users of cannabis had shorter attention spans than both short-term users and non-users. According to the results published by the AMA, people who are long-term users gradually lose the ability to maintain focus on a single thing and inevitably find ways to...