The Dark Spiritual Truth About Marijuana
A Night That Opened The Door
In December 2023, Bryn Spejcher was convicted of one of the most horrific crimes in the history of Thousand Oaks, California—one of the safest cities in America. (Source)
Chad O’Melia met Bryn and her Siberian Husky at a dog park. He had no idea that her second hit from his bong, on their first and last date, would open a door to something dreadfully dark.
Bryn heard voices. Dark, guttural voices. She went to Chad’s kitchen and returned with a knife in each hand. She began to stab him. “Keep going,” the voices commanded. “Don’t stop. You’re almost there.”
She obeyed. She later testified that she felt like something else had taken control—as if she were watching her own body from the outside.
Bryn Spejcher
What terrified officers wasn’t just the blood. It was the strength—and the look in her eyes.
They tased her four times. She didn’t react. They struck her nine times with a steel baton, breaking her arm in five places. She kept going.
Not a Bad Trip—A Breach
Bryn had no history of mental illness. One of her professors testified that of the thousand graduate students he had taught, “none has ever been better than Bryn Spejcher.”
Cannabis-induced psychosis, they called it. This was not a bad trip. It was a door opened. Something came through. But what was it?
The Staggering Irony
Robert Corry was the attorney who legalized recreational marijuana in Colorado in 2012—the poster child for cannabis advocacy, the legal mind who assured America that marijuana was safe.
Then something stepped out of the haze—the same darkness that used Bryn now found him.
When the Advocate Becomes the Warning
In 2019, Corry was arrested for waving a sword at strangers in Denver. (Source) Weeks earlier, he had kidnapped a woman at Denver International Airport, hijacked her car, crashed through the airport parking garage gate, and told her he would kill her if she didn’t stay quiet. He claimed he was being chased by “Arabs with a helicopter.” (Source)
Robert Corry
Cannabis-induced psychosis. The top marijuana lawyer in America—undone by the very drug he championed.
Today, Corry warns against the industry he helped create: “It’s hard to admit I was naive… flat out wrong about some things. But at least I’m willing to admit that and try to make things right.”
A brilliant graduate student with no mental illness. The most celebrated cannabis attorney in America. Both highly intelligent and successful. Both opened the same door. Through cannabis inebriation.
It’s a doorway. And once opened, the darkness doesn’t ask your permission to enter. Whatever is hiding behind that haze is not harmless. The “high” you seek is a spiritual hijacking; you are evicting your own mind so a dark tenant can move in.
Cannabis and Psychosis
The doctors don’t know exactly what they’re dealing with. But they see what it does.
Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse since 2003, has watched the data pile up for two decades: “We are seeing a very significant rise in psychosis associated with the consumption of marijuana. And the higher the content of THC, the higher the likelihood of a sychotic episode.” (Source: https://www.thetimes.com/world/us-world/article/potent-marijuana-strain-in-us-causing-psychosis-time-bomb-v2zfxd9km)
Her conclusion is haunting: “Cannabis harms your humanity.”
Dr. Leslie Hulvershorn, chair of psychiatry at Indiana University School of Medicine, sees it firsthand in her patients: “When I see youths with psychotic symptoms, they’re almost always using lots of cannabis.” (Source)
Whatever hides behind the green haze, its fingerprints are all over modern psychosis. Science has documented the symptoms, but it is beginning to realize it is staring into an abyss it cannot map.
The Devil Is in the Details
What modern doctors are only now discovering, ancient physicians saw two thousand years ago.
Alex Berenson—former New York Times investigative reporter and author of the extensively researched book Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence—unearthed a chilling historical warning. The Pen-ts’ao Ching, the first comprehensive pharmacopeia ever created, warned Chinese physicians around 100 AD that excessive cannabis use caused users to see “devils” (Berenson, Tell Your Children, Free Press (New York, NY, 2019), p. xxiii) and “stimulated uncontrollable violence and criminal inclinations.” (Ibid.) They believed the drug acted as a spiritual catalyst—a doorway to something dark.
Seeing devils. Uncontrollable violence. Two thousand years ago!
Berenson didn’t stop with ancient warnings. Working with a Columbia University professor of clinical biostatistics, he analyzed modern data and they documented a sharp and undeniable rise in emergency room visits, violent crime, and schizophrenia tied directly to cannabis use.
Ancient doctors said “seeing devils.” Modern doctors say “psychosis” and “schizophrenia.” The language has changed, but the pattern hasn’t. The “devils” seen by the ancients are now filling our modern psychiatric wards.
For thousands of years, people who get close to this drug keep reporting the same thing: something steps through the haze and starts using and abusing them. In Persia, the Hashshashin used hashish (cannabis) to create violent killers—so notorious that their name gave us the English word assassin. The same spirit behind past assassins is now seen in drug-linked school shooters today. In India, spirits were believed to reside in cannabis leaves which belonged to Shiva, the Lord of Destruction, and were consumed in wild bhang rituals where insanity and violence were treated as worship.
Different continents. Different centuries. Different religions. The same darkness. When you use cannabis, something demonic on the other side of the haze starts reaching back.
The Devil’s Sacrament
Aleister Crowley—the man who called himself “The Beast 666,” who wrote openly about sacrificing children to Satan, and who remains the most influential occultist of the twentieth century—used cannabis as a “Black Eucharist” in his ceremonial magick. Within his ceremonial magick, cannabis is formally assigned to the Devil’s path. He ingested it to alter his consciousness and invite possession—to become one with the forces that hate your soul.
In Philip Farber’s High Magick: A Guide to Cannabis in Ritual and Mysticism, the author traces Crowley’s classification of cannabis in his Qabalistic system, noting that Crowley attributed “Indian Hemp” to the Twenty-Sixth Path of the Tree of Life—which corresponds to the Tarot card “The Devil.” (Aleister Crowley, Liber 777)
From Chinese doctors warning against “seeing devils” to Hindu rituals honoring the Lord of Destruction, from Persian assassins fueled by hashish to the father of modern Satanism using cannabis as a Black Eucharist—the thread is unbroken across every continent and century.
When you smoke the haze, you are walking the road where your mind meets the Devil—and he never walks alone.
The Bible Has a Word for It
The word is pharmakeia—and it changes everything.
From the beginning, God’s Word treated illicit drug use as a spiritual crime—not a harmless habit. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word usually translated “witch” or “sorcerer” is mekashep. Its root means “to cut”—referring to the cutting, preparing, and administering of plants for supernatural purposes. The New King James Study Bible confirms that this term describes “drugs or herbs” used “to produce magical effects.” When Jewish scholars translated the Old Testament into the Greek Septuagint, centuries before Christ, they rendered mekashep as pharmakeia—the word from which we derive “pharmacy” and “pharmaceutical.”
Drugs and sorcery were never separate categories. They were the same word. In fact, the New Testament confirms it. The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology states that pharmakeia included potions and herbs prepared “for spells, and also for encouraging the presence of spirits at magical ceremonies.” (The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, Vol 2, p. 558) Ancient readers understood sorcery as drug-assisted contact with non-human entities—chemically dismantling God-given mental defenses to invite a dark guest.
The word pharmakeia appears in Galatians 5:20 as a work of the sinful flesh, and in Revelation 9:21, 21:8, and 22:15—where sorcerers are condemned alongside murderers. But its most chilling appearance is prophetic:
“For your merchants were the great men of the earth, for by your pharmakeia all the nations were deceived.” (Revelation 18:23)
A global system deceiving the nations—not through violence alone, but through commerce, normalization, and mass participation driven by drug cartels and mass commercialization.
What ancient cultures feared–and what doctors now document–Scripture warned would come. Substances used to alter the mind become tools of the devil to capture the soul.
The Body Keeps the Score
Set aside the spiritual for a moment. The physiological science alone is damning.
Strip away the hype and the wellness branding, and marijuana looks less like medicine and more like a slow, smiling wrecking ball. The drug marketed as a cure for anxiety actually increases anxiety with continued use—fueling paranoia and raising the risk of panic attacks and psychotic breaks. The “harmless herb” deposits more tar in the lungs than tobacco and causes chronic bronchitis, respiratory disease, lung cancer, and brain damage. Marijuana impairs memory, shrinks gray matter in the brain, and lowers IQ with prolonged use. It doubles the risk of car accidents, and disrupts hormones, damages sperm, and crosses the placenta into unborn children. Daily high-potency users are up to five times more likely to develop psychotic disorders like schizophrenia.
And the claim that it isn’t addictive? One in ten users become dependent—rising to one in six for those who start as teenagers.
The verdict is undeniable: marijuana is a destructive, multi-system performance degrader that systematically dismantles both the mind and body.
Jonathan P. Caulkins, Professor of Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University and co-author of Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know, after listing a myriad of cannabis’s harmful effects, concluded “It is clear we would all be better off if marijuana did not exist.” (Source)
If a prescription drug produced mass anxiety, broken minds, damaged lungs, schizophrenia, and neglected children, it would be pulled from the market overnight!
When smoking cannabis, you aren’t just “relaxing,” you are sabotaging your mind, body, and soul. This is what the data shows when the haze clears. The lost world calls it wellness. The latest data calls it wreckage.
The Battle for Your Soul
You are not just a brain and a body—you are a soul in the middle of a war. God’s Word reveals a real cosmic conflict: Satan and his angels rebelled against God, and Jesus revealed why He came: “The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). The enemy’s strategy is simple: enslave through sin—sexual immorality, violence, theft, drunkenness, or drugs—and bind the soul.
That is why God’s Word warns in the Book of Revelation with terrifying clarity about pharmakeia (sorcery tied to drugs): “The cowardly, unbelieving…murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers…shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death” (Revelation 21:8).
When you chemically dull your mind, you are not just “relaxing”—you are throwing open the door for darkness to enter. This is why God warns, “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). Bryn’s story is real. And you’re not immune. But hear this clearly: it is not illicit drugs alone that damn the soul—it is sin against God.
Have you lied, lusted, stolen, hated, or put anything before God? If so, you are guilty before a holy God. And guilt demands justice—unless mercy intervenes through Jesus Christ alone. Yet this is exactly why Jesus came: “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8).
The Only Way Out of the Haze
Being “high” is a counterfeit of being filled with God. The world offers intoxication; God offers His Holy Spirit. “Do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation; but be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18). Scripture calls us to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 13:14) and to be clothed in “the whole armor of God,” so we can “stand firm against the schemes of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11).
Right now, the same door that opened for Bryn could open for you—one hit, one moment, and the voices begin. Don’t wait for blood or brokenness. Turn now. Confess your sins (lying, perversion, drugs, rebellion…) to the only Savior who can silence the enemy and shatter his chains.
Pray this prayer from your heart: “Lord Jesus, I am a sinner. I turn from sin and the haze. I believe You died and rose for me. Forgive me, save me, fill me with Your Holy Spirit, and guard my soul. I surrender to You as Lord.”
Jesus destroys the devil’s works (1 John 3:8). Cry out—He is stronger than the darkness—but He will not choose for you. Choose Christ today—before the haze claims you forever.
For His glory,
Joe Schimmel