Anything that clouds the mind and puts one in an altered state of mind, comes with risks.
My student’s boyfriend kept complaining he was being attacked by some force when sleeping. He was losing weight, health, and facing immense bad luck. I tend to initially dismiss such claims - 95% of folks have no entities/spells/demons, etc., - we tend to always explain things in terms of the supernatural because it is hard to take responsibility and action; shifting the responsibility to a supernatural cause is always easier and the human nature is adept at blaming something unseen than act in real life. Non-dual consciousness does not mean inaction in the plane of duality.
Anyway, we did a divination session and my guides showed me that he was being attacked around 10-11 pm by a succubus like entity. So, there indeed was an entity involved here, which is pretty rare. I gave him a certain energized mandala to carry, and it held up well, until around 11 pm. And the attack occurred again. On questioning him, I realized that he would smoke weed everyday before sleep. Once he stopped smoking weed (which in his case was making him vulnerable to attacks), cleaned up his lifestyle (reduced drinking, cleaned up his living space from clutter, got enough sunlight, added fresh fruit and vegetables to diet) and began to carry the mandala I gave him, the attacks were gone and he recovered his health in a month.
The entity seemed to be an intelligent one (a lot of them are energetic blobs, what I tend to call ‘dumb’ forms, but not this one), and showed up at my place (as a grayish smoky blob in my mind’s eye with a suffocating quality to its presence) and at that moment incidentally, I was looping Dream’s Chandi audio and reciting the mantra for Chandi and the entity dissipated, and we never encountered it again.
The energetic consciousness of Marijuana does not seem as bad as other chemical substances that radiate nearly evil presence (unless one knows the way to transmute the evil aspects and use the psychoactive effects to alter perception). In San Francisco, when we walk around and see folks addicted to various chemical substances, many a time, terrible entities are around, attracted by such substances. Yesterday, we were walking home from dinner and passed by a “open consumption site” (another nonsense by SF’s crazy politicians resulting in more Fentanyl deaths) and the whole place was frighteningly full of entities.
While grading meditation, Je Tsongkhapa lists the “substance-induced” state where one is relaxed, possibly without the usual dominant thoughts, but the mind is not aware, and the state of relaxation is characterized by lethargy rather than awareness. He terms such a meditative state as “addictive, and spiritually unproductive, with the risk of slipping into nether realms”. I would say, if done skillfully, it is still of use, but there are also risks.