The Mormon Church is currently opposing a ballot initiative in Utah that would legalize medical marijuana due to moral reasons. But it turns out they may have a financial reason for preventing the expansion of medicinal cannabis as well.

Last week a website called MormonLeaks released tons of documents regarding the financial situation of the Mormon Church. The leaks showed showed that the church owned around $32 billion worth of stocks as of the end of 2017. While that is a pretty big bombshell, one Reddit user, called u/relevantlife, dove into the data and investigated exactly what stocks the Mormon Church invested in.

The Reddit user found out that the Mormon Church owns $1.3 billion worth of stocks in in seven different pharmaceutical companies. Many pharmaceutical companies oppose the expansion of medical and recreational marijuana because they believe that increased cannabis sales will mean less people purchasing the drugs they produce, which will hurt their bottomline.

The revelation about the Mormon Church's financial investment in the pharmaceutical company now makes their opposition to Utah's medical marijuana initiative a little more sinister. Do they oppose the initiative because they believe using marijuana is wrong, or are they afraid it will hurt their investments?

Ironically enough, one of the companies that the Mormon Church invested in, called AbbVie Inc., actually produces a drug called Marinol that contains a synthetic form of THC, which is the compound in marijuana that gets people high. So apparently the Mormon Church doesn't want people getting THC from legally prescribed cannabis, but is totally ok with it when it's sold in the form of a drug they're invested in.

So it sounds like the Mormon Church has 1.3 billion reasons to oppose medical marijuana.

(h/t Reddit)