Veterans and Cannabis: The Forbidden Lovers
Military veterans are at an interesting cross-section in our society. On one hand, politicians love to use them as bait to prove how pro-America they are (Trump) — and on the other hand, these same politicians don’t mind ignoring critical issues for vets (Trump again).
Through the bombardment of furniture and car sales, and beyond the meaty smoke of Memorial Day cookouts, I began to think about veterans and their quiet struggle for safe access to cannabis.
Honestly, with subpoenas being thrown around like rice at weddings, threats of Russian cyber bullying and Trump’s delicate wispy hair distracting the population all the time, we quickly fall prey to overlooking the misdeeds in our system that don’t make breaking news. For instance, the VA’s insistent pushback on cannabis research for PTSD and chronic pain. Democratic members of the House Veterans Committee wrote a letter to the former VA Secretary David Shulkin asking why more research hadn’t been done on medical marijuana for veterans suffering from chronic pain and PTSD — especially being that 1 out 5 veterans will be diagnosed with PTSD and 7.7% of VA patients with chronic pain are either provided or prescribed opioid based treatments.
Secretary Shulkin replied to their 2-page letter with 3 paragraphs, where he tap danced around the question and used “Federal law restrictions” to create the illusion that he had done as much as he could possibly do. Also attached to the letter was a study the VA had conducted, which gave skewed information on the side affects of cannabis, and stated it could cause a development of mania, increase of traffic accidents and even suicide. It went as far as to say the following:
“The review found insuffinect evidence to demonstrate benefits of cannabis use for patients with PTSD or chronic pain.”
Fortunately, this study can be taken with many grains of salt due to another government study that was published 8 months prior, with some pretty different findings on the benefits of medical cannabis. Unfortunately this isn’t the first time the VA has misled the public and government officials for their own gain.
While the VA continues to ignore the opportunities medical marijuana could hold for veterans, it doesn’t take away that cannabis isn’t anything new to the military. In fact, during the Vietnam War, soldiers were no strangers to cannabis — also known as grass, tea and gage in ‘Nam — but unlike their American civilian counterparts who were smoking brown, prepackaged weed with THC levels of up to 1%. Soldiers were smoking fresh jungle-grown cannabis, often forged and dried by themselves.
In the book Passing Time: Memoir of a Vietnam Veteran Against the War, William Daniel Ehrhart talks about the commonality of cannabis in Vietnam:
“Oh yeah. Good stuff over there. Right off the vine. And cheap, too. It just grows there, like dandelions, Old mama-sans used to walk around all the time with big fat joints hanging out of their mouths…Stoned out mama-sans…I guess that’s the only way they could cope with all the bullshit going down.”
Like in the video above, it wasn’t uncommon for soldiers and their superiors to use cannabis to bond and cope with extremely stressful and traumatic situation s— it was also a way to show their defiance towards a war so many were innocently drafted into against their will.
By 1969, pot smoking was reaching its peak and the army’s Criminal Investigation Division had reported the 75% of their “major cases” were marijuana related. A year later and the public had grown tired of hearing stories of pothead soldiers, and they started demanding change. Legislation was created and the Drug Abuse: Prevention and Control Act was passed. The purpose of the program was to rehabilitate soldiers, but instead it became a way for soldiers to escape the hell that was Vietnam. By 1971, 16,000 military personal had been discharged for drug abuse, and stateside, many potential draftees started using to avoid being sent over. Those who were left in a confusing war soon started turning to heroin as a cheaper and easier drug to carry and conceal.
Like a story we’ve heard too many times before, while in the midst of a “War on Drugs,” the US government continued to pass out amphetamines to soldiers like dietary supplements. A 1971 report by the House Select Committee on Crime showed that 225 million “pep pills” had been given to the military from 1966 to 1969. To combat comedowns and breakdowns, the Department of Defense decided to give soldiers sedatives and neuroleptics. Due to this opioid-induced suppression, many didn’t/couldn’t acknowledge the emotional strain they were facing — until they returned home, no longer getting by with the government supply of uppers and downers. This resulted in a counter-culture fueled by psychotropic drugs.
Seven years after the US military stopped directly involving itself with the Vietnamese conflict, the American Psychiatric Association added PTSD to the third Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. After nearly a decade of veterans coming into VA hospitals distressed by the same symptoms of severe anxiety, insomnia and depression, they could no longer ignore the mental health epidemic at hand. But they did. Hospitals quickly became overwhelmed and, again, instead of rehabilitating soldiers, they turned to drug therapy rather than psychotherapy. Many who were discharged for behavior that would later be classified under PTSD would never receive their benefits — as well as those who served fully but lost the fight at proving their deteriorating mental well-being and never received disability.
Sadly, over the last fifty-something years, not much has changed for our veterans. PTSD still haunts more than 200,000 Vietnam veterans and since the last decade, 29% of 830,000 veterans treated at a VA have been diagnosed with it. Many also go undiagnosed for other reasons like lack of scheduling availability, and even due to the VA’s determination that you‘re not a risk to yourself.
When the quickest way to get our veterans out of hospitals and on their feet is opioid-induced, we should probably do better as a community. :/
These same issues continue to show themselves not only in the United States but also in the global leader of cannabis, Canada. Due to a recent increase of veterans using medical marijuana in our sister country, they’ve cut their funding for government-funded weed by 70% — bringing veterans daily limit down from 10 grams a day to 3 grams a day. But unlike in many legal states in the United States, it isn’t legal to grow your own Canada, which has forced many to cut their medication drastically.
Even though there’s a huge lack of research being done on veterans and cannabis, studies have shown that 9% of US veterans reported using cannabis in the last year, and 41% of that usage was reported as medicinal, which doubled the percentage of US citizens using cannabis for the same purpose (10.79%). For many servicemen and women, their PTSD, chronic pain or a comorbidity of both isn’t treated as a whole illness but broken up into symptoms like anxiety, depression, insomnia, etc., and treated with pharmatherapy. This leaves many vets over-medicated, which has also resulted in an overdose and opioid epidemic. Over the last 5 years, the VA, due to being exposed for their practices, has reduced their opioid prescriptions by 41% in almost every facility. But where has that left those who have grown a dependence to high doses of morphine, hydrocodone and other opioids?
Whether the VA wants it or not, it’s time we change the way we heal our veterans. Quick fixes with addictive and potentially lethal concoctions aren’t longterm options for those who are already susceptible to addiction. It’s time that the cannabis community came together and rallied to expose the US government’s role in not keeping our veterans healthy with something as simple as cannabis. Like how are we going to get cannabis federally legalized when we can’t even get the VA to acknowledge the health benefits it has for our veterans?
