Medical Marijuana Should Be Available to Veterans
Florida Veterans for Common Sense (FLVCS) supports veterans having legal access to marijuana and marijuana products to relieve pain, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, sleep issues, and other ailments.
The increasing numbers of veterans who have committed suicide or have attempted suicide is stunning. After returning from the battlefields, many service personnel are suffering from PTSD. Still others, with the advancements in life-saving technologies, are surviving wounds that would have been fatal in previous wars. But they have discovered that advances in pain-management have not kept up with the life-saving skills of medical staff.
The Veterans Administration (VA) treats these issues with a wide assortment of powerful medications that adversely affect the quality of life for many suffering veterans and recovering military personnel.
A growing number of active duty personnel as well as veterans have discovered that marijuana gives them relief and helps them deal with flashbacks, anxiety, hypertension, sleep issues, and pain without the side effects of the VA prescribed drugs, which often are addictive. Some have even used marijuana to wean themselves off of the powerful drugs prescribed by the VA.
In December 2017, the VA allowed its physicians to discuss marijuana with their patients. But they are not allowed to prescribe marijuana because it is a Schedule 1 drug.
FLVCS members urge Congress and the Executive Branch of our government to remove marijuana from the list of Schedule 1 drugs in the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 so that the VA and armed services can immediately prescribe it and the onerous restrictions on medical marijuana research can be lifted.