Veterans are key as surge of states OK medical pot for PTSD
NEW YORK — It was a telling setting for a decision on whether posttraumatic stress disorder patients could use medical marijuana.
NEW YORK — It was a telling setting for a decision on whether posttraumatic stress disorder patients could use medical marijuana.
Against the backdrop of the nation’s largest Veterans Day parade, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced this month he’d sign legislation making New York the latest in a fast-rising tide of states to OK therapeutic pot as a PTSD treatment, though it’s illegal under federal law and doesn’t boast extensive, conclusive medical research.
Twenty-eight states plus the District of Columbia now include PTSD in their medical marijuana programs, a tally that has more than doubled in the last two years, according to data compiled amid increasingly visible advocacy from veterans’ groups .
Retired Marine staff sergeant Mark Dipasquale says the drug freed him from the 17 opioids, anti-anxiety pills and other medications that were prescribed to him for migraines, posttraumatic stress and other injuries from service that included a hard helicopter landing in Iraq in 2005.
“I just felt like a zombie, and I wanted to hurt somebody,” says Dipasquale, a co-founder of the Rochester, New Yorkbased Veterans Cannabis Collective Foundation. It aims to educate vets about the drug he pointedly calls by the scientific name cannabis.
Dipasquale pushed to extend New York’s nearly two-year-old medical marijuana program to include post-traumatic stress. He’d qualified because of other conditions but felt the drug ease his anxiety, sleeplessness and other PTSD symptoms and spur him to focus on wellness. by the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project. A 29th state, Alaska, doesn’t incorporate PTSD in its medical marijuana program but allows everyone over 20 to buy pot legally.
The increase has come