Veterans, Retired Police Captain Agree on Ending Marijuana Prohibition

By Mike Cockrell, Reader Supported News

07 September 14

he 2014 Veterans for Peace National Conference has unanimously passed Resolution 2014-03, which among other things calls for further studies of medical cannabis, including calling upon the federal government to reschedule the plant, which is currently federally listed as a Schedule I Drug under the US Drug Enforcement Administration. The 2014 VFP National Conference was recently held in Asheville, North Carolina, which also happens to be home to the local chapter where the resolution was first introduced.

In addition to calling on the federal government to reschedule the plant, the resolution calls for open communication to be allowed between veterans and their healthcare providers, without the fear of potentially negative repercussions. The 2014-03 VFP resolution reads in full, as follows:

Be it resolved, that Veterans for Peace advocates further study and use of medical cannabis for treatment of veterans seeking relief for maladies incurred during active duty and post service where medically appropriate.

VFP recognizes that there are benefits reported by veterans experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), and pain, and the group calls upon the federal government to reschedule cannabis so that it can be legally accessed by veterans for their treatment.

Furthermore, Veterans for Peace believes it is the right of any veteran to discuss with his/her healthcare provider any and all possible treatment options related to the veteran’s health and clinical care, including the use of medical cannabis, without the threat to the veteran or provider of disciplinary action, regulatory loss of privilege or benefits, or criminal sanctions.

The organization, whose members make up a global network of over 140 worldwide chapters, expands upon a previously passed resolution from back in 2007, which stated their support for “legislation that eliminates criminal and civil penalties for the doctor-advised, medical use of marijuana by patients with serious physical medical conditions.” The 2007 version of the resolution also urged that “in a state where patients are permitted to use marijuana medicinally for serious and/or chronic illnesses and a patient's physician has recommended its use in accordance with that state's law and that state’s medical practice standards, the patient should not be subject to federal criminal penalties for such medicinal use.”

Schedule I drugs are defined by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration as drugs with no current medical use, and a high level of abuse, and they are considered the most dangerous of the five schedules which make up the Federal classifications. The 2007 resolution illuminates the fact that the current classification restricts scientific research on cannabis, which prohibits the Food and Drug Administration from evaluating and approving the plant through the normal procedural channels. Other Schedule I drugs include heroin, LSD, and ecstasy; while cocaine, methamphetamine, hydromorphone, and oxycodone make up some of the “less dangerous” Schedule II drugs. With the way that the plant is currently scheduled, doctors and nurses at the VA are prohibited from advocating the use of medical marijuana.

“Even though there are currently doctors working for the VA who will admit to cannabis helping in up to half of the veteran patients they treat with anxiety, chronic pain, PSTD, or some other malady, they are prohibited by federal law to communicate this benefit with their patients,” said Tom Palumbo, a board member of VFP. “Communication between the doctor and patient should be privileged, just like any other communication would be considered. It should be confidential and protected, so that by being open with your practitioner and vice versa, you shouldn’t be set aside, or punished, or singled out.”

As a practicing nurse, Palumbo can attest to the numerous patients he’s seen who have been kicked out of pain management programs, and denied access to the most commonly supplied medications for their ailments, such as benzodiazepines and narcotics. Whereas in medical states the VA has more of a don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy, in non-medical states, such as this year’s host to the VFP National Convention, North Carolina, patients are often singled out and suffer consequences because it’s still considered a dangerous drug.

Additionally, Mr. Palumbo adds that more and more VA staff, including the doctors themselves, are citing the anecdotal evidence of patients who do treat themselves with cannabis (for things such as PTSD, TMI, and chronic pain), who are getting better.

“It’s easily admitted that cannabis is certainly safer than the benzodiazepines, narcotics, and everything else that would commonly go with the currently prescribed treatments,” Palumbo said.

When mentioning the current legal status of cannabis, Tom can’t help but notice the ongoing restrictions the natural plant endures, but yet the irony of the plant’s synthetic cousin, Marinol® (dronabinol), manufactured by Unimed Pharmaceutical, which is completely legal and accessible. In fact, the synthetic THC in a sesame oil mixture was released on the market in 1985 as a Schedule II drug, but after constant pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, among others, the drug was reclassified to the Schedule III classification in 1999, joining other drugs with a moderate to low potential for physical abuse, such as anabolic steroids and testosterone.

Even though a common sense rationale would seem to lead to the quick demise of the prohibition of the completely natural version of cannabis, (such as the short lived 1920-1933 Constitutional prohibition of alcohol), there are powerful and well-funded groups fighting to keep the plant as far from the public’s reach as possible. The normal players in the effort to keep the current scheduling are commonly those who are most likely to lose money from legalization, such as the pharmaceutical industry, the alcohol and tobacco companies, the private prison-industrial complex, and while not always the first to come to mind, as retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis points out, the police unions themselves.

“Arrests for marijuana are the ‘cash cow’ of the legal system,” Lewis explains. “It’s money for the judges, money for the lawyers, money for the prison-industrial complex, and money for the officers themselves. The arrests are made for one reason, because they know there will be overtime involved. They know there will be hearings that they’ll have to attend, which will result in overtime, so they arrest as many as they can just so that they can go to the hearings and cash in.”

The first 10 years on the force, Mr. Lewis was assigned as a patrol officer, the same officers who ride around the streets of their precinct and are responsible for answering the dispatched radio calls.

“The thing that hits me the strongest is that in those ten years I spent as a patrolman, by far the most frequent calls I responded to were domestic disturbances. Out of those several thousand domestic disturbances I responded to, I would say as an estimation, that in 90% of them, one if not both of the combatants were intoxicated on alcohol, but not a single one was a result of marijuana,” Lewis said. “I was not an exception, by the way – every patrol officer’s log showed alcohol-related domestic disturbance as the most prevalent.”

“I don’t know how anyone, or a society in general, can rationalize the legalization of alcohol and tobacco, but not cannabis; it’s both ludicrous and a sham. There’s no way you should ever deny anyone the medical benefits that it provides, it’s inhuman,” Lewis continued.

Tom Palumbo and Ray Lewis can both personally speak on the ramifications of the current prohibition. As a nurse who formerly worked inside the VA system, Mr. Palumbo is well aware of the all too familiar path many vets are taken down, resulting in self-medication.

“If people don’t get the pain relief they need, if they can’t tolerate their prescribed cancer medicine, they can be driven to try something that could hurt or even kill them. I know too many people, vets particularly, who medicate themselves to death.”

As Captain Lewis details, it’s not just the medical patients feeling these ramifications, as simple arrests for possession can often have life changing consequences.

“You get a father who gets jailed, the next thing you know the kids are without a father in the house, the mortgage is not getting paid, and now you have a family that’s homeless,” Lewis said. “Primarily, the arrests are of black men and women in economically depressed cities. You don’t see this as often in rural America, or in suburbia, even though there’s just as many people in these areas smoking marijuana. It’s the inner cities that are suffering.”

He also cites the outrageousness of the penalties that can come along with marijuana charges, such as the current case of Texas teenager Jacob Lavoro, who might face a life in prison charge for attempting to distribute or sell cannabis-infused brownies.

“Here’s a normal high school kid, no previous record, and now he faces life in prison? It’s just destroying someone’s life, and that just can’t be, it just can’t be tolerated in America.”

As the VFP’s resolution points out, there are plenty of veterans who have discovered the benefits that cannabis can provide patients suffering from ailments such as PTSD, TBI, and chronic pain. However, with the VA standing in the way of advocating these benefits to patients, and with standardization falling years behind where it could be without the current prohibition, veterans in particular have been struggling to reap the full potential benefits that the plant has to offer.

“The VA just may be the last showdown in the war for medical marijuana,” Palumbo said. “The VA is trying to retract themselves, they’ve gotten into a lot of trouble recently overprescribing the benzodiazepines and narcotics … We’ve already passed the tipping point. Now, it’s just a matter of how fast the dominoes will fall.”

Veterans for Peace is not alone in calling on the federal government to reschedule cannabis in order to allow access to further study the plant’s many potential medical benefits. There are numerous other national, state, and local organizations that have publically endorsed their support of medical marijuana as well, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the American Academy of Family Physicians, the National Association for Public Health Policy, and the American Nurses Association, who back in 2003 passed a resolution stating they “Support the right of patients to have safe access to therapeutic marijuana/cannabis under appropriate prescriber supervision.”

“We’re too focused on the daily DOW (Jones) and the quarterly dividend, the bottom line, and we’re not saying to each other ‘Do you have enough to eat? Do you have a place to sleep? Are you okay, are you healthy?’” Palumbo continued.

“We’ve got to come back to valuing humans over profit. Until then, it’s a bad, nasty, unsustainable path we’re headed down.”

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