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Literally, for centuries in this country, in every country,
people have been going to war,
they've had skirmishes,
they've been in battle, and when they come home from these battles,
everybody says the same thing:
"My loved one came home a different person."
Every war fighter that went to war kicked a door, did some stuff,
came home and said, "You know what? I don't feel like the same
person."
Well, they're not, we're not, I'm not...
I still have PTSD from being an infantryman in the Marines.
You see stuff, and you lose brothers, you lose friends.
He was under so many drugs that they gave him,
that he was like a zombie, and he wanted
to just let the pain go.
My history with the zombie dope started at Walter Reed Army Medical Center,
when a field grade officer officer gave me my first prescription of Seroquel,
couldn't do it on the dope, it's all bad, it was just all
bad, but I got off of it.
Nobody was in tune, and my son died,
he took his own life because of that drug. This study is built
around the idea that we were looking for veterans with combat related trauma
because we felt that there was such a dire need with the epidemic
of veteran suicide in this country. Marijuana 100% saved my life,
it created lives, as in my daughters,
and then all my buddies that I'm helping that... That are along the
process.
Josh is US Marine Corps combat veteran of 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment,
who was one of the very last casualties of the Battle of Fallujah in
2004, the largest urban combat operation since the Vietnam War. Josh was
part of a six week battle that involved vicious street by street and house
by house fighting against an entrenched enemy that left nearly 100 American
soldiers and Marines dead,
and 560 wounded. Charlie, oh my gosh, holy moly, hey babe. Josh was
awarded his first Purple Heart in November 2002, when he was knocked unconscious
and suffered other wounds from a rocket propelled grenade blast. That's
what I tell everybody, "Google that shit: '3rd Battalion 1st Marines in
Fallujah.'" Less than a month later, he took a more serious wound when
he got in a gunfight with an Iraqi insurgent while clearing a house
in Fallujah. Pillows, decorative pillows. Wow! A new blanket... Looks like
you went to grandma's house actually. He needed six blood transfusions to
keep him alive, and eventually underwent 22 operations.
Josh is an ambassador from the veteran community and an outspoken advocate
for medical cannabis research. Without medical marijuana,
I couldn't get up here and speak, I couldn't even get on a
plane, I couldn't take my kids to school, I couldn't go to the
grocery store, I couldn't do any of that. And with medical marijuana
I can do all that and then some. And I stay in the
community. Yeah, I have lots of limitations. You may look at me,
I'm totally fine but if I had some cut offs on...
It's pretty serious stuff, but to have the VA tell you you're doing
something bad
because it's illegal... It was voted on by guys that are probably dead
now, long gone,
we need to come, stop the madness, we need to get this stuff
on the books, we wanna save guys.
This is the real action, the pot partying, the trippers, the grasshoppers,
the hip ones, all gathered in secrecy and flying high as a kite. Outside
the boundaries of their phony world of kicks is the ever present possibility
of discovery. This must be avoided at all costs, for discovery brings with
it the penalties of society: Shame; arrest; prison. So destroy the evidence,
leave not a trace, burn it in paper trash, that way,
they can deny possessing the illegal marijuana. Let's go back to 2003,
2003 is when I joined the Marine Corps at age 26 years old.
I go to boot camp, I get on those yellow footprints;
man, my life changed forever and...
I was in a battle of Fallujah, Operation Phantom Fury. Fallujah was like
the hot spot where all the bad guys... Even Saddam Hussein was like...
Just left Fallujah alone.
Two weeks before I got shot, my second Purple Heart, I received my
first Purple Heart, an RPG blew up,
I was up in the gun, and we had been... We had inched by a
couple of weeks in, and was just serious fighting,
just serious fighting, like the tanks and door to door. Everything was just
going on. No, I wasn't happy to go up in the gun,
but it's like... Yeah, I was replacing it 'cause Lance Corporal Burns got
shot in his head and he was one of the best gunners
in the platoon, and he got shot the first day.
So that's when we were like, "Shit's gotten real." Hey, what bullshit gear
we got out there? What was it? His Kevlar? Yeah, I mean do
you... You have his Kevlar? Yeah. Right here. Hit right here. Okay. It's
in the back of the head.
And he pulled that outta there? Yeah, he's freaking... You see right there,
so
I don't know, maybe he hit his head and bounced off or something,
I don't know. It's weird. Ricocheted all around.
And then I see these... I see this RPG, the guy with RPG, and
basically, we're sitting at an intersection. There's a house here, and I
can look all over and I can see down the street.
And I'm like, "Oh there's a dude with the RPG." And I'm like,
"RPG!" And then I come back and then he didn't shoot.
And then I looked back for a third time and then it's like, "Shoot!" And
it just goes dink, dink, dink. I'm like, "Oh, it's a dud", boom!
And then I just woke up on the gun, I don't know how
the hell I didn't freaking get my face blown off or anything,
but it was just like burns and scrapes, but I was,
man, just so lucky, but not... And then
this goes into the day I got shot two weeks later,
and we were starting to come down. We knew we were going home
soon, too, 'cause on paper, we were supposed to go home in two
weeks.
December 11th, we'll go back to December 11th, 2004.
I was in a CAT team, combined anti armor team, and with basically
four vehicles. The lead vehicle's the 50 cal, and then I was the
rear vehicle, rear security with the Mark 19 grenade launcher.
So, at this point we'd already shot... I'd probably already shot about 3,000
Mark rounds. Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. This Frank Dizzle, my
nizzle. We're getting so close to going home, all we could think about
was America and going home. And then Platoon Sergeant comes in and is like,
"Hey, we gotta go back out, be on the trucks at 06:00." Man, and
so we go to the mayor's house in Fallujah. That was basically our
AO. We were just gonna go. And some guys are on top of
the house doing the OP. And then we see a guy run across
the street and kneel down. And it was like, "Guys, guys!"
And then my buddy, Dickinson, first thing he does is he jumps out
and he ran down. And him and there was... I forget the other
two Marines, and they all went down and then it was just total
chaos, I just hear pop, pop, pop, pop. I'm still in the gun.
I'm trying to get on the radio to call the QRF, the other
team, the other vehicles 'cause there's... We only had two on one side
and the other two were on the other side. So I jump out
of the gun and I run down probably, I don't know,
50 meters. Then the rest of the QRF team came in,
and that's when we went inside to go get Dickie 'cause he was
down in there. Where'd he go? Where'd
he go? Get in that motherfucker. Kill his ass. Yeah. And that's when we
go inside the...
In all the freaking... Just the chaos of pop... I saw the guy, pop pop pop!
And then there's three of us online, and
basically we shot at the same time.
And then all of a sudden, my arm was just like...
It just fell... My brain, it just felt like I got hit really,
really hard. They had to drive me four or five miles to the
Surgical Center. Then all I remember, I wanted to go to sleep 'cause
I'm in the back of the Humvee. And then, Eubanks, private... Or PFC
Eubanks is just sitting there like, "Frank, you gotta stay awake." I'm like,
"Give me a cigarette." So I light the cigarette and he's like, "Okay."
And then I'm like... And then I woke up on the table.
Take a nice deep breath. Then exhale and let those ribs fall. That's perfect.
Do you wanna be like, "Did he really get shot?" I mean, if
I got shot, I'd be screaming if I was on the table and he
was doing that to me.
Well.
I did scream and cry alone many years, people. Terrence makes it easy,
look easy. Yeah, remember in the beginning, man? It was tough. Yeah.. Weekend
at Bernie's? Second one is Sling Blade.. Alright, let's pull out the list
of everything they got. Problems, they call them: Head injury, shotgun wound,
right shoulder, injury from terrorists, caused fire burns, vertigo, migraine
headache, depression. I thought I had major depression and depression. Shit.
Yeah. You know I just... But this whole box was so adhered to by myofascial
adhesions that when I first met him, I couldn't get it to shift.
It was actually moving muscle tissue and everything because it builds up
scar tissue from the adhesions. But think about it, the muscle insertions
and all the nerve points that come through here, this thing is pressing
on it every time he sits on a chair,
so. If you think about it, I have this other surgery, that's why
I did. But now I'm like, "I wanna do it, but then I'm
like, "Man I really don't wanna go... Through another surgery.
Like an Iraqi fire. That's the actual wires right there. Wow. It's a Medtronic
nerve stimulator. And I
got like... Basically, that's another thing too because
they got in good with the hospital. Basically these guys came to the
hospital and put them in all of us. I mean, but even with
the repair and everything to the structure, there's muscle tissue that's
gone, there's bony process that's gone. I got all of my X rays,
too, so you can actually see, 'cause visual... People are really visual.
Yeah, you can see just the structure of the it's completely different.
You see it, and all the shrap metal from the bullet
that are still inside me, freaking, there's just... I don't know, it's just
crazy. Yeah. If you wanna get a good story about that,
ask the wife about when I got shot, freaking, like all the shit
that they put me through, and her.
Here's the pictures of us on our... We had the big wedding.
Got married for the second time.
Very early on in meeting Josh, I was instantly attracted to
his easy going, just really humble nature. Never met anybody that didn't
like him and he pretty much liked everybody too. And I thought that
was
a pretty good quality. He's very much himself
and confident. And
who doesn't like a confident man? Honestly.
And I don't think I was as confident. And so
I think he lifted me up, and
I think we were a good balance. This dude just beat me by
a... He was ranked 2,378th and I would've won if...
It's just a game.
He seems to make the best out of
most situations. And
after we got married, we really learned the true testament in that.
But I just could see us just being a really strong team.
We were a really strong team from very early on, and the commitment
was strong, and the friendship was amazing. Amazing. So
I'm truly convinced that I married my best friend. Josh was attached to
3 1
shortly after we got engaged. We didn't know how long before he got
cut orders and how long before it was gonna be before he left
for Iraq. So we eloped, it was very quiet, we kept it that
way. He deployed. I spent the whole time he was deployed,
going to school and planning our wedding for when he came home.
That was something to keep me busy, something to focus on.
I always told Josh before he left, I said, "If officers show up
at the door, I won't open the door, 'cause I already know what
they're there for. I don't need them to say anything, I already know
what it's about." He'd been gone seven and a half months,
and the day that I
dropped 175 wedding invitations in the mail was the day I also found
out that he'd been severely injured in Iraq,
which was also two weeks before our one year wedding anniversary,
and two weeks before the day he was supposed to be coming home.
I don't think there is really any way you can prepare yourself for
what's coming next, because it's all just one question mark after another
after another. Looking back now, it was a whirlwind, 22 surgeries in 18
months. We didn't really start to see a lot of Josh's PTSD issues
until he started to recover from all of the reconstruction of his shoulder.
That took precedence over everything.
We didn't start to even diagnose or look into
what this has done to him mentally. The first
three years he was out of the military, he was a shell of
a human being. Lights were on but there really was not anybody home.
He was very isolated. This really joyful person and leader, and always active
and super friendly person, did not exist. He kept to himself,
he didn't go anywhere, he didn't do anything,
he took pills.
That's what he did. He took pills and he went to the VA,
so that they would keep giving him pills. Alright, active medications.
This was back in '07. I can't even pronounce half these things:
Controlled Substance Release 180mg Verapamil, Clonidine, Seroquel. It's
ridiculous. And
this is just what they start you with.
And
reading in here,
there's so much,
these medical records, and there's so many of us that had this stuff.
And look at this, refills left. Let's just go to that,
we don't have to worry about whatever the hell the freakin' the pill
is, because we already know there's a bunch of pills and the opium
problem, the opiates and all this. Refills left, 1 of 1, 3 of
3, 1 of 1, 3 of 3. This is one, two,
three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13,
and this is back in '06, so this is way before the damn
2007, 2008, 2009, I could get in to all those. Are you kidding me? Three
of 3. All that money wasted,
it makes no sense. And then it all goes back to freaking,
all this stuff, it made me feel like a complete piece of shit.
I didn't wanna live, you know what I mean? I thought that it
wasn't because of this, I'm like, "Well they're trying to help me."
They wanna avoid the troops. They're like, "Well, what can help them?"
Then they wanna listen, and then you tell them, and then you're like,
"Hey actually, weed will help us." And then they're like, "Well,
oh no. Hey, you guys are talking that crazy talk."
But, weed just helps me stay in the here and now.
And this is just... How many times have we've been talking about this,
honestly? We've been talking about weed this long?
Come on, man, all those pills Frey dog with you, everybody,
and they saw me on all the pills, I was crazy.
They see me on the weed, they're like, "I love you,
Frey. Frey, how do you do it?" Weed and freaking determination,
and
happy that I have two legs.
Yeah, I got shot and it hurts and all this, but my buddy
Joe, and my buddy Bo Jones, and all these other dudes missing legs,
to have them not to complain either, that's where it's like,
"Damn, I'm definitely not complaining about my shit." And
it all goes back to green. They're all on the green.
Marijuana.
My name is Janel Ralph, I am the Executive Director of Compassionate South
Carolina, also known as csc.health. We are the patients' advocacy group,
fighting for patients' rights in South Carolina, to be able to use medical
cannabis through a tightly regulated comprehensive program.
Today, we are here at the Richland County Library in Columbia,
South Carolina, filming several PSAs. We have medical professionals, we
have law enforcer officers, and we have several patients from around the
states, all coming in to talk about their stories and why they support
medical marijuana. Action. Currently, what's legal here is industrial hemp,
so we have a hemp program here that was passed last year.
We initially had in 2014, one of the CBD only bills.
CBD is not a fix all.
For a lot of people, they need higher levels of THC,
or they need THC to help improve their quality of life.
Whereas CBD is... It's great and it benefits a lot of areas,
but having access to the whole entire plant is extremely important for a
lot of different complicated conditions. So the scientific definition of
the plant is THC dominant, trace amounts of CBD is marijuana,
CBD dominant, trace amounts of THC is hemp. And so that's how it's
defined. Now that we have Federal programs under the Federal Farm Bill to
be able to cultivate and grow hemp under pilot research programs,
we've seen a lot of these CBD products enter the market in the
last three years, 'cause they are legal products grown federally compliant,
where medical marijuana is still a Schedule 1 drug,
so now we have to fight on a state by state level to
allow access to the other part of the plant.
Certainly in terms of overdose, people treating pain through cannabis have
zero chance of an overdose. That's a good thing to touch on, right there.
Yeah, I have no personal story. But you're a good storyteller. I was
the chief federal law enforcement officer for six and a half years..
Well, actually you do though, Bill, if you think about it,
because while you were the United States attorney, you changed policy on...
Oh yeah, yeah. Doctors are not allowed to prescribe it, doctors are only
allowed to recommend it, otherwise they risk their license to prescribe
other drugs, because as a Schedule 1 drug,
it is classified as no medicinal benefits. It's classified higher than crystal
meth,
as in cocaine, and a lot of these very damaging drugs,
obviously, opiates, which we know. So it's got a higher classification on
that list. So if the federal government actually de scheduled cannabis and
there was a system to dispense it, through the federal government.
Then, of course... I guess patients could get access if doctors wanted to
write prescriptions for it. We're years away from that ever happening.
That type of a system is not workable for many, many years to
come, because if they de scheduled, then it has to go through the
FDA process, there's gonna be IND drug trials that'll have to be set
up, and some of these drug trials take five, 10 years.
This is a... The whole notion of the FDA
allowing access to medical marijuana is not a comprehensive notion. We could
be waiting 20 years, and thousands and thousands of more people will pass
away and die, with something we know has never killed anybody.
I've never been against marijuana, I've never been against people that use
marijuana, I've never really had a strong opinion on it one way or
the other. My opinion started to shift a lot when
I was witnessing what pharmaceuticals were doing to my husband,
and then on the occasions when he would smoke marijuana and use marijuana,
I would start to catch glimpses of the person I fell in love with. Send
that one to Madison. The
more he partook in marijuana, the less pills he took, and he started
eliminating one pill at a time. And as the caregiver, you would think
that since I'd been so involved with all of his care,
that I would know, to a tee, what pills he was taking.
At this point, I didn't.
Let's see how good at this, still.
I don't think for probably four years, he took what he was actually
prescribed from the VA, he took what worked for him. Today,
Josh is pill free, he 100% uses marijuana for all of his
injuries, whether they're mental or physical.
I went in there and then came out of the back.
He's much more calm and he's able to go out into public,
and actually be relaxed in a public setting,
which was absolutely impossible before. We avoided a lot of public places,
crowds, etcetera, etcetera, because it was just absolutely too much for
him. This is a good idea, this is a good idea. Alright I
gotta go. Now I'm becoming more of an advocate,
because a man I haven't seen in seven years,
he's starting to come back.
He's never gonna be the same person,
but lots of him is still the same, lots. The man I married,
the man that I fell in love with, he's in there,
I see him a lot more now that he's not on any pills
than I did for seven years.
Decisions out there, like in training, there are real
consequences that you can't get back.
And that's what happened
Easter weekend in 2007. It was a fucking terrible weekend. We hear a
blast, and then find out that six guys are blown up and they're
all dead and you're like, "You're not too far away from it."
And it was a big blast.
And then all the drills go out the window. All the drills go
out the window, and everybody's at risk, and there's no way you cannot
go downrange. So let's put the blade down on the biggest vehicle there
and clear an emergency lane up. And
find myself in the dark with an infrared glow stick for a Black
Hawk to land, to pick up my buddies that I was supposed to
make stay on the other side that fucking ditch. And there's one VSA and
one guy still alive, and you think, "Okay, we're getting one out," but by
the time you
got to the Black Hawk from the vehicle, he was dead. There's two
VSAs heading to Kandahar Airfield for a ramp ceremony that
should have been sitting in their vehicles until the sun came up. And
that was a bullet I had to swallow.
That's fucking war. So I came back from that,
the summer of 2007, was diagnosed with PTSD.
That was three years in the pharmaceutical chain. I took
nine pills a day for three solid years
as a member of the army, prescribed by army doctors. SSRIs and benzos,
like Clonazepam, Paxil, Wellbutrin, Seroquel, Abilify, trazodone, Risperdal.
Try it all.
I'm not sure how
they're treating us. The symptoms of PTSD with the medication that I have
witnessed and found, cause more problems, not relieve problems.
Myself and my peers, and my friends became zombies on these type of
medications: Fat zombies, lazy, fat zombies, like fucking beyond.
And
you're in a fog almost, you can't really fucking
grasp the here and now, it doesn't... There is no real fucking here
and now, there's kind of a fog you're in, and you're just lethargically
moving through time. You're existing, you're not really fucking living life
and doing anything. So after three years of this fog and destruction
of my life, I came back with a little bit of clarity,
and at the age of 31, I put cannabis to my lips.
And I took a big puff, and it was the first time in
three years that my brain relaxed and my physiological body
stopped being tense. And I smoked so much that night, I puked and
I slept good and I woke up and I said, "Get me more."
And over the next year to two years, I got off of every
single pharmaceutical and I haven't looked back since.
A lot of people join the military and they say, "Oh I just
wanna serve my country. I want to do good for other people."
And that's really nice, that's fine and dandy, I think that's really noble.
That's the thing people say, and I think it's the politically correct thing
to say. Myself, I didn't join for any of those reasons.
I joined the military and I represent those guys that basically joined 'cause
they wanted to get in a good gunfight. That's what I wanted to
do, that's what my life revolved around, that's what I... When my head
hit the pillow at night, what I thought about was,
"Can I win a fight to the death, and where do I gotta
go to make that happen?"
I know that's not politically correct, but that's just the truth.
And I think there's a lot of us out here that...
That we're just born that way, and that's what we do,
and then when that gets taken away, where do we go?
What do we do? 'Cause I'm not a criminal, I live by an
ethos. I don't just wanna walk around and shoot people.
I like that Patton's army type of mentality, I like that General Mattis
mentality of,
"Do what it takes, get the job done,
live by your wits,
and let your grit drive you." I wanted to lead troops in battle,
that was what I longed to do, that was where I felt my
destiny was.
Before I was medically discharged from the United States Army,
I served as a 37 Foxtrot, which is a tactical psychological operations specialist.
And before that I served in the infantry.
I went to Fort Benning, Georgia, also attended Airborne School there,
later I served with the 82nd Airborne Division, and these days
I'm a warfighter activist. Easy 104.1, your hometown radio station. It is
the Johnny B and Dave show and we are joined by a special
guest. A radio guy, author, war fighter, marijuana enthusiast, not enthusiast,
but... Advocate. Advocate, thank you, that's the word I was looking for.
Activist. Boone Cutler. How are you doing, man? How are you doing? Good
morning. Welcome. So thrilled to have you on the show. I'm trying to
be a knowledge olobist. You do know a lot... I'm working at the
knowledge oloby. Listen, you are a guy that knows a lot about a
lot of stuff, 'cause you're a psy ops guy. Yeah. I was a psy operator in
the United States Army... Here's the thing, in the United States Army, I
was trained to go into countries, develop a theme and a message to
influence attitudes that change behavior in other countries, that was my
job. You got a new version of the book coming up. Yeah, get
ready for "Call Sign Voodoo", that's my new book coming out.
It's about a lot of psychological operations, some stuff I did in Iraq and
how it affected the United States. Super, super interesting. Boone, thanks
for spending some time with us today. Yeah. Thanks Boone. My pleasure. We'll
get back to music now on Easy
104.1. Cool. By far the worst time in my life was Walter Reed Army
Medical Center. I was there for two years after I left Iraq.
When I got hurt,
there wasn't much to it, I ran around a corner and I ran
into a mortar, and boom, it exploded and
it rocked my world a little bit, and that's why I was at Walter Reed for
that. It was TBI, traumatic brain injury, it was PTSD, multiple orthopedic
injuries that I'd sustained during the tour. And all these things were...
It was what they refer to as polytrauma. It was a whole bunch
of different systems that were out of whack or injured. And
because of the treatment, for one, it caused problems in another,
and it just creates this cycle of all bad, all bad.
And I don't think anybody at Walter Reed was necessarily trying to do
anything negative or
less than standard of care for me. I just think that they had
a lot of wounded and there just weren't enough people to deal with all the
wounded, and guys were severely wounded. In today's modern war, survival
has become an issue, because those guys that would have died on the
battlefield are surviving the battlefield. In Iraq, you could be at a level
one trauma unit in very short order from the battlefield. And so guys
were surviving. And I don't think that this era of military medicine was
ready to receive
that type of trauma because we weren't dying.
So is it good that we were surviving? Yes, absolutely, absolutely,
it was good.
But there's a cause and effect, and the other side of the effect
is,
they didn't know how to treat us. And there were too many of
us, and nobody had prepared for that many wounded.
So we got a lot of drugs, we got a lot of drugs.
So I go in, I see this psychiatrist for the very first time,
first psych appointment at Walter Reed. And he says, "Let's talk about your
PTSD." I'm like, "I ain't one of those guys, I don't have PTSD.
I'm not some punk ass little bitch. I don't have PTSD,
I have a traumatic brain injury, I need to see a neurologist."
And I definitely had an attitude with him.
He didn't give me another word, he spun around in his chair,
took out a piece of paper,
handed me that piece of paper, said, "Go down to the pharmacy,
fill this, come back next week." I said, "What is it,
doc?" He says, "It'll help you sleep."
I was all welcoming of sleep 'cause I wasn't sleeping, hadn't slept for
months.
So I went down to the pharmacy, I got that script,
and it was Seroquel. And from my first dose of Seroquel, it was
a downhill slide. From that first dose, my
will to do things the way I wanted to do just
slipped away,
and from there it was a plethora of other drugs on top of
the Seroquel. Well, now we skip a few years ahead, and I'm back
on the block. I'm in a VA, I've been
medically released from the military, no longer on active duty, trying to
find an identity in the world again. Meanwhile, I was spun out of
my mind, not just because of the drugs, but because I'm still dealing
with all the injuries that I had before
that people took shortcuts on, that didn't get resolved.
So I still have all the injuries and all of the problems,
but now I have a huge drug problem on top of it.
I'd had enough,
enough. I did not care anymore.
And they come around to me with all the drugs
and I'd say, "No, thank you."
They would tell me, "Well, you have the choice, against medical advice,
AMA, you don't have to take the drugs, but we don't recommend it,
you're gonna go crazy." And I say, "Hey, the door is locked, let's
go crazy, let's see what happens." And I went a little crazy.
But by the end of the 17 days, I was off the drugs.
Well I wasn't sleeping. And I was at work, and this young kid
came up to me and he said, "Man, you look like hell,
what's going on?" And I said, "I can't sleep."
He said, "Why don't you smoke some weed?" And I was so offended
that this guy would look at me and think I was one of
those people that smokes weed.
"No, I don't smoke weed."
Then I went another night without sleep. And as I'm laying there,
I'm reviewing all the things I have done to try and get sleep.
So I'm thinking of all the herbal stuff I did, holistic stuff I
did, all the drugs they... Every drug they gave me, the NyQuil, the
alcohol. In the morning time, looking at the sunrise and watching it set
to reset my circadian rhythms. I did it all,
none of it worked.
So I went to that kid the next day and I said,
"Okay, give me some weed."
And that night I slept five hours,
five hours, five uninterrupted, dream free, nightmare unplagued hours.
I hadn't slept five hours in five years
like that,
at least. Imagine that.
But I slept five hours
off something that had been demonized my whole life.
My name is Joey Gilbert, I'm a lawyer actually here in Reno,
Nevada. But I was a former professional fighter.
And after I retired from fighting, I started practicing law full time.
And then in 2013, our governor here in Nevada signed a medical cannabis
bill to provide cannabis to the people of Nevada, and I started working
on cannabis at that time. What got me interested in the cannabis movement
was veterans. I started getting lots of pro bono cases that involved veterans
that had been doing things like self medicating. And by that I mean,
they come back, they had all kinds of issues going on
from their service, and they were trying to figure out a way to
deal with it, and there just wasn't enough help or enough services back
here to get them through. The VA was mailing these guys bottles of
pills, about this big, and I was just seeing an epidemic start.
I got involved because my father asked me...
When your father is a commander in the Marine Corps, he more tells
you. So he said, "Son, I got some cases I need some help
So after almost 31 pro bono cases and taking these guys across Nevada,
and beating these things, I started realizing there was a pattern.
And I said, "What's going on here?" And I looked back and said, "Why are
these guys getting in trouble across the country, across the state for these
little things?" And like I just said, it was self medication,
they were using alcohol, prescription drugs, over the counter drugs, Adderall
from their brother, anything they could get their hands on to try and
get this change, this head change to try and figure out what was
going on. And so based on that and talking with people,
I said to a few of these vets, "Why don't you try cannabis?"
And then what happened from there was just magic. I have text messages
in my phone where wives say to me, "Thank you for my husband back,
it was the first time we were intimate again in four years.
Thank you for my kids' father back, it's the first time I've seen
him laugh or go with his kids somewhere since he got back from
Iraq."
So the biggest problem that we faced with veterans, with guys and girls
that served, was they didn't wanna have this designation of having PTSD,
getting a medical card, and then having to lose
rights or lose access to certain things. And as everyone knows,
marijuana is illegal at the federal level, so these guys could potentially
lose out on veterans benefits if they use something that actually was much
safer, non addictive, non toxic, not lethal, but here was the conundrum:
Do I use something that really helps me and makes my quality of
life so much better or do I risk losing my benefits?
And it was a problem. It created a lot of problems.
Cannabis took a lot of guys out of a funk and gave them
hope again. It made them feel like they could deal with whatever it
was they were dealing with without being a zombie, without having to take
these meds that made their eyes white out,
white in the corner of their mouths, and they just sat there.
And as everyone knows, we were losing 22 plus a day,
minimum. So that was the issue. And I really got to see
people I knew, like I said, like Boone, and here we are,
introduced cannabis to him. Man, everything slowed down. Like you said,
the anxiety went away. Ability to go out and just do the simple
normal things that a lot of us take for granted. So that's what
I noticed. If anything, I could say anything, it just takes the edge
off. It's not a silver bullet, it's not gonna solve everything for everyone,
but the ability to
enjoy your life, you know what I'm saying? To really be comfortable in
the moment, is what cannabis does. And it's what it did for Boone. And
that's what I've learned, is that if you're gonna help these guys get
off the dope, and that's what it is, the pharmaceutical stuff is pure
crap, it's killing these guys, it's absolutely killing them. They know it,
and they won't let them use something that will help them.
And so what I noticed the biggest sways was when he ran out
of product, and I'd get a call from his wife saying,
"Oh my god, he's in a bad spot right now." And I would
say, "How is he on his meds?" "He hasn't had them for three
days." "Why didn't he call me?" "He doesn't wanna ask you for anything."
Which is textbook for anybody that came out of the military.
Veterans don't want your sympathy, they don't want you to... They don't
want your pity. Get out of their way, respect them, and they're gonna
be fine. And so that's what I really noticed. And that's part of
the problem as well, because cannabis isn't everywhere, it isn't easy to
get. They don't like asking anybody for anything.
And at some point,
I'm thinking to myself, "Why is this illegal?
How is this wrong? What is the problem here?
Because, I don't really see one."
And all those feelings, all those thoughts, all that
junk that people put in my head, I started to question.
And every time I questioned it and I researched it on my own,
I realized those people were just lying. Some of them didn't know they
were lying, they were just repeating somebody else's lie, but ultimately
it was one big lie.
People don't realize that cannabis was available in America, medically,
from the middle 1800s, about 1839, when it first got introduced to western
medicine, all the way to the 1930s, in fact, up to 1937,
when they put through the Marijuana Tax Act.
Be careful how you use it, for to grow hemp legally, you must
have a federal registration and tax stamp. This is provided for in your
contract. Ask your AAA committeeman or your county agent about it. It was
available, it had to have specific labeling instructions, it was a medicine,
but it was in no way, shape, or form prohibited. In 1937,
they passed the Marijuana Control Act, and what that did is tax cannabis
and tax hemp so incredibly that it effectively put it out of business.
The excise tax was so high, no one could afford to grow it.
So, when you talk about cannabis legalization and the history of prohibition,
it's an ugly past. It's very much steeped in racism and with the
whole Reefer Madness movie, and all that propaganda, which we still see
present in the stigma we have today. So
basically, Reefer Madness alluded to the fact that if white women use cannabis,
they'll wanna sleep with black men, or they'll be jumping out of the
window or they're gonna be playing the piano crazy, and it's not true.
It was not based on fact, but it did have that hysteria effect. All
of these devoted to marijuana records.
Here is an example.
A 16 year old lad, apprehended in the act of staging a hold
up. 16 years old and a marijuana addict.
Here is a most tragic case. Yes, I remember. Just a young boy. Under
the influence of the drug, he killed his entire family with an axe. And
that carried on way into the '60s. In the '60s, they used the
same prohibition against cannabis to go at the hippies, and again,
people of color. So it's been rampant through the federal government to
target minorities through cannabis. So put simply, from 1952, 1956 to 1970,
the United States government went on a campaign to systematically eradicate
any form of hemp or cannabis in the United States, period. And that
took it even a step further, because in the 1970 Controlled Substances Act,
they said that cannabis had no medical value, nothing. None whatsoever.
Which is absolutely ludicrous.
When the pot smoker uses that good material, the smoke carries a variety
of chemical compounds to the lungs. Within seconds, the THC begins to circulate
throughout the body, carried by the fatty particles in the bloodstream.
Almost instantly, there is an effect on the brain. As with alcohol,
the human thought process is chemically altered. This state of intoxication
is what getting stoned is all about. Along with the intoxication,
the heartbeat increases dramatically. This is why many scientists believe
that no one with a heart condition should use marijuana. Cannabis is a
completely harmless plant, however it's been criminalized over all of these
years, by all this negative propaganda that's not true. We've been lied
to all these years. Leading medical researchers are coming to the conclusion
that marijuana, pot, grass, whatever you wanna call it, is probably the
most dangerous drug in the United States, and we haven't begun to find
out all of the ill effects, but they are permanent ill effects.
All types of things that we've just been fed to and now they've
been ingrained in our mind, so it's hard to believe that this drug
that we've been told is awful, it's terrible, it's a Schedule 1 drug,
meaning it has no medical properties. And have you seen what marijuana does
to some people? Oh yeah, you've seen them, total burnouts. It slows you
down, it softens your mind, and in my neighborhood, you need to move
quickly and think fast. Drugs, it's a bloody shame. When I was 10
years old, my babysitter and her friends would do drugs in front of
me.
I really looked up to her, I wanted to be like her.
I would talk her into letting me get high with them.
That's all it took. After that, I moved on to pills, speed,
cocaine, mushrooms, you name it, I took it. It's just... At this point
now, we're fighting against years of brainwashing that has happened, and
it's slowly but surely reversing. Now we're seeing a resurgence of the use
of marijuana, we're seeing the end of prohibition, and
people are being baffled by the fact that they were lied to
for so many years, they grew up being lied to.
This is your brain on drugs. The Nancy Reagan campaign, the War on
Drugs, which affected certain communities more than others. There's gross
disparities in how the War on Drugs was applied across our country.
Meanwhile, around me, war fighters in my community are killing themselves
at a rate of 22 a day,
and I'm like, "I know why,
we should probably fix that."
Janos Victor Lutz is my son, we call him Johnny.
He was a Marine,
and I was a proud Marine Mom.
He deployed to Iraq in 2007 and 2008, came home and
I didn't see too much difference in Johny from that deployment.
It was really a cakewalk compared to his 2009 deployment to Afghanistan.
We lost 14 men.
They had
some big firefights, and they couldn't get them
food, water, they couldn't get them ammo,
because they were so far out, and when the caravans would come with
food and ammo, they were getting blown up,
they weren't making it, the guys, they lost 40 pounds.
When Johnny came home, all the families greeted them. You could instantly
tell that they were all shell shocked, they were just expressionless. Yeah.
Yeah, he was totally different when he came home, I noticed that before
it got dark, all the curtains had to be drawn,
all the windows had to be shut.
And I put undue pressure on him because I would say things like, "What
do you mean you don't wanna go? Come on, Johnny. We always would
love to go out to... We would fine dine." And
he didn't wanna do that anymore, and I just didn't understand why.
Johnny returned from his second deployment November of 2009 and was
subsequently diagnosed with severe PTSD, and TBI, which is traumatic brain
And their treatment was to put my son on
about 18 different medications. He was on antidepressants, SSRIs, pain medication,
it was a very dangerous cocktail of drugs.
So it was still not working for my son. In June of 2010
they gave him a drug called Klonopin. And a week later he attempted
suicide, they found him just as he stopped breathing.
The doctor knew that the causation for his suicide was the Klonopin, and
in fact wrote in Johnny's chart, "Do not prescribe Mr. Lutz Klonopin because
it'll be detrimental to his health," but never told my son, never told
the family. So my son was left to believe that he wanted to
die because that's what he wanted to do.
Fast forward, Johnny was medically retired November of 2011,
came home and he was still on many different medications, but the summer
of 2012... In the spring, rather, Johnny decided he wanted to get off
everything, and he did. He went cold turkey, got off all his meds,
except for a low dose of morphine that he would take as needed.
And we had a wonderful summer, we traveled. Johnny was laughing again,
joking. And we traveled to Colorado, we went whitewater rafting. It was
just a wonderful summer, I had Johnny back. Johnny flourished, he thrived,
he was just doing wonderfully. At the end of the summer,
though, something triggered his PTSD and he became depressed.
And on January 1st, he called me and he said, "Mom,
I need you to lock up all the guns in the house and
I need you to take my pain meds, and when I need them,
I'll ask you for them." I said, "Okay, honey." And
he said, "I'm scared, Mom." Three days later, on January 4th,
he went to the VA on Commercial Boulevard, and his medical records read,
"Mr. Lutz presents teary eyed and well groomed, he stated that he had
his mom lock up his guns and his meds.
'Well, Mr. Lutz, how are you today?' 'I'm okay,' as the tears were running
down his face." He's clearly not okay. How many chances did that woman
have, how many chances... How many times did my son say,
"Please help me"?
And her response to my son was, "Let's put you on some Klonopin." Then
he goes next door to the back doctor,
and that doctor prescribed my son, gave him in his hand,
90 morphine. So that was on January 1st, so during that week,
he came home, he had a couple of beers, and
he decided to take all his pills and he killed himself.
He overdosed here.
And I could've been in tune to that, but I wasn't.
Nobody was in tune and my son died,
he took his own life because of that drug.
My first Buddy Up, I had four people show up and I said,
"Well, maybe this isn't it", but one of the war fighters there,
Brian Lupo, by the way, marine infantry, he said, "No, Janine,"
he goes, "This is exactly what we need."
I joined the Marine Corps in 2009, got out in 2013.
One of the things that I think really helped me, when it came
to life after the Marine Corps, was the fact that I joined at
25 and not 18. And I didn't have that stress of an 18
year old that enlists when he gets out at 22 or 23 or
whatever.
I still have PTSD from being an infantryman in the Marines.
You see stuff, and you lose brothers, you lose friends,
so a lot of that still weighed on me. It was really tough
to sleep, you have bad dreams. So I'm 34 years old now,
and when I was 32, so about two years ago, a friend of
mine pulls out a bong and he says, "Here, man, you wanna try
this?" and I was like... Or, "You wanna hit this?" and I'm like,
"No, I've never done that before." Literally 32 years old, never smoked
marijuana before, and he's like, "Dude, it's great for PTSD,
it really mellows you out, relaxes you and all this stuff."
And I said, "You know what? Screw it, I'm gonna try it."
Since I got out of the Marine Corps, I don't think I've ever
felt that
normal.
I was able to laugh at things, relax,
had a good time, nothing could aggravate me, I wasn't angry about anything,
I didn't wanna go home and hide in
my house. And so from there I decided I'm gonna try this
on my own. So I got some marijuana and
didn't know what the hell to do with it.
So I went down to the grocery store at the end of my
street and got a
little pipe. And went out on my back patio and smoked,
and was like, "Okay, this
makes me feel good, this makes me feel normal."
Leading up to that, I refused to go to the VA.
I'll go to the VA if something's physically wrong with me,
if I've got a bad cold or... Well, I wouldn't go for a
cold. But if something was really wrong with me, I would go.
But I'm not going to the VA for mental health 'cause
they're just gonna say, "Here's an antidepressant drug, take it
twice a day and come see us in a month." But the side
effects on the drug is suicide... Or suicidal thoughts. What the fuck am
I gonna take that for? "I'm thinking about killing myself." "Well,
here, take Zoloft." Well, what's the side effect on Zoloft? Suicide.
Klonopin, suicide. Paxil, suicide. All these drugs... So I refused to go.
So I started self medicating with marijuana, and I've never felt better.
The reason I got interested in the study was because I've been taking
care of veterans for so long, and I saw that there weren't really
any good treatments for PTSD.
We only have two FDA approved medications on the market, Zoloft and Paxil
are the only meds that actually have an FDA indication for PTSD.
So all these other meds that we throw at PTSD patients
have never really been formally tested in clinical trials for treating PTSD.
Suddenly, these patients feel like guinea pigs, they're just being
pummeled with all these different prescriptions that don't seem to have
any logical method for
how we're using them. And so I began losing a lot of patients
in my own practice to suicide. That's what really woke me up because
I had
patients that I would just...
I don't even know how to describe it. It was just
the heartbreak of all these great young men and women who were ending
their life, and I realized that I had nothing more to offer them,
that we exhausted all the conventional treatments. The epidemic of veteran
suicide is one of the biggest public health crisis that we have in
this country and we don't have any good solutions for it.
And I don't know if cannabis can help curb this epidemic of veteran
suicide. But I hope that we can continue to collect information about this
and see if there's a possibility of looking at that specifically.
Our trial isn't looking at the suicide epidemic, we're just looking at the
question, "Does cannabis reduce the symptoms of PTSD?"
and if so, maybe which strains are best or which strains should be
avoided?
When somebody chooses
suicide because...
It can be for a myriad of reasons.
Whether it was pharmaceutically induced
because, like my son, he took the drugs, that made him
take his life or
for whatever the reason that you decide to do that.
When you...
When somebody dies by suicide, they just transferred everything,
that pain inside them times 10 to their loved ones that they left behind.
For the rest of my life, for the rest of my life,
I have to live without my children
and
it affects me every single day.
You know, you get really angry, you know? You get really
angry. A person could let it...
Make you really angry.
And I'm sure that he did not want
his brother to follow in his footsteps, but that's what happened.
The ripple effect of suicide
is huge. Johnny suicided. I came very close. Justin, his little brother,
completed suicide. And
the effects of
Johnny and Justin are just huge, the ripple effect,
and
it's a real mindfuck, 'cause you questioned everything you ever said,
everything you ever did, and
you wonder if something you said or did could have changed something,
or you could have done more. And I'm not the only one being
the mom. I know their friends
think that.
I know it's just... It's painful.
This is a memorial wall that I started in 2013.
When you put a face and an age
to... And realize that this person died of suicide, that all of these
people died of suicide, it's just, it's a very heart wrenching and very
impactful.
It's now well over 80 feet long and I have almost 400 photos
on it. We have overdoses, gunshot, hanging, poison, just about every method
of suicide
has been done on this wall.
And it's so sad that they think that that's the answer,
it's not the answer.
Kit,
I really wanna let kids know that illegal drugs are bad news.
Yes, David. It's true. Over one hundred thousand teenagers were admitted
into hospitals last year, because of drugs. Yeah, but I'm talking about
kids' futures. Did you know that marijuana can affect a person's physical
and sexual growth? Yes, that's quite accurate. In a laboratory test,
female animals treated with the active component in marijuana, experienced
a 44% death rate among their offspring. This is much more important than
facts and figures. What kids should know is that marijuana has got more
cancer causing agents than tobacco and a lot of young kids use drugs
on a daily basis. One of the things that people talk about is,
there needs to be more research into cannabis, but what people don't realize
is that there's already been thousands and thousands of reputable studies
done around this plant. I think probably the most predominant thing happened
last year when the National Academy of Science came out with a statement
that said, cannabis does have medicinal properties, and one is
treatment... Relief from the treatment of chemotherapy. So it definitely
improves somebody's quality of life that's going through chemotherapy. One
of the other thing that was interesting... They found out though is that
smoking cannabis does not cause cancer. So this has been a myth that's been
out there for a long time, that's fluctuated through. So smoking any type
of cannabis does not cause any type of lung cancer, there's no...
There's no substantial research showing that that actually occurs.
I never expected to be diagnosed with cancer at 46, but I should
have known. I mean I had a... My father had three different cancers
when he died. I was his primary caregiver for the last two years
of his life and I saw him endure all the awful effects of
chemo and I just knew for me that I didn't want that.
This says that the biopsy showed a malignancy in the left breast. This
is a common cancer in the breast of women and it's usually easy
to treat, especially that since we caught it early, it should be pretty
manageable. I would say, so I was diagnosed in January of 2017,
the biopsy showed I had a highly invasive intraductal carcinoma that was
a little bit between stage I and stage II. So early stage,
very hopeful that there would be
remission eventually.
I did all the standard
surgery, radiation, but I refused chemo in order to instead opt for this
cannabis oil and trying to prevent recurrence with this. Cannabis does have
some anti cancer properties, but we don't really know how to harness that
yet, we don't know what tumor cell lines are responsive to what cannabinoids
and things like that. So in my case, the only thing I can
do is just try to take this sort of shotgun approach.
So this is really a hyper potent form of cannabinoids, they've been extracted
and
put into this oil now and you can see here, this is full
of THC, CBD and other terpenes, and cannabinoids. So all we do is
we take the oil we squeeze out a little bit and we put
it right on the capsule there. But you can see this is a
very imprecise way of dosing of... We really don't know if this is
gonna work or not. We're all looking for something that gives us hope.
Hello? Hey Mom.
So what's happening? The both mammogram and breast ultrasound were negative.
Oh, I was so worried, with all kinds of instruction, I thought maybe you
had a biopsy. I know, no.
Luckily, everything went great, and now this is almost two years,
right? Since the... Yeah, what about the medicine that you're... How can
you get this medicine anymore? Oh the marijuana? Yeah, I don't know,
I have to figure it out. It's always a challenge trying
to find new supply. And then, he doesn't do it anymore. I know, we'll
figure that out. But anyway, I just wanna let you know,
mom, I'm gonna wrap up, but I'll give you a call later,
okay? Okay, love you. Love you. Oh, Sue? Oh yeah. Sue? Yes? I'm gonna ask
Sam to bring your milk, and I have also soup. But I
the pot, I need the pot, so I put it in the deep dish. Okay, that's
great, Mom, thank you so much. Okay, love you. Love you.
Bye,
Ma. so.
So as a physician, I weighed the options,
there's a whole bunch of different treatments you can do with this early
stage breast cancer. It's a personal decision, each patient is gonna handle
this differently. I think I had the chance because it was early stage,
that I could try this approach with using a high dose cannabis to
try to prevent recurrence, and it wasn't just going in blindly,
I have some colleagues that have produced some data that shows that they
took breast tumor cells in a petri dish and introduced a synthetic cannabinoid
and found a dramatic reduction in the density of the breast tumor cells.
And I look at that data, this is legitimate data published in peer
reviewed medical journals and... And I made a personal choice that I was
gonna go this route. I can still always
go with full mastectomy and chemo and all those things later,
but right now, I just chose to do a simple lumpectomy,
radiation, and then try this and see if I can flood my receptors
and capitalize on whatever anti cancer properties that this material has.
Usually when I'm sitting on panels, and they say, "Well, how long before
it'll be federally legal?" I'm saying two years.
Some of the challenges with getting there would be the United Nations and
some of the treaty issues. Once though we see how Canada does,
especially with the UN's posture and treatment of Canada, with regards to
their recreational space, then we'll see the United States government move
in that direction. So the legalities around cannabis north of the American
border are quite different than in the States. And I have a heavy
heart, and a sad place in my heart for
my southern brothers and sisters. Hence, creating a charity with a global
focus to try to change some of this stuff.
You're supposed to have a high GAFF, it's a high give a fuck
factor.
I've turned the acronym into the Global Alliance Foundation Fund.
Its principal will never be touched, and this fund will last forever,
and in perpetuity the interest will be spent to bridge the gap in
care on a global effort
for veterans everywhere.
The fact that people have had to relocate as kinda refugees for access
to the medicine, it's ridiculous in a country that's known for its freedoms,
such as America. The over prescription of these very powerful drugs is something
that we really need to pay more attention to,
and we need to educate ourselves. Cannabis has never killed anybody,
you cannot overdose from it. It has the addiction rate of coffee.
So we need academia to embrace it, we need our politicians to embrace
it, we need our physician community to embrace it, so that the patients
win at the end of the day. I so wish that my son
would have smoked pot, but my son would not do anything that would
be illegal. I think it's silly that you've got
a plant,
something that does these amazing things that they've now seen. You've got
nine states that have it legal, you've got 33 states, give or take,
that have a medical program. And so at the end of the day,
they're not putting this genie back in the bottle.
Something so preventable, my son didn't wanna
die.