PTSD, Post Traumatic stress disorder, is not new to the vets. PTSD has been called a lot of things in the past. Every war the United States was involved in had it's own term.
- Shell Shock
- Combat Fatigue
- Combat Disorder
- Battle Fatigue
- Combat neurosis
American soldiers and veterans diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are often given a duffle bag of drugs, from antidepressants like Zoloft and Paxil to any number of highly addictive opioids. Doctors who work with these soldiers in Veterans Affairs clinics are encouraged to prescribe such medications, and any thought of prescribing alternative medicine that has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration is generally forbidden.
But some doctors break the chain. Sue Sisley is a psychiatrist who's worked with veterans for 20 years. While she has never smoked marijuana herself, she's heard how it can work from some of her patients who use it on their own to treat PTSD. "Nobody is claiming it's a cure, but they report they have been successfully managing their symptoms," she says. Sisley was set to begin studying the benefits of using medical marijuana to treat symptoms of PTSD at the University of Arizona – until she was fired in July, which she suspects happened for political reasons.
Sisley has now been nominated for a $2 million grant by Colorado's Medical Marijuana Scientific Advisory Council to fund her triple-blind study into how marijuana can help treat PTSD. (The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment's health board will approve or deny the grant on December 17th.) Sisley hopes to treat half of the 76 veterans participating in the study in Arizona, as well as cooperating with doctors at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for the other half. "Johns Hopkins has a long history of doing high quality marijuana research," she says. Even so, the university has thus far only looked at possible harms of marijuana, because that's the only thing the government wanted to hear about.
One obstacle the study still faces is getting government-approved research marijuana.
According to Sisley, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which provides research marijuana, won't have enough until April or May 2015. They've known about the study since 2011, and it definitely doesn't take that long to grow weed, so the veterans she knows worry that the government is stalling.PTSD - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is taking it's toll on vets and needs to be dealt with ASAP. Putting off the necessary help just because congress is tightening up the purse strings is not acceptable..
...via PTSD and Pot: The Fight to Get Veterans Some Weed - RollingStone.com
RT @MHVChampion: VA will Rx tons of drugs for #PTSD but not #Marijuana - Support #Veterans Equal Access Act alternative treatment http://…— Korey Gaskin (@) Fri Dec 12 2014RT @christobartley: Our essay in Time on the need for VA to be transparent and accountable for veterans' #PTSD outcomes. http://t.co/tnpjXZ…— Dominic Piper (@) Fri Dec 12 2014
