Weeded Warriors: the young veterans breaking the law to treat their PTSD

Weeded Warriors: the young veterans breaking the law to treat their PTSD

THURSDAY 14 SEPTEMBER 2017
Mick was almost driven to suicide by the drugs Defence gave him to treat his PTSD, so he started smoking weed instead.
When Mick Harding came back from Afghanistan he was struggling with depression, anger and alcoholism.

“I was involved in an incident in Afghanistan where my [second in charge] was shot and killed,” he told Hack.

It happened while Mick was on patrol through the Tangi Valley near the village of Derapet. It left him with some pretty serious emotional issues and he ended up being medically discharged from the army in 2012.

He suffered from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), conversion disorder and a major depressive disorder which saw him prescribed the anti-psychotic Seroquel and anti-depressants Avanza and Lexapro. Those drugs seemed to make things worse though; spurring on homicidal and suicidal ideation.

“There was a lot of time I’d get emotional to the point where I’d just be crying on the ground wishing I was the one who was killed overseas," Mick told Hack.

“To me, that's bizarre that [these pharmaceutical drugs are] the number one prescribed and conventional treatment for dudes that are already suffering from suicidal thoughts and coming from such horrific events.”

Mick figured there had to be something better out there. After using weed as a vice, he started reading stories from veterans in the United States who'd found it helped their PTSD.

I was at a point of desperation."

“I was about 110 kilos, I wasn’t functioning, I wouldn’t get out of bed until one or two o’clock and when I did I’d just start drinking to feel something over the medication I was on. It wasn’t any sort of quality of life,” Mick says.

Mick found smoking cannabis helped him with his emotions and come to terms with what he’d experienced overseas. After visiting veterans groups in the US using weed to help with PTSD he decided to start a group called Weeded Warrior to help vets in Australia.

“Really my main motivation was that I wanted to give guys other options,” Mick tells Hack.

The gatherings

Weeded Warrior sets up in small community hall on Brisbane’s northside for its monthly meetings. They’re not big gatherings, the one Hack went to had six attendees.

On the left as you walk into the hall there’s a long table covered in books like Psychedelic Marine, A Mind of Your Own and Beyond Buds. In the middle of the room is a ring of chairs, where the group sits to chat.

Nathan’s one of them. In his late 20s, softly spoken with a thick, well kept beard. He’s wearing a hoodie, shorts and thongs, carrying some mental scars from his time as an infantry soldier in Afghanistan.

“The meds that we're prescribed by the doctors make you feel dead inside,” he said.

“Smoking some weed though, it just seems totally harmless and makes me feel more in touch with other people, more at peace with myself.”

Nathan is here alongside Max, who served as an army medic and theatre technician for 12 years. He's got the warm air of someone you'd want nearby if you ever needed that sort of help.

“It takes out the stress, the anxiety, I get my appetite back, I get my sex drive back, the moods are more stable than ever have,” he told Hack, explaining why he smokes weed.

I don’t have suicidal thoughts any more or tendencies. These are all things I still had on the other medications.”

Despite the name, Weeded Warrior is about more than smoking dope. Mick also recommends holistic therapies like yoga, healthy eating and flotation therapy. The monthly meetings are a way for people to get to out of the house and talk, find out what’s been working well for others and what hasn’t.

“It's nice to just see other people and hear other people talk about the similar effects that they have... also it's a way to confront the legality of it,” Nathan says.

“It's good we're sort of on the precipice of change. We're trying to sort of hurry that along a little bit.”

The issues these guys are trying to deal with are a serious problem for former soldiers. A recent report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found male veterans between 18 and 24 were twice as likely to take their own lives than non-veterans.

The report also found that men who were discharged involuntarily from the ADF were 2.4 times more likely to die by suicide than those who discharged voluntarily; those who were discharged for medical reasons were 3.6 times more likely to die by suicide than those who discharged voluntarily.

A 2010 report from Defence found members are more likely than civilians to suffer from depression and post-traumatic stress.

“It feels like my nerves slowly get worked up, it just sort of hurts, like my whole body kind of hurts like it's going to confront a danger but if I smoke some weed that basically dissipates,” Nathan says.

This isn’t medicinal, it’s illegal.

While the federal government has legalised medical cannabis, a hodgepodge of state legislation makes it hard to access. Applications through the special access scheme, the only legal avenue outside of clinical trials, can take months.

Without approval from state and federal governments, smoking cannabis is against the law.

“Myself and a lot of other veterans have gotten to a point of desperation,” Mick told Hack.

“We've been in a conflict zone where people want to kill us so you come back here and the least they can do is give you the respect and decency to medicate the way that you're finding best, so I think a lot of us are at a point where we're taking it into our own hands.

“When the alternative is medication that's going to potentially cause you to kill yourself or hurt someone else I don't see what crime we're really committing.”

The mismatched medical cannabis laws around Australia are holding back the Department of Veterans Affairs from making any ground in this space too. In a statement to Hack, the Department said it had been investigating the treatment, but the inconsistent state laws and a lack of research were holding it back.

“While there is a confusing mixture of legislative barriers between State and Commonwealth laws, and in the absence of any clear evidence base for the routine use of medical cannabis (other than possibly for some types of childhood epilepsy, cachexia associated with malignancies, and possibly some types of chronic pain), DVA does not support or endorse the use of medicinal cannabis.”

The North American experience

The lack of evidence isn’t holding back groups in the United States though, there’s a cabal of ex-service organisations holding meetings and handing out cannabis to veterans for chronic physical and mental pain.

“So many of us medicate and use and just don't tell anyone, so we're screaming it from the mountain tops,” Mark Carillo from Weed for Warriors told Hack.

Mark started smoking cannabis in 2009 to help with anxiety issues caused by going to war, in 2010 he started growing his own.

“In January 2015, I started giving out cannabis for free to veterans in Sacremento, California. Over two and a half years later now we have over 21 chapters in the country.”

Weed for Warriors hands out donated cannabis to veterans who come along to their monthly meetings. There's other groups too, like the Santa Cruz Veterans Alliance which farms its own cannabis with the help of volunteer veterans. That's sold through a dispensary with some set aside to be donated to vets.

Medical cannabis laws in the US differ from state to state though, so it’s not legal everywhere. Mark lives in California, a legal state, but is pushing US Veteran Affairs (VA) to source and pay for this medicine.

That’s a move in step with the American Legion, one of the largest ex-service organisations in the US. It wants the VA to do more research into the benefits of cannabis for PTSD so they can start prescribing it as medicine.

“It's not our fault my only health care is through the VA health care and it's a government organisation that's in every state,” Mark told Hack.

“The only thing I can see to give these veterans the options they're asking for is to let us choose whatever medicine they want, and if that's cannabis, let it be.”

It’s a different story north of the border though. Canadian Veterans Affairs will pay for three grams of medical cannabis a day for veterans suffering from PTSD.

http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/smoking-cannabis-to-treat-ptsd-weed-veterans/8945080