Original subtitles

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.