📜 FEAR AND LOATHING AT THE VA PHARMACY WINDOW, RETOLD IN DICKENS MODE
A Dispatch from the Margins, Rendered with All Suitable Melodrama, Moral Fury, and Medicinal Mirth
By Ricardo Pereyda, through the Looking Glass of Mr. Dickens
This, dear Reader — attentive, incredulous, perhaps clutching your handkerchief or hipflask — is no fiction cobbled from fancy. It is, in that most peculiar and perilous sense of the phrase, a true story.
Imagine, if you can bear the thought, a young man returned from foreign sands — where the sun bakes bullets and comrades are buried with bureaucratic ceremony — stepping once more upon the soil he once called Home. But what souvenirs did he bring? Not baubles nor badges, but a pair of ticking companions: alcohol, which grins like a saboteur in a suit, and pharmaceuticals, doled out like peppermint lozenges by the solemn priests of American medicine.
At first, they courted him like gentlemen callers: smooth-tongued pills promising peace, and amber-hued libations whispering oblivion. But lo! Soon they became tyrants — one numbing his body, the other robbing his breath — until our narrator, battered but unbowed, found himself marooned between appointments, diagnoses, and the slow withering of his spirit beneath fluorescent lights.
In time — three years of institutional unction and whispered prayers to the holy pharmacy window — he made a conversion not unlike a monk renouncing the reliquary: he turned from pills to plant. From chemistry to botany. From prescription to proscription. A whiff of rebellion clung to his very breath.
And so, having attended classes, earned fellowships, gathered accolades like dead leaves in autumn, he was declared — by polite society — to be “doing well.”
How fine a fiction is success, when written by the hands of strangers.
But come the year of our discontent — 2013 — and our man did a scandalous, heretical, positively indecent thing: he spoke. He declared, in voice and deed, that cannabis — that cursed herb, denounced by lawmakers and loved by the poor — had not only soothed his wounds, but saved him.
What happened next would be comical were it not so cruel. Flags, once waved in his honour, became kerchiefs to catch the delicate swoons of scandalised patriots. Lips once busy with praise puckered into silence. His hero’s laurel wilted into a bureaucratic sneer.
Veterans? Using cannabis?
Why, the very notion!
— though it had happened a thousand times before, over back fences and basement ashtrays.
But a breakdown, dear reader, is not poetry. It is arithmetic:
A hundred unheard pleas
one thousand folded condolence letters
× the nightly echo of your brothers in bodybags
= one soul smashed upon the pavement of policy.
And still they smiled — the ladder-climbers, the grant-hounds, the veterans polished for photo-ops. He saw them dance, and he saw the dead, and he knew something had to give.
So what did our man do?
Why, he returned to the scene of the prescription, the very citadel of contradiction:
The Department of Veterans Affairs Pharmacy, Tucson Branch.
Not the rose garden. Not the doctor’s lounge. The machine’s metallic mouthpiece — the very window through which suffering is rationed like sugar in wartime.
He wore his protest like armour:
Flip-flops. Gym shorts.
ID in pocket like a prelude to martyrdom.
And upon his chest, a tank top not fashioned but ordained — adorned with the image of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, wide-eyed and wild, cradling an Uzi amidst floating cannabis leaves and cosmic cats.
It did not say arrest me.
It thundered: I DARE YOU TO UNDERSTAND THIS.
And in his hand, a joint fat enough to claim a Congressional district.
He called his sweetheart. He said — in the tone of a man preparing for crucifixion — that legal counsel might soon be required. He offered no explanation.
He walked.
Through doors. Past stares.
Up to the counter where medicinal pieties are dispensed.
The pharmacist — poor soul — asked how she might assist.
He lit it.
A joint. A prayer. A flare. A statement.
He inhaled with the calm of a saint and exhaled with the defiance of a prophet.
Smoke slithered through the glass partition. The pharmacist stammered. Blinked. She asked — gently — what he was doing.
He did it again. Larger. Louder. With Purpose.
Then, with the dignity of a condemned philosopher, he took a seat in the middle of that holy waiting room — a confessional of linoleum and paperwork — and smoked.
Murmurs rippled like gossip in a pew.
A woman asked what he was doing.
He replied, “I’m making a statement.”
And she, God bless her, nodded.
The arrest never came.
Not from the stormtroopers of policy.
Not from the marble guardians of righteousness.
No — only a kindly old man approached, volunteer badge gleaming, voice softer than protocol.
Might he, he asked, move to the designated smoking area?
Reality cracked.
He expected punishment.
He got a park bench.
So he walked.
Out of the building. Into the open air.
Puffing his protest into the wind, flanked only by pigeons and indifference.
No mugshot. No headline. No outrage.
Just a man in flip-flops and civil disobedience,
his joint so loud the system went quiet.
📜 And that, dear reader, is how one man attempted to wage war with truth against a fortress built of silence — and discovered, to his bewilderment, that even outrage must now audition for attention.
Since that fateful day — a decade, give or take — he has refined his weapons: traded blunts for pens, graffiti for essays, fist-pounding for phrase-turning. He fights not with fire, but with ink.
For revolutions, it seems, do not always wear masks or carry pitchforks.
Sometimes they wear tank tops.
Sometimes they sit, quietly, in a parking lot.
And sometimes they speak — softly, bravely — through the haze of a joint that didn’t get you arrested.
EPILOGUE FOR YOUR REFLECTION, DEAR READER:
💭 What does protest mean when the powerful no longer blush at scandal?
💭 What is a veteran, if not a man denied the peace he fought for?
💭 Can a pen cut deeper than a scream? And can a story endure where smoke fades?
God bless the brave, the broken, and those mad enough to speak.
The fight continues — with paper, with prose, and with righteous puffery.
🕯️ Onward.
📜 THE MATCH — A Tale Retold in the Dickensian Temper
As remembered by Ricardo Pereyda, reimagined by that ever-watchful, morally indignant Narrator of Shadows and Sparks
It was upon waking from a dream — not the soft dreams of infants nor the sentimental dreams of poets, but the kind of fevered reverie one carries like a scar beneath the soul — that I found it. Not in my hands, dear reader, but in my mind — or perhaps deeper still, in that tender province of memory where the true and the forbidden reside as uneasy bedfellows.
There was a poem. No parchment. No ink. Merely remembrance — branded upon the conscience like a quiet heresy. And its weight! Oh, such weight — as if one had brushed against a relic buried deep within the earth, dangerous and divine, both relic and rebellion in verse. It was not written for the eye, but rather for the nerve, the gut, the trembling hand. A missive from Orwell’s world — that bleak dominion where Thought itself is watched, where silence is policy and honesty is sedition.
And yet there it was: this poem — this whispered revolt — hidden like a smuggled candle beneath a mound of grey protocol. Someone, it seemed, had dared the darkness. Someone had kept the flame.
A shiver overtook me. Not from cold, but from comprehension. For in that moment — stark and airless as any interrogation room — I felt the unmistakable sensation of awakening. Not to safety, no. But to the unpalatable possibility that all the comfort I had been fed was mere camouflage, that security was but a soft-lit cell, and I its willing inmate.
You see, dear reader, it is one thing to dream of freedom — and quite another to see its cost itemized in the ledger of your own cowardice.
The question came swiftly: Would I hold the match?
Ah! That tiny, trembling ember. So insignificant. So disposable. And yet it contains in its sulfuric gasp a dangerous invitation — to see. Not in floodlights. Not in holy revelation. But in flickers.
The match does not explode. It reveals.
Walls.
Cracks.
Dust.
Faces.
Falsehoods.
Files, locked and sacred, where hypocrisy sleeps in alphabetized slumber.
Most extinguish it. And why wouldn’t they? The dark is so soothing when one has something to lose. But if you hold it steady, dear reader — if your fingers do not tremble away from the hiss and heat — something terrible and true begins to happen:
You see.
And what a price for seeing!
The flame draws near the skin. It licks. It asks — as fire always does — Are you prepared to carry me further? Or shall I die here, a martyr to your hesitation?
You may drop it. Return to the velvet black.
Or — oh, most sacred of “ors” — you may touch it to something that burns slower but longer.
A page. A policy. A lie. A life.
You light it. Not to destroy, but to expose. To warm others. To declare — softly, but unmistakably — “I refuse your darkness.”
And in that act, revolution begins. Not with bombs nor banners, but with a single individual saying, “I will see, even if it scorches me.”
It is not a torch I pass, no. Too grand, too gaudy.
It is a spark.
A whisper wrapped in flame.
A secret that refuses silence.
For when enough of us light our little matches — in alleyways, in basements, in break rooms and borrowed classrooms — the room begins to change. The dark cannot hold.
And when the last of the obedient candles gutter out — the ones handed down by those who feared knowledge — our small fires will remain.
PASSING THE FLAME
(A Verse Rendered in the Manner of Sentimental Rebellion)
I hold the ember,
not like a sword,
but like a secret —
too bright to bury,
too beloved to boast.
It sears my fingers.
Not out of cruelty,
but to remind me:
truth is not ornamental.
It burns.
It brands.
It binds.
The dark murmurs sweet nothings:
Close your eyes. Obey. Forget.
But I remain —
trembling, yes —
but lit.
And in the glow,
I do not preach.
I do not command.
I do not even speak aloud.
I simply offer the flame.
To you.
To them.
To anyone who dares to hold light long enough
to feel where it hurts.
And now, dear Reader —
Permit a few questions, posed not by a scholar but by a soul:
🕯️ What, in your life, was your match moment?
🕯️ What darkness have you agreed to keep company with, out of fear?
🕯️ Where, even now, do you see the faintest glimmers of others daring to see?
Thus ends the telling. But the burning — ah — the burning has only just begun.
God save the matchbearers.
Uncle Rico’s Dojo: The Burn Slow Doctrine
Civil disobedience — ah, Reader — is no longer the clarion trumpet of yesteryear, nor the crowds with placards and marching feet. No longer the grainy pages of history recounting snarling dogs unleashed by Bull Connor, or a lone boy standing before a tank in silent defiance. The institutions, alas, have grown thicker hides than once they possessed. Outrage glides past them as autumn wind past a stone wall — unnoticed. Protests, hashtags, viral fury — mere Muzak in the lobby of oblivion. The bureaucrat, hearth-warmed, sips his lukewarm coffee and nods in feigned empathy; the machine grinds on, indifferent, impervious. Thus, rebellion must mutate.
It is no longer firebrands in the streets, but absurdity in antiseptic places. A joint ignited at a VA pharmacy window — not for spectacle, nor for cameras or applause, but as precision sabotage. A reminder: reality and regulation are at mortal odds. The pharmacy technician, beholden to procedures but unarmed to change, cannot arrest your intention, cannot reconcile the contradiction, cannot heal the breach. All she can do is blink. That blink — that rupture in her expectation — is the power. Not riot, but paralysis; not clamor, but quiet defiance.
And then arises the larger question that must not be whispered: Who are veterans supposed to be in this nation? We have been taxidermied into mascots: polished, sanitized, neutered. Ubiquitous “hero” tropes — halftime tributes, discount codes, flags in storefront windows — these are the stage props in a patriotic theater. Meanwhile the real lives — trauma, addiction, rage, survival — churn in unseen rooms. To honor veterans is not to wax patriotic in platitudes, but to speak the messy truth. Some veterans return broken. Some return radical. Some light joints in pharmacies because the system refuses to heal them otherwise. That is not unpatriotic. It may, in broken irony, be the most American gesture left standing.
Healing outside the official channels becomes dissent. The state offers pills; people refuse. They find cannabis, art, community, ritual older than the charter — and in reclaiming autonomy, molecule by molecule, story by story, they depose the gatekeepers’ monopoly on legitimacy. Once you see the prescription pad as one ticket among many, you glimpse the edifice for the sham it is.
And here: writing — the sacred incendiary. Protests flare and fade, swallowed by the news cycle’s maw; signs collapse. But a word — an essay, a narrative — has a half-life measured in years. A slogan vanishes; a manuscript resonates. Writing archives the madness, holds institutions accountable (“you cannot say you knew not”), gifts future rebels a map. Civil disobedience in our age is not about volume, but about surgical acts within the machine — then words that outlive the moment. Light the joint. Write it down. Force them to face contradiction — and ensure the record endures. That is how you slip past apathy. That is how you outlast the empire of managed decline.
Because — listen closely — truth does not march in the parade. Truth smokes in the pharmacy, scribbles in the margins, refuses the polite conventions.
They tell you that every soldier brings the war home. Me? I brought it into a small room — stained-glass windows, swirling brushstrokes of psychedelia, a desk buckling under truths that few dare carry. Over the last decade, this room has been womb, war room, witness to my folly and my fidelity.
It did not begin with program or blueprint. It began with memory, with pain, with the desperate business of survival. I did not strive to craft an office. I strove only to remain alive, to anchor myself, to keep speaking when silence was so much cheaper.
This room has judged: nothing.
This room has tolerated tears mid-draft, smoke in grief, skipped classes to transcribe buried lies.
This room has been the launchpad: policy drafts ignored until they weren’t; spoken word recorded; archives of Robert Randall unearthed; Zoom calls spanning continents while a ceiling fan turned overhead, doing duty as compass and clock. The walls themselves are murals — a sun hotter than foreign deserts, camo blobs melting like lost ideals, a wizard lurking in the corner as spiritual guard. This is not paint. This is protection. A palimpsest of resilience.
The shelves groan: Thompson, Baldwin, Ginsberg, The Green Paper. Diplomas, lanyards — not decorations, but reminders of what was endured, not what was earned. Everywhere artifacts: an MP patch, a holster, water bottles beside vinyl crates, bar stools more storytelling perch than seating. Each object, a pulse. A past.
Visitors comment: “It’s colorful.”
I say: “It is coded.”
This room is hidden manifesto.
It has birthed Arizona Garden Month, the International Veterans Leadership Committee, the Veterans Action Council, purged false allies, hosted MAPS truth-telling, launched a thousand “Dear Editor” letters. It is not an office. It is a grown place, like a garden: soil, seeds, storms, and growth from wreckage.
This room embodies the Burn Slow Doctrine: sit with soil, weather the storm, extract use from ruin.
Reflections on the Warrior Ethos
It is not slogan. It is not marketing. It is a way of being when battlefields recede and the war becomes internal.
Discipline when no one watches.
Purpose beyond the self.
Integrity under collapse.
Sacrifice with no cheer.
Adaptation without betrayal.
And now — what then?
The next expression of this ethos may be silence. Stillness. Stewardship.
Do not mistake them for retreat. They are weapons also.
The garden, the rest, the peace — sovereignty, not surrender.
The ethos may not retire. It may root deeper.
And should the need arise again — oh, we will know.
The arrow will fly.
Reflection Prompts:
What does it mean to design a space to survive, not to succeed?
In what ways does your physical environment sustain or suppress your truth-telling or your resistance?
If protest signs fade and tweets vanish, what writing might persist a decade on?
What does “Burn Slow Doctrine” mean in a world addicted to virality?
How do we move beyond sanitized “hero” narratives to honor veterans’ full truths?
Can rest, joy, or art be protest?
If burnout is the mortal enemy of resistance, how do we reframe sustainability as revolutionary self-possession?
—
Rico, Veteran. Archivist. Dissident.
In this sun-scorched command post of Tucson, in psychedelic camo and mural revolt, he pens not soundbites but testimony. He traded rifle for records, mission for revelation. This room is not a portrait. It is a living palimpsest of persistence.
If you seek a slogan — look elsewhere. If you seek unfiltered dispatch from the frontlines of healing and dissent: take a seat.
THE CLOCK
A Reckoning with Juvenile Injustice
In the Voice & Vein of Charles Dickens
—As rendered from the testimony of Mr. Ricardo Pereyda
It was in a cold hall of concrete and consequence, beneath the sterile stare of flickering fluorescent lamps, that a lad, scarcely more than a boy, was handed a pencil — not as a gift, but as a test. Not to chart his dreams, but to catalogue his role in a game already rigged. The question posed was deceptively gentle, like a velvet glove concealing the iron hand beneath:
“Who do you look up to — and why?”
Permit me, dear Reader, to escort you into that place — juvenile detention, they called it, though the only thing detained more thoroughly than the boy’s body was his faith in the fairness of systems. He was sharp of eye, sharper of tongue, and possessed that dangerous combination: a wounded conscience and a working mind. Told to respect institutions that had never extended him the courtesy of recognition, he wrote not of generals or gods, but of two unlikely figures: his cousin Jorge, and, heavens preserve us — Al Capone.
Jorge, you see, was a man of most uncommon quiet. He made no boast, wore no jewels, held no court in alleys or parlours. He arose early, laboured honestly, and performed the most radical act available to a working-class man in America — he saved. Not for frivolities, not for glinting toys or temporary triumphs, but for something altogether nobler: freedom. He saved for movement, for dignity, for a life not dictated by the lash of each passing payday. Jorge was no prophet, and yet he prophesied — in action, not in word — that discipline could be wealth, and that quiet persistence might yet outlast noisy failure.
But what of Capone? Ah, the infamous Mr. Capone! The bootlegger! The butcher of Volstead! The crownless king of a thirsty nation! The boy did not admire the man’s violence — no, not that — but he saw in Capone a mirror, cracked though it was, of the economy’s hypocrisy. For what is Prohibition, Reader, but the theatre of morality — where the law decries drink with one hand and pours it with the other? Capone, rogue though he was, understood the market better than the magistrates. He prospered, not because he was good, but because the system made profit more possible than principle.
And thus the boy wrote — in a hand shaped more by instinct than grammar — that “Se la vi” governed all. Life, as he spelled it, was not fair; it was fluent in contradiction. Jorge and Capone were not opposites — they were brothers divided by incentives.
And what are incentives, Reader, but the compass by which the soul navigates the storm? If a system rewards deceit, do not be surprised to find liars in charge. If it honours quiet toil, expect a few Jorges to rise — though rarely do they receive parades. In this tragic theatre of the Republic, it is too often the Capones who dine, and the Jorges who disappear into smoke and silence.
That essay was no mere schoolroom exercise. It was a moral treatise. A premature thesis on power, pathology, and the price of survival. The boy would grow to fight — not with fists, but with files. Not with rage, but with research. He would lift the curtain on lies enshrined in law, and root out injustice from its bureaucratic burrows. But even then — back when his age was counted in half-years, not hard-won lessons — he understood: the game was broken.
And the game, dear Reader, had a clock.
Now, let us reverse the gears of that very clock, and observe the beginning — which, like all beginnings in Dickensian affairs, is found in the end of something else.
The boy’s descent into the legal labyrinth did not commence with robbery, nor riot, nor the ruin of property. No — it began, as such sagas often do, with a plant. Cannabis — the same herb so often invoked in song and sermon, so criminalised in statute and sanctified in silence — that gentle leaf became his undoing.
Caught one evening — barely past his fifteenth year — smoking after a day’s labour in a place not sanctioned for rest, he was seized not by compassion but by process. Thus began the ritual: the tests, the check-ins, the sermons in fluorescent rooms where help was promised but never provided. They did not ask why he smoked — they merely demanded that he stop.
He smoked not for rebellion, nor spectacle, but to function — to soothe the gnawing chaos within. To make himself quiet in a world that shouted him down. And never, not once, did the test return clean. Yet the system retained him all the same. Not because it helped him — but because he fit its rhythm. He was clocked in. Stamped. Processed. Filed.
And before probation, there had been Charter Behavioral Health — a name which sounds like hope, and acts like despair. There, they administered chemical silence, not healing. He emerged blank. Unwritten. And then — as is custom — he was handed off, like a misdelivered parcel, from one institution to another.
When he failed a drug test at a military-style reform school — not by vice, but by the residue of trauma — he was expelled. Not because he brought contraband, but because his body remembered its pain.
He asked, reasonably, “If I cannot access the drug here — why remove me?”
He received no reply. Systems seldom answer when confronted with logic.
They sent him home. Again.
But Reader, home is no home when the streets have teeth.
The clock — oh, that ever-ticking tyrant — was his salvation. Not a therapist. Not a judge. Not the dozen institutions that misnamed themselves as treatment. No, what freed him was age. He turned eighteen, and thus aged out of their grasp. The file was closed. The watch was ended. Not because he was healed — but because they no longer had jurisdiction.
The system, you see, does not rehabilitate. It times out.
And so he writes. Not to glorify — for there is no glory in shackles, even if they are invisible — but to account. To bear witness. To call out, across the concrete echo of youth detention cells, to those still trapped inside.
To say, as he now says:
I see you. I was you. And you are not broken.
You are not the number they gave you. Not the mistake they magnify. Not the paragraph in their cold reports. You are blueprint, potential, storm-in-waiting.
And when you escape — by wit, by will, or by the mercy of time — you may yet become the builder of better systems. Not the inmate. But the architect.
Because, dear Reader, the boy they tried to silence is writing. And those still locked down?
They are listening.
REFLECTIONS, in the Manner of Pedagogues and Philosophers:
What systems mistake survival for defiance?
Can justice be measured by compliance, or must it begin with care?
Is there salvation in time alone — or must we intervene before the chimes toll their last?
And who, pray tell, benefits from the silence of the young?
About the Author (in Proper Dickensian Terms):
Mr. Ricardo Pereyda is a gentleman of uncommon resolve — once numbered, now named; once muted, now a chronicler of truth. A veteran by rank, a strategist by calling, and a storyteller by fate. Where others redact, he reveals. Where others retreat, he reclaims. He writes not with ink alone, but with the marrow of memory.
And in that memory, he has found not only his voice — but his vengeance.
🎩 THE PETITION: A Most Earnest Appeal to Reason and Remembrance
Rendered in the Dickensian Style, with Due Moral Indignation and a Pen Dipped Deep in the Inkwell of Conscience
By Mr. Ricardo Pereyda, Late of the U.S. Army, Presently of the Unquiet Mind and the Unsilenced Tongue
Now, dear Reader — permit me a brief indulgence. For I am well aware that no one, neither statesman nor street-sweeper, relishes the company of a constant complainer: that familiar figure who wails without will, moans without method, and diagnoses all ills without so much as a handkerchief to mop the fevered brow of the afflicted.
And so — rather than merely raise my voice — I raise a proposition. A document. A Petition, if you please. Not a mere scribble of dissatisfaction, but a charter of justice, drafted with trembling fingers and iron purpose.
Let us begin at the beginning: with Robert C. Randall, the man who, in the Year of our Bureaucratic Lord Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Six, became the first citizen to whom the United States government — that reluctant physician of last resort — did extend the olive branch of cannabis as legally protected medicine.
Yes, Reader. The Republic that imprisons men for the possession of a plant did once prescribe it.
And if it could be done once — it must be done again.
But this time, not for one man alone.
🕰 THE CLOCK STRIKES AGAIN: From Randall to Our Veterans
The Petition here presented is no idle complaint. It is a position paper, a policy proposal, and a plea for decency — addressed to the Honourable Chambers of Congress, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and that vast alchemical bureau known as Health and Human Services.
The proposition is plain:
⚖️ Recognize veterans as federal patients.
🔐 Apply the Randall precedent to protect their right to medical cannabis.
🚫 End the systemic denial of cannabis as life-saving care.
🏛 Create a federal program that reflects both medical science and moral obligation.
🪦 THE BURDEN BORNE: The Veteran as Federal Patient
Imagine, if you will, a man taken from his home, clothed in uniform, trained in violence, and flung across oceans to bear witness to the machinery of war. When he returns — limping, haunted, wounded in spirit if not in flesh — he is told, “We will care for you.”
But then he seeks relief. Not from opiates. Not from barbiturates. Not from the pharmacological buffet offered without hesitation. He seeks a plant, and for this — for this alone — he is denied, gaslit, criminalized, and called suspect.
“You are a federal patient,” they say,
“But not that kind of patient.”
Robert Randall was “that kind of patient.” He was under federal care. He had a documented condition. His doctor recommended cannabis, and when no other medicine sufficed, the courts declared: “This is necessity, not novelty.”
And so, dear Reader, we ask — if the Republic can make an exception for one man to preserve his sight, can it not make one for millions, to preserve their lives?
🔍 THE CORE ARGUMENT (Fit for Reading Aloud in Any Drawing Room or House of Parliament):
Robert C. Randall: Documented patient. Under federal oversight. Physician-backed. Cannabis-dependent for survival. Granted access.
U.S. Veterans Today: Documented patients. Under federal oversight via the VA. Physician-backed in legal states. Cannabis-dependent for quality of life.
The difference?
Mr. Randall received access.
Our veterans receive indifference.
And sometimes punishment.
And often pain.
🏛 WHY THIS MATTERS
1. Federal Duty of Care
When one becomes a VA patient, one becomes a federal medical beneficiary. Their treatment is not local, but national. Their rights fall under federal jurisdiction. The refusal to provide cannabis care creates disparity across state lines — an injustice hidden in the folds of bureaucracy.
2. Uncle Sam is Already the Doctor
The same government that trained these men and women in warfare, exposed them to trauma, and sent them home in pieces now denies them a plant that may soothe what pills cannot. If Uncle Sam can prescribe fentanyl, why not cannabis?
3. Medical Necessity is Legal Precedent
The courts — those arbiters of dusty tomes and reluctant mercy — already recognized that when nothing else works, cannabis is defensible. Veterans meet the same criteria. Why, then, is the door bolted?
4. This is a Civil Rights Issue
To deny medicine on the basis of federal status is to weaponize care. It is to penalize loyalty. To rob the wounded twice: first in war, then in recovery. It violates autonomy. It punishes the faithful. It is, in short, disgraceful.
✍️ POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS (With the Urgency of a House on Fire)
1. Create the Federal Veterans Cannabis Access Program
A program administered jointly by the VA and HHS — with patient ID cards, legal protections, and interstate continuity of care.
2. Reinstate the Compassionate IND Program
Veterans qualify. Let them in. Let them heal.
3. Deschedule Cannabis
The plant does not belong on Schedule I. It never did. The very existence of the Randall program proves this.
4. Protect Against Weaponized Diagnosis
Cannabis use disorder (CUD) has become the newest chain. Enact protections so veterans are not punished for healing.
🧾 EVIDENCE, IF YOU INSIST ON FACTS
Randall: IND #13-387. Legally permitted to use cannabis for medical necessity.
Veterans: 9 million strong. Many already self-medicating with cannabis — often the only medicine that works.
VA: Acknowledges cannabis efficacy, yet remains barred from recommending or prescribing it.
States: Nearly 40 allow medical use, including for PTSD — yet federal patients are trapped in bureaucratic purgatory.
🗣 KEY TALKING POINT (Fit for the Senate Floor or the Supper Table)
If the federal government gave Robert Randall cannabis to save his eyesight in 1976,
It cannot, in good conscience, deny veterans cannabis to save their lives in 2025.
Veterans are not finished when the war ends. The government that sent them is not finished either. It swapped their uniforms for VA cards, and their liberty for a waiting room. It cannot praise them on Veterans Day and poison them every other.
We owe them more than flags and pills.
We owe them truth.
We owe them options.
We owe them cannabis.
“That’s exactly what should be done.
Should have been done a long time ago.”
— Mr. Noam Chomsky, Distinguished Elder of Reason and Righteous Dissent
🔦 Stay Loud. Stay Bright. Let Your Light Be a Lantern.
To every lawmaker and citizen of conscience:
The time for cowardice has passed.
The time for science is now.
The time for justice is overdue.
💭 REFLECTION QUESTIONS (For Discussion, Debate, and the Drawing of Better Laws)
Why has the Randall precedent been buried beneath the rubble of policy indifference?
What are the legal implications of formally defining veterans as federal patients?
How does this challenge partisan divides and reveal institutional cowardice?
Can a Federal Patient Bill of Rights exist — and what must it contain?
Who is erased when veterans speak the truth — and who benefits from their silence?
About the Author:
Mr. Ricardo Pereyda, U.S. Army Veteran, former Military Policeman, and present-day dissident of the desert, writes not as a scholar of theory but as a survivor of systems. Founding Member of the International Veterans Leadership Committee, he speaks with fire and files — and carries with him the names of those for whom no medicine came in time. His story is not just testimony. It is evidence.
