Founding Father’s walk into the Cannabis Caucus
To the People,
In the matter of the MORE Act of 2025 and its treatment of veterans' concerns, I have reviewed the evolution of this legislation and observed critical gaps that must be addressed in service of our nation’s veterans.
Context of the Issue:
In October of 2020, I, alongside veterans from across the country, approached the United States Cannabis Caucus, seeking consideration for our community's unique needs within the upcoming MORE Act. Despite presenting the concerns of our veterans with respect and urgency, our voices were met with silence. Though our appeal was disregarded, I resolved to seek other avenues of action, collaborating with Representative David Joyce and others to refine our proposals.
The 2025 MORE Act and the Gaps:
Veterans’ Voices and Recognition:
The MORE Act speaks of veterans in passing, primarily in the context of PTSD. Yet, it fails to recognize the distinct status of veterans as federal patients.
My proposals center on institutionalizing the veteran voice, ensuring that their needs are heard, particularly regarding cannabis as a harm reduction tool, and formalizing their protections across all states.
Suicide Prevention and Harm Reduction:
Suicide among veterans remains a staggering issue. I have continually advocated for cannabis as a vital harm reduction measure, especially to combat the over-reliance on pharmaceuticals.
The MORE Act does not address the connection between cannabis and suicide prevention, nor does it reflect the need for substance use disorder treatments tailored to veterans.
VA & DoD Integration:
My blueprint calls for the integration of cannabis treatment within the VA and DoD systems. Veterans should be treated as federal patients under federal care, with uniform protections in place.
The MORE Act fails to address how cannabis should be handled by these agencies, leaving veterans without clarity regarding their treatment options.
Compassionate IND Program:
I propose an expanded Compassionate Investigational New Drug (IND) Program to allow veterans access to federally grown cannabis.
The MORE Act acknowledges the IND program but offers no real expansion, nor does it commit to transparency regarding safety and efficacy data, crucial to ensuring safe and effective treatment for veterans.
State-Level Programs:
My approach calls for state-based frameworks that include job placement, licensing preferences, and protections for cannabis-related veterans' organizations.
In contrast, the MORE Act remains silent on these matters, deferring the responsibility to states, leaving veterans’ needs unaddressed at the federal level.
Conclusion:
While the MORE Act of 2025 represents progress toward broad cannabis reform, it fails to offer a veteran-centered framework—one that acknowledges veterans as federal patients with unique medical needs. The gaps identified here must be addressed if we are to fulfill our sacred duty to those who have served this nation. We must ensure that cannabis becomes a viable treatment option, integrated into federal care systems, and that new, specialized Veteran Service Organizations (VSOs) are chartered to support the health and well-being of our veterans.
Let us not allow this moment to pass without fulfilling our obligation to those who have borne the burden of war. The time is now to address the gaps and ensure that every veteran receives the care they have earned, with dignity and respect.
End of Statement.
🖋️ Printed for public notice in the spirit of civic instruction and reform.
📜 AN ADDRESS TO THE PEOPLE:
George Washington Enters the Cannabis Caucus—
A Veteran’s Appeal to Conscience, Congress, and Common Sense
Set forth in Franklin Mode for the broader understanding of the citizenry.
To the Inhabitants of These United States,
Permit me, dear reader, to recount a matter of some consequence—one which touches the lives of those who have carried musket and memory through the fields of war, only to return to a peace still learning how to care for its defenders.
In the Year of Our Lord 2020, I was called upon by veterans from every corner of our Republic to deliver, in solemn voice, their concerns to the United States Cannabis Caucus. Our petition was simple: that our needs—not ornamental, but essential—be considered in the crafting of the MORE Act, a bill proposing to reform our national policy on cannabis. Our plea was received with the grace of a stone, and left unanswered.
What followed was not surrender, but adaptation. With quiet diligence and firm resolve, I joined with Representative David Joyce and other allies to refine our proposals—to shift from appeal to blueprint.
The matter has now returned in the form of the MORE Act of 2025. And so I ask: what, pray, has changed?
Let us examine the parts.
I. On Veterans’ Voices
The new Act nods politely to veterans—mentions PTSD, offers acknowledgment. Yet it fails to institutionalize our place within this reform. Veterans are not just sufferers of trauma—we are federal patients under federal care, and deserve recognition as such.
My proposals outline chartered organizations, identification protections, and a framework by which veterans may be treated not as afterthoughts, but as integral stakeholders in the shaping of policy.
II. On Suicide & Harm Reduction
The epidemic of veteran suicide is not a metaphor—it is a funeral bell tolling daily across this land.
Cannabis, when responsibly deployed, offers a path of harm reduction—a countermeasure to the overprescription of dangerous pharmaceuticals.
The MORE Act makes no mention of suicide. It offers no redirection of existing VA funds toward this end. It does not even whisper the word prevention. On this front, it is as silent as a locked infirmary door.
III. On VA and DoD Integration
We do not ask for miracles, only uniformity. Veterans, as federal patients, deserve equal access to care regardless of geography.
My blueprint proposes the expansion of the VA Choice Act, allowing veterans to consult cannabis providers in regulated states. It suggests modifications to the UCMJ and a unified administrative response from the Department of Defense.
The MORE Act addresses none of this. It passes the buck, while the burden remains.
IV. On the Compassionate IND Program
Since 1976, a trickle of patients has received cannabis from the federal government under the Compassionate Investigational New Drug (IND) program. What has been learned? What might yet be?
I call for the expansion of this program through the VA and HHS; for the release of decades of data; for the issuing of patient ID cards protecting lawful veterans from criminalization on federal grounds.
The MORE Act tips its hat toward this history—but does not extend the hand of progress.
V. On State-Level Implementation
The Act offers reform, but leaves the rest to the states—as if fifty fragmented policies might compose a single promise to the veteran.
I propose templates for veteran access: licensing preferences, job pathways, compassion centers housed in former VFW halls—new organizations free from the culture of alcohol, oriented toward healing, mutual aid, and post-war purpose.
The Act says nothing of this. It gives us liberty, but not leadership.
Conclusion: What Ought to Be Done
The MORE Act of 2025 is not without merit—it cracks the door. But it does not yet open the house to those who kept the wolves from its walls.
We must do more. We must write into law the recognition of veterans as federal patients, with full protections and access to care rooted in science, compassion, and equity. We must fund and empower new VSOs, designed not to echo the past, but to build a future worthy of their service.
This is not the indulgence of a political class—it is the fulfillment of a sacred debt.
Let us not wait for another generation to repair what this one might amend.
With measured hope, unshaken duty, and a clear eye toward the unfinished work,
—A Citizen Among Veterans
🕊️ “Well done is better than well said.” — B. Franklin
🖨️ Published by order of Common Sense Press, for wide and free distribution.
🔔 DICKENS MODE: ENGAGED
📜 The Petition of Sergeant Holloway
A Tale Most Melancholy, Mildly Mad, and Morally Indignant, as Transcribed from the Federal Fogs
In the vast, sepulchral machinery of government—where memos travel more swiftly than men, and the only ailment recognized is a paper cut—there occurred a most curious case concerning one Sergeant Holloway, a veteran of sound body once, but now a soul entangled in the red-tape vines of institutional forgetfulness.
This tale begins, dear reader, not in the glow of cannon-fire or the thud of muddy boots, but in a corridor—longer than mercy and colder than Parliament—within a place called The Cannabis Caucus, whose chambers were warmed not by compassion, but by the indifferent heat of fluorescent bulbs and underpaid staffers.
🕯️ A Veteran Appears
Sergeant Holloway, whose knees knew more wars than most congressmen knew their own voting record, arrived with parchment in hand—not a sword, not a bayonet, but a petition. “A simple matter,” he thought. “We ask not for treasure, only treatment.” His comrades, too many to fit within the marble room, had entrusted him with their hopes—rolled tight as joints and twice as fragile.
They had seen what pills did to a man. How they dulled the pain and then dulled the man himself. How suicide walked like a quiet shadow behind their barracks. They had seen in cannabis a flicker of something better—not cure, but comfort.
But alas! The Caucus, as it was called (though neither green nor especially united), received Holloway’s plea as one might receive a draft of vinegar in a chalice of wine. They nodded. They shuffled papers. They sighed. And then they forgot.
🪶 The Act of MORE, and the Doing of Less
The MORE Act of 2025! A parchment so proud it might have lit the entire chamber if burned for heat. It claimed to be reform, yet was curiously short of the substance. For in its many paragraphs—each puffed up like a bureaucrat’s waistcoat—one found only a passing mention of veterans, as though an afterthought had slipped in without a coat.
PTSD, yes. A line here, a phrase there. But nowhere the thunder of real recognition. Nowhere the nod that these men and women are federal patients, deserving not just of sympathy, but of system.
The Act bore no mention of suicide. No compass for the 22 a day who do not survive the peace. No line-item for the redirection of vast sums spent on pills that pacify but do not heal. Not even the courtesy of a plan to study what has already been learned in quiet rooms, in basements, in borrowed gardens.
🔍 Bureaucracy as Labyrinth, and the IND That Was
Ah, the Compassionate Investigational New Drug program! A title so long it takes two breaths to say, and two decades to see. Since 1976 it had delivered cannabis—legal, yes, and laughably rare—to but a handful of citizens, like relics passed to monks in hiding.
And where, dear reader, is the data? Locked. Forgotten. Buried beneath layers of officialdom, as if truth were a dangerous gas and safety lay in sealing the vault. Sergeant Holloway asked not for miracles, only access. A card. A permit. A recognition that if the government could provide cannabis to a dying man in Florida, it could provide the same to a wounded soldier in Michigan.
But the Act, bold in title and bland in content, offered none of it. No expansion. No reform. Not even a candle lit for those who fought in darkness.
🏚️ Of Posts, Pints, and Possibility
And what of the VFWs, those grand old halls where medals rusted beside beer taps? Sergeant Holloway imagined something new—a place where veterans might gather not to drown sorrow in drink, but to cultivate healing. A compassion center, free of intoxication, rich in understanding. A farmers’ market of medicine. A fellowship of renewal.
But the Act said nothing. It deferred. It deflected. It delegated to the states—those fifty little governments, each with their own peculiarities and prejudices—leaving veterans to wander once more into inconsistency and contradiction.
⚖️ The Moral of Our Parliament
Sergeant Holloway wrote again. This time not to ask, but to declare: “We are not anecdotes in your footnotes. We are not statistics in your polling. We are federal patients, made so by war and contract, and we will not be unmade by silence.”
His words, printed by the Common Sense Press, blew through the halls of Congress like a wind that dared to rearrange powdered wigs and unsettled consciences. Some scoffed. Some paused. A few listened.
Whether anything shall come of it, I cannot say. But I, your humble narrator, have seen enough to know that if justice is to be done, it will not be from the top down—but from the ground up, planted, like cannabis itself, in soil long neglected.
And so, dear reader, if ever you hear a name like Holloway, or pass a flag draped not in glory but in bureaucracy, spare a thought. Or better yet, a vote.
For the Act of MORE, if it is to be more than less, must remember the ones who were promised more than this.
—✍️ A Minor Chronicler in the Age of Major Indifference
London, Washington, or Wherever People Still Feel Things
🕯️ “No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of another.” — C. Dickens
📎 Filed under: Veterans, Vice, and the Vast Indifference of Committees
🖨️ Printed in serial by the Cannabic Gazette, three pence or the truth freely spoken
Where the Sidewalk Ends and the Silence Starts
They marched with medals, not with smiles,
Through desert heat and endless miles.
They came back home with quiet hope,
But found no one to help them cope.
The MORE Act came with promises grand,
A paper shield, a shaky hand.
It whispered “vets” in passing tones—
But left their needs like broken bones.
“PTSD,” it said with care,
But missed the rest—left vets to stare
At empty words, no place to go,
No federal care, no steady flow.
They asked for voices—loud, not small—
To be a part, to stand tall.
But Congress nodded, then looked away,
As veterans faded into gray.
Suicide’s shadow stalks the night,
Yet the Act ignores the fight.
Cannabis could ease the pain—
But silence rules the healing plain.
The VA’s doors are closed too tight,
No uniform care in sight.
States left to scramble, patch, and guess—
While veterans drown in neglect’s mess.
The Compassionate IND, a slow drip—
Fed the sick, but barely a sip.
No expansion, no shining light,
Just the same old bureaucratic night.
And what of halls where vets once met?
Now places of regret.
No job help, no fresh new plans—
Just fifty states with empty hands.
So here’s the truth wrapped up in rhyme:
The MORE Act’s more like borrowed time.
It cracks a door, but won’t unlock—
Leaves veterans out in the cold to talk.
If justice walks beyond this page,
It’s time to fight, to turn the cage.
To give our veterans not just talk—
But healing hands and solid walk.
Because where the sidewalk ends, you see,
Is where we build their liberty.
