“Did I Do Enough?” A Veteran Reflects on a Decade of Cannabis Advocacy

Ten years ago, I asked myself a question that still haunts many veterans today: Did I do enough?

Did I do enough to protect the men and women who served beside me? Did I fight hard enough for those who came home only to face a quieter war — the one waged inside the mind, the nervous system, and the broken systems we’re expected to heal within?

I served in the U.S. Air Force. I deployed to Iraq. And when I came home, I fell apart. I didn’t know what was happening to me — only that I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t feel, and couldn’t stop the slow slide into despair. The medications didn’t work. The stigma was crushing. The VA wasn’t listening.

Cannabis saved my life. And for that, I was punished.

After being discharged for self-medicating with cannabis, I was left to navigate the aftermath alone. Like so many veterans, I was offered pills instead of support. Sixteen prescriptions later, I realized I had become a statistic — another name at risk of disappearing into a mental health crisis we still aren’t taking seriously enough.

So I made a choice: if the system wasn’t going to protect us, I would try.

I founded Veterans Ending the Stigma to give veterans a voice in their own recovery. I helped write Ohio’s medical marijuana law — specifically including protections for veterans. I served on the state’s Medical Marijuana Advisory Committee as a Patient Advocate. And I’ve spoken out, again and again, about the human cost of criminalizing healing.

Veterans aren’t asking for special treatment. We’re asking for options that work. And for many of us, cannabis works. It helps with chronic pain, PTSD, anxiety, traumatic brain injury, and sleep disorders. And unlike many pharmaceuticals, it doesn’t numb our humanity in the process.

I’ve now spent a decade advocating for veterans’ access to cannabis — to legislatures, at conferences, on the streets, and across coalition tables. Through the International Veterans Leadership Committee, I’ve worked with global partners to bring this message beyond U.S. borders: that cannabis access is not just a health issue. It’s a human rights issue.

And still, the stigma lingers. Veterans risk losing jobs, housing, even custody because they use a medicine their doctors can’t legally prescribe. Researchers are blocked by federal red tape. And thousands of veterans die by suicide every year, many after being failed by systems too slow to change.

So again I ask: Did I do enough?

The honest answer is — not yet. Because until no veteran is punished for choosing cannabis, until the Department of Veterans Affairs is empowered to recommend it, until we replace punishment with care, none of us has done enough.

But I know this: we’ve made progress. And we’re not alone.

The movement is growing. More states are protecting veteran access. More doctors are speaking out. More researchers are documenting what veterans already know: cannabis helps. And finally, more veterans are sharing their stories without shame.

This next decade belongs to solutions. To trauma-informed policy, international collaboration, and a new standard of care that treats veterans not as liabilities, but as human beings worthy of healing.

We served. We sacrificed. We survived. Now we’re demanding the freedom to heal — on our terms.

And if that makes people uncomfortable, so be it.

We didn’t fight to be silenced. We fought to be free.