Combat Vet Posts Shocking Picture of How Many Pills He Has to Take Because Cannabis is Illegal
One veteran got so frustrated with the number of pills he had been prescribed to take on a daily basis that he decided to create a visual aid. After calculating that he took more than 9,855 prescription pills annually, he got an idea. Joshua Lee served with the Missouri National Guard from 2007 to 2014, and spent one year in Afghanistan, where he was diagnosed with a mysterious yet painful illness, an inflammation of the hands.
In October 2010, Lee returned home from Afghanistan and began going to the VA for medical treatment—and that is when the script count skyrocketed.
He was given 27 different pills to take each day and his weight ballooned. He went from weighing a normal 160 pounds to weighing 220 pounds with a size 40-inch waist in 2017.
He said that when someone remarked, “Man! You’ve really let yourself go!”
he knew he had a problem. Last year, Lee and his wife went to Colorado for their 15-year anniversary, and he tried cannabis for pain relief for the first time. He said he began to feel better instantly.
“I went out there with a plan in mind to step-down my medications and I got to experience life again,” Lee said.
“My wife held my hand and I got to see the world as beautiful, instead of dangerous any longer.” After heading back to Missouri from Colorado, Lee said he got an idea, “What would all my medicines look like if I put them all in a pile?”
He hunted around a few candy stores and secured enough smarties to represent the number of pills he was given annually. The pile was huge! He vacuum-sealed all of the smarties and put them in a pair of bags to hold them together. After posting the visual aid to his Facebook page, the image blew up from there, also going viral on Reddit and Imgur.
“It’s gone viral at least seven times on Facebook!” he told the Free Thought Project. “That picture has been shared a minimum of 80k times.”
Marijuana is still illegal in Missouri but was decriminalized in January to a misdemeanor and a fine for getting caught with up to 10 grams weed. But Lee says more needs to be done to keep veterans off of lethal opiates and suicide-causing antidepressants. Lee, like many other veterans, claims cannabis can do just that.
The veteran who used to take nearly 10,000 pills per year says his trips to Colorado have allowed him to reduce his prescriptions to just a handful a day.
However, Lee does not want to have to go out of state to treat his illnesses.
He believes Missouri veterans deserve to be able to consume cannabis in their own state without fear of being arrested or fined.
He is now urging Missourians to vote for access to medical marijuana on Nov. 6, 2018.
“We need access to cannabis, which can save more lives,” Lee said.
There are three voter referendum bills on the November ballot but Lee said he believed that at the very least, medical marijuana needs to be permitted in the state. Once cannabis is legalized, Lee said he wants to go down in Missouri history as being the “Elon Musk of the Cannabis industry.”
He wants to help state and local veterans’ organizations and encourage them with funding to do the right thing for veterans. But it all starts with legalizing cannabis across the state. Lee said he wants to create a philanthropic cannabis organization to give money to groups who are already helping veterans such as Warriors Outdoors, which helps veterans get active in outdoor life and sporting activities. To those who are skeptical of whether or not cannabis works, Lee invites people to visit www.veteransforaccess.org for more information.
As The Free Thought Project has reported, while the federal government claims to care about the mental health of veterans, it continues to feed them dangerous prescription drugs, while treating them as felons if they choose to use cannabis. President Trump recently signed an executive order that was presented as an effort to improve veterans’ mental health treatment, just days after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced plans to wage war on their medicine by rescinding a policy that keeps federal prosecutors from aggressively enforcing federal law in states where cannabis is legal.
He should not be consuming any drug, legal, or not.
Elaboration:
Even if he can not solve his problems, dependency on drugs is guaranteed to not solve anything, except in the short term, so the best thing he can do, is to deal with his problems without drugs, legal or not.
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Cannabis is more of a herbal supplement than a drug, how else to treat cannabis deficiency?
Cannabis deficiency?
Is it similar to opium deficiency?
more like DHEA deficiency, humans produce their own endogenous cannabinoids but perhaps some do not produce enough, especially those who are under extreme stress like soldiers and those suffering from PTSD.
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Only the goverment can sell drugs.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6630507B1/en
US Patent US6630507B1
Patent Holder - US Department of Health and Human Services
Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants
Cannabinoids have been found to have antioxidant properties, unrelated to NMDA receptor antagonism. This new found property makes cannabinoids useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and HIV dementia.
Our patent is very narrow and specific, you could patent other properties of cannabis.
are you a patent holder? or do you work for the dept of health?
that might be very true, but as you must be aware of working with substances with a schedule 1, are extreamly difficult, and rare-although seem to be opening a bit. but also i understand they are stepping up the battle on CBC oil ( i live outside the US, so my news can be dated)
but the point is not other can patent it, the point is the gov puts people in jail for it, steal their property-a friend of mine had his house, clothes, cd's, car everything taken. they say it its highly addictive, and has no medical uses, while allowing a patent, that shows it does have benifits, despite many studies claiming there are benifits. basicly prooving they have scheduled it for facts, that are not fact, and in fact were never really looking into anyway
I am an American and the patent is held by America thus the word "our". It's too late to battle against CBD oil, it's legal in 50 states, they were selling it at Walmart.
I have read the government patent, it is very narrow. Just one property of one cannabinoid is patented. At the current time in the US it is tricky to get permission for cannabis research but that is not necessarily the case in every country.
Indeed it is hypocritical for the government to hold a patent on one of its beneficial properties and at the same time to declare that it has no beneficial properties.
Luckily President Trump has said he will sign the pending bill to legalize cannabis on the federal level if it passes. It is bipartisan so really the biggest hurdle will be the fact that the drug companies will do everything they can to stop it and they are incredibly powerful.
ok i get the logic, but i guarentee you if/when it is marketed-it will have a no bid contract to manufacture-probably by halloburton-or whatever they are called now, they will reap huge profits, charging an outragous price for it, and taxpayer/country will be lucky if the cost of the patent is covered-kinda like nasa keeps giving away patents for free,they seem to assume they belong to them, and politicitans just keep doing what they are told.
http://www.iflscience.com/space/nasa-have-released-56-patents-their-technology-free-public-use/
Gosh, that's terrible, now we can all enjoy Velcro. So your fear is that they will give it away or that they will sell it. Anyhow, their patent does not stop anyone from producing cannabis or using it for any number of purposes. The great thing about cannabis, and also why it is banned, is that it is pointless to try to patent it, even if you could, people can just grow their own. It's not a very good product from that standpoint. They like drugs that they can charge thousands of dollars a month for, not something someone could grow at home.
the patents dont belong to NASA, we paid for them, and we should have a department that actually works in the interest of the public, license velcro out, who know, possibly for much less than it cost now, will all proceeds going to schools, velcrow shoes for handicap kids, whatever. instead its possibly going to a foriegn company, or a mega cororation, that
and/or
Apple Computer is a perfect example, worlds largest company, based in the USA, hasnt paid $1 of income taxes, legally.
im not anti buisness, im anti getting constantly screwed!
and actually with their patent-i dont have it in front of me, they only refence 1 element, most pharmacuticals have a natural begining, morphine, cocaine, etc, but they need to filter out the other stuff, so they can be sure of the cause/reaction relationship with the substance. but also some of the other stuff could be couterproductice in some way or another. so just like you can grow a coco plant, and chew the leaves-the effects are very diffrent-so ive heard.
our natitional debit is rising so fast, allready (in october 2017), every man woman and child in the US owes $61,539.+interest, we are getting to the point where if we tax 100% of the people 100% taxes, we wont be able to make the interest payments. when that happens, all you savings will be worthless, , and the banks, and the PRIVATE federal reserve, being aware of this, and ready for it, will run around buying up everything at pennies on the dollar, like they have done before.
Thomas Jefferson said
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.... I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."
well we did, and they do, and we are almost there. obviously this is not related to patent proceeds, but those are just another way we are getting screwed at every turn, personally im sick of it.
Actually home ownership rates in America are pretty high, some economists are saying that in some ways the home ownership rate is too high, right now inventories in many places are very low.
He is going to need a huge cup of water!
That was just fake news MSM fearmongering, Sessions rescinding that memo had no actual effect on law enforcement because it was redundant, that was like a year ago right? Where is the crack down?
There has not been one because rescinding that memo was meaningless, just one of a huge host of such memos that he rescinded. There were no plans to wage such a war and such a war has not been waged.
That's old fake news, more recently when President Trump was asked if he would sign the pending bipartisan legislation to end the federal prohibition of cannabis, something Hillary opposed, he said that he would sign it.