Post-Traumatic Marijuana

Some Military Veterans Are Embracing the Drug as Scientists Scramble to Study its Effects.

Jose Martinez knows trauma. As a U.S. Army infantryman in Afghanistan, he lost both legs, his right arm and his left index finger to a land mine in 2012. Recovery was challenging. “In my eyes, I had pretty much failed when I stepped on a bomb and lost three limbs,” he says. “I was going insane because I did not understand why I was still alive.” Then, last December, he broke his maimed left arm, his lone remaining limb, when his car flipped over after hitting black ice in the high desert near his Apple Valley, Calif., home. It’s no surprise, then, that he also knows posttraumatic stress disorder. Doctors plied him with pills after both calamities. “I started taking so many prescription pills,” he recalls, “I was numb to the world.”

Over time, he ended up replacing those pills–up to 150 a day, he says–with marijuana. While Martinez says he smoked pot occasionally before enlisting in the Army in 2010, he obeyed the military’s prohibition against it before that bomb blast near Kandahar. He says marijuana has stayed his pain and tamed his demons. “My brain’s telling me to freak out because I’m missing my limbs, but when I’m on cannabis, it tells me to calm down, you’re O.K., you’re fine,” Martinez says. Not only does it soothe the phantom pain of his missing limbs, but it also eases a racing and apprehensive mind riven with PTSD. “It relaxes me and helps me sleep at night,” he says. “I’m so supervigilant, and it really calms my anxiety, which can shoot up when I’m around a lot of people I don’t know.”

Back home, Martinez, 28, is once again a frontline soldier, now in a new battle–to prove that the ancient herb can help veterans like him who suffer from PTSD, a signature wound of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But marijuana’s checkered legal, medical and social history make it a controversial treatment. The federal government estimates that as many as 500,000 of the 2.7 million troops who served in those countries may have some kind of PTSD. Advocates like Martinez argue, on the basis of their experience, that marijuana is good for more than getting high.

Research has shown that pot can be useful in the treatment of pain, making it a potentially suitable alternative to opioids for some–though the research on medical marijuana and PTSD is wanting. That’s because the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has listed marijuana as a Schedule I substance–dangerous, with no medical benefit–for nearly 50 years, a stance it reaffirmed Aug. 11, although it also opened the door to more research.

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