The night I knew something had to change, I was sitting in the dispatch office of the Sheridan County Sheriff's Department on a Saturday in March 2016. A woman called because her husband — a veteran — had a gun and was talking about using it on himself. I talked to her for eleven minutes. When the call ended I sat in the parking lot for an hour. I felt nothing. Not fear. Not sadness. Not the thing you're supposed to feel when a man's wife calls you because he might be dead by morning.
I went home and told Sarah I was done with the pills.
At that point I was taking seven medications every day. Hydrocodone, cyclobenzaprine, gabapentin, trazodone, sertraline, prazosin, and omeprazole because the other six were eating my stomach lining. The VA prescribed them after I was medically discharged in 2009. TBI, bilateral knee damage, three fractured vertebrae, tinnitus. Helmand Province. IED outside Sangin.
The cocktail kept me alive. I want to be clear about that. There was a stretch in 2009 and 2010 where I don't know what happens without those medications. But alive and living are different things, and by 2016 I hadn't been living in seven years. I was present the way furniture is present. My son Jack was four and my daughter Lily was turning one and I could hold them and feed them and read to them, but the volume on everything was turned down to two. I didn't feel the bad days. I also didn't feel my daughter laugh.
So I tapered. Hydrocodone first, then gabapentin. The pain came back like a door opening into a room I'd forgotten existed. Five months of ibuprofen and stubbornness and not sleeping more than three hours at a time.
Then my buddy Travis Wendt called from Missoula. Travis was in my unit during the first deployment to Ramadi in 2005. Same cocktail background. He'd gotten his Montana medical card. He didn't pitch me on it. He just said, "I slept five hours last night without a pill and I woke up knowing who I was."
I drove to Missoula. He gave me half a gummy. Ten milligrams of THC. I slept six hours. Not medicated sleep — actual sleep, with dreams that weren't firefights.
Over the next two years I figured out what worked. Low-dose edibles at night, 5 to 10 milligrams of THC, for sleep. A high-CBD tincture during the day for back and knee pain. I tried flower but the dosing was inconsistent. Edibles and tinctures let me measure. After seven years of someone else deciding what went in my body, I wanted to know the numbers.
Here is what cannabis fixed: sleep. That's the big one. When you sleep, everything else gets a little easier. The pain doesn't disappear but it loses its edge. The tinnitus doesn't stop but you stop grinding your teeth about it. I also noticed my back loosened up during the day on the CBD tincture — not dramatically, but enough that I could work in my shop for four hours instead of two.
Here is what cannabis did not fix: PTSD. I still have it. I still go to therapy. I still have days where a sound or a smell puts me back in a vehicle in Helmand and I have to talk myself into the present tense. Cannabis didn't cure that. Nothing cures that. What cannabis did was give me back enough of myself — enough sleep, enough feeling, enough presence — to do the work that therapy requires. You can't process trauma when you're numbed out on six medications. You can't do EMDR when you haven't slept in four days. Cannabis gave me a floor to stand on. The hard work was still hard.
For veterans in North Dakota: you have a medical cannabis program. PTSD is a qualifying condition. That's more than Wyoming gives me — I maintain a Montana card because my state still won't get out of its own way. If you're on the cocktail and you're reading this at 2 AM because you can't sleep, I'm not going to tell you to flush your pills. I'm going to tell you to talk to your doctor about whether cannabis might let you take fewer of them. That's how it started for me. Not a revolution. A reduction.
One last thing. If you're a veteran and you're in crisis, the Veterans Crisis Line is 988, press 1. That's not a formality. I've given that number to three friends and all three of them are still here.
I don't know if cannabis will work for you the way it worked for me. But I know what it's like to sit in a parking lot and feel nothing, and I know that's not a life. If you're there, you deserve to try something different.