Cannabis didn't save my life. I need to say that first because the internet is full of people who talk about this plant like it pulled them out of a burning building, and I'm not going to add to that pile.
Here's what cannabis did: it helped me sleep. It reduced my pain enough to get through a day without white-knuckling it. That matters. I don't minimize it. Six hours of real sleep after six years of trazodone blackouts changed what my mornings looked like. A CBD tincture that takes my back from an eight to a five means I can build a bookshelf or walk a ridgeline with a client. Those are real things.
But here's the list of things cannabis did not do, and I need this list to be longer than the first one.
Cannabis did not process the memory of June 14, 2008. I can tell you the date because it's the date two Marines in my vehicle were killed by an IED outside Sangin. I carried that for years. I carried it through the hydrocodone and the gabapentin and the trazodone. I carried it through the first gummy in Missoula and every gummy since. Cannabis doesn't touch that. It doesn't make you forget and it doesn't help you deal with what you remember. Therapy did that. A counselor named Dave at the Sheridan VA did that, over two years of showing up to appointments I didn't want to go to.
Cannabis did not fix my marriage. In 2014, Sarah told me she was living with a stranger. She wasn't wrong. The medication cocktail had turned me into a piece of furniture that occasionally spoke. When I came off most of the pills and started using cannabis in 2016, I was more present. I was sleeping. I was in less pain. But being present means you actually have to deal with the person in front of you. The anger was still there. The distance was still there. We did couples counseling for a year. That's what fixed the marriage. Not the tincture.
Cannabis did not fix my relationship with my kids. It made me more available, yes. I could stay awake for a full Little League game. I could sit on the floor and play with Lily without my back seizing. But being physically present and being emotionally present are different things. I had to learn how to be a father again, and that wasn't something that came in a dropper bottle. That was work. Daily, uncomfortable, sometimes embarrassing work.
Cannabis did not eliminate my pain. I have three fractured vertebrae that healed wrong and two knees that sound like gravel. That's permanent. The CBD takes the edge off. It does not fix the underlying damage. On bad days — cold mornings, barometric pressure drops, days when I've been stupid about lifting — the pain is right where it's always been. Cannabis lowers the volume. It doesn't turn it off.
Cannabis did not cure my PTSD. I still flinch at unexpected loud sounds. I still clear every room I walk into. I still have nights where I wake up soaked in sweat with my heart at 130. Those nights happen less often. But they happen. Cannabis gave me enough rest to function between episodes. It didn't make the episodes go away.
I'm writing this because the cannabis industry doesn't want you to hear it. The industry wants testimonials. It wants before-and-after stories. It wants you to believe that the right product at the right dose will solve your problem, and then it wants to sell you that product.
I'm not against the industry. Strive Life gave me a place to publish this, and they didn't ask me to change a word. But I've met too many veterans who tried cannabis expecting a cure, didn't get one, and gave up. They gave up on cannabis, and some of them gave up on everything else too, because they'd been told this was the last answer and it didn't work.
It's not the last answer. It's one tool. The other tools are harder. Therapy is harder. Marriage counseling is harder. Showing up for your kids when you'd rather disappear into the garage is harder. Getting honest with yourself about what you're actually running from — that's the hardest one.
Cannabis gave me enough relief to pick up those harder tools. That's what it did. That's all it did. And that was enough, but only because I did the rest.
If you're expecting cannabis to fix the thing you're carrying, I'd ask you to think about what would happen if it only fixed the sleep and the pain. Because that might be what happens. And then the question becomes: what are you going to do with the rest of it?
I didn't have a good answer to that question for a long time. I'm still working on it. But at least I'm awake for the work.