Cannabis Patient Care - December 2021

Cannabis Patient Care December 2021

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20 patient focus cannabis patient care | vol. 2 no. 4 cannapatientcare.com medicine in the hands of those that can help save lives. It gives us a mission. And it gives us something to get out of bed in the morning for," he said. Krawitz is a disabled US Air Force veteran who served from 1981 to 1986. He was injured in an accident in Guam that was not combat related. He had 13 surgeries to put him back together, including some done in the Air Force and some done by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Since then, Kraw- it z has been busy pursing his advocacy work. He worked on a cannabis decriminalization bill in Virginia (11) that passed into law in July 2020. Then he helped create a Virginia legalization bill (12) that passed into law in July 2021. He was also appointed as one of 21 council members on the Virginia Cannabis Public Health Advisory Council (13), which has authority over public health decisions regarding cannabis. And he just returned from five years abroad, where he worked to change World Health Organization's recommendations (14) to reclassify cannabis that would help advance research and medi- cal use. "It's really been a pretty wild ride," he said. He is now monitoring developments with the bi-partisan Vet- erans Medical Marijuana Safe Harbor Act (15) in Congress. It's something else that is working for veterans to help them find treatments other than opioids, because one of the pieces of infor- mation inside that bill is that opioids account for approximately 70% of all drug overdoses in the US, and veterans are twice as like- ly to die from opioid related overdoses than non-veterans. The VA is still under restrictions from the US Drug Enforce- ment Administration (DEA) about marijuana because it is listed as a Schedule I substance, meaning that the VA is not able to rec- ommend or fill out the forms for veterans to use medical mari- juana. "We thought that if there are some doctors that want to come and fight this, then we will help them. But in the meantime since the federal government was passing the buck to the states we would to go work in the states on state laws. So that's what we did. We did a pretty careful assessment of the state laws and compared it to what we know about cannabis, and determined that the thing that we could work on to have the greatest impact was PTSD," said Krawitz. The first state to pass PTSD as a qualifying condition for medical marijuana was New Mexico. This effort was led by VMCA mentor Brian Krumm. "So based on that work, and based on the science, we took this on as a national effort," Krawitz said. "Our strategy was to treat it as a veterans issue, even though the vast majority of patients out there are not veterans. I think we've succeeded in knocking down some of the stigma of seeking treatment for PTSD, of making it an ac- ceptable thing that you can talk about, and showing clearly, in many states, that some of the symptoms of PTSD can be ef- fectively treated with cannabis. "We've got over 30 states that have PTSD as a qualifying condition with tens of thousands of patients using that, and their doctors approving it and overseeing it. And that is sort of like a standing wave starting from the West Coast building towards the East Coast, directed at the VA," he said. Ron Millward and Balanced Veterans Network Balanced Veterans Network (BVN [16]) is a 501(c)(3) organization on a mission to create a safe space for the education, advocacy, Eryck Stamper. Ron Millward

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