RECOVERY: Inside the Fight to Study Marijuana for Vets with PTSD.

Cannabis remains classified as a Schedule I substance which means, according to the federal government, it has no accepted medical use. However, the PTSD cannabis trial—the first of its kind to rigorously investigate the safety and efficacy of veterans’ claims about using cannabis for PTSD—is an FDA-approved study using cannabis given to the researchers by the federal government. These types of seemingly contradictory policies have created confusion and, some cannabis advocates argue, bureaucratic excuses which prevent progress in the arena of cannabis research.

After seven years of regulatory hurdles, the researchers finally began sending veterans through their trial in February without recruitment assistance from the VA. But now, they say they’ve exhausted all the veterans organizations near their lab and they won’t be able to find the roughly 50 more volunteers needed for the study without help from the Phoenix VA.

The leadership at the VA in Phoenix—the closest VA to the trial’s lab in Scottsdale, Arizona—still will not permit the researchers to hang flyers in their facility, talk to their clinicians, or do anything else that would inform veterans who go to their site about the study. According to Phoenix VA chief public affairs officer Paul Coupaud, that would change if Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin told them to allow it.

That’s why the American Legion, the country’s largest veterans organization with more than 2 million members, has been calling on Shulkin for more than a year to tell the Phoenix VA to help.

Let the research go forward — you never know what you’ll find.

PREVIOUSLY: FDA designates MDMA [Ecstasy] as “breakthrough therapy” for PTSD.