The long road to researching cannabis

In late 2016, a former Navy SEAL named George Hodgin was in the final months of completing a graduate degree from Stanford Business School and was trying to work out what to do upon its completion.

Like many veterans of the US armed services, Hodgin knew plenty of fellow vets suffering from the effects of service-related PTSD. One fellow vet who’d already gone through the usual cocktail of prescribed solutions heard that medical cannabis was showing great promise for symptoms like his. Still, upon asking for advice from the local Department of Veteran Affairs (a.k.a. the VA), he hit a brick wall of silence.

Hodgin notes: “They wouldn’t tell him anything; they were not permitted to give him any guidance at all. Later I discovered that their silence was not only because they’d been ordered not to discuss cannabis, it was also because science doesn’t really know all that much about it — it’s nearly impossible to get hold of any for research.” Read more →