Some Canadian veterans and their supporters, including long-time cannabis crusader and former Victoria city councillor Philippe Lucas, are petitioning Canada’s Parliament for marijuana in pills.
The group says marijuana can help veterans suffering from chronic pain and in dealing with the psychological and emotional residue of combat tours, generally known as post-traumatic stress disorder.
They point out that Veterans Affairs Canada refuses to pay for marijuana extracts or in pills, covering only raw marijuana leaves or buds to be smoked.
“It seems arbitrary to cover the cost of one method of ingestion and not cover the cost of another,” Lucas said.
Lucas recently launched a petition, sponsored by his MP, New Democrat Sheila Malcolmson, with the hope of overturning Veteran Affairs’ lack of support for cannabis in non-smoking forms. The petition requires 500 signatures to be presented to Parliament. As of Thursday night, it had about 250 signatures.
A spokesman for Veterans Affairs Canada said in an emailed statement that the agency is reviewing how it reimburses veterans for medical marijuana.
The review will also look at new regulations, now in the works, from Health Canada on medical marijuana.
Lucas was founder of the Vancouver Island Compassion Society, making marijuana available to people with chronic illnesses or conditions. He was also a one-term Victoria city councillor from 2008 to 2011. He now lives in Nanaimo, where he is a vice-president of Tilray, a company making medical-marijuana products.
Until last year, Lucas said, the company was supplying ingestible marijuana products — such as extracts, drops and pills — to veteran patients. It was a surprise when Veterans Affairs stopped reimbursement for the products, he said.
“These are popular options for veteran patients,” he said.
Veteran Trev Bungay, 39, of Fredericton — who also played a part in organizing the petition — said marijuana helped him get his life back on track.
Bungay is co-owner of a company called Trauma Healing Centre, with four clinics helping people deal with the ongoing effects of traumas and PTSD.
A former infantryman, Bungay served 19 years in the Canadian Army and completed seven tours overseas — including four combat tours in Afghanistan.
By 2012, he found he had anger issues and trouble sleeping. He turned to military medical services for help and was prescribed 22 different pills per day.
“There were pills to sleep, pills to wake up, pills for your stomach because you are taking so many pills,” Bungay said. “I was a zombie.”
He retired from the army in 2014, but problems persisted. He said years of active soldiering also left him with persistent pain in his knees and back. The emotional and psychological problems made him unwilling to leave his home for weeks. He attempted suicide twice.
Bungay experimented with marijuana, smoking it at first. He found it calmed him enough that he started sleeping and was able to leave his home and find his way to a psychologist’s clinic.
“Within six months, I was sleeping through the night,” he said.
Bungay said he progressed to a “holistic” approach using fitness, better diet, exercise and counselling. He still uses cannabis in his food or in a capsule.
“And today I’m on zero pills, not one,” he said, referring to his past regime.
• Details of the petition are at petitions.parl.gc.ca; search for cannabis.
