When I hit U.S. soil after playing soldier in Germany and tasting Baghdad’s dust in 2005, I came back with souvenirs: two ticking time bombs called pharmaceuticals and alcohol.
They were courteous at first—pills like little government pamphlets suggesting calm, booze like a smiling grenade—and then suddenly you’re forgetting how to breathe between doctor appointments. Not a thing I’m looking to parade on a Sunday sermon, just laying asphalt for the road we’re about to drive full-throttle down.
Fast-forward and I’d done the long, slow conversion: three years as a full-time patient at the VA, swapping pharmacy faith for the blunt religion. Pills out, smoke in. A couple more years between sessions at home and lectures at the University of Arizona, and I cobbled myself into something resembling a civic leader: classes, volunteer work, fellowships, plaques with my name on ‘em, the whole absurd post-service meritocracy. I was, by most metrics, “doing well”.
From Pills to Plants
Then 2013 happened—the year I decided to stop whispering about what got me through the night. I came out as a medical cannabis patient, and the world performed an immediate striptease of hypocrisy. Overnight, I went from a paraded hero to persona non grata. Flags that had been waving turned into handkerchiefs for fainting. People who had sung praises suddenly clutched their pearls when I walked into a room.
Veterans using cannabis for sleep, pain, PTSD? Shock and horror, as if none of this had been happening for generations on “walks” and around kitchen tables.
A breakdown isn’t poetic; it’s arithmetic. Add a hundred ignored pleas, subtract a thousand condolences, multiply by the bodybags you can’t unsee—you get a meltdown so raw it rearranges your priorities. And this is after therapy! I watched ladder-climbing grifters in the veteran space perform like we were in a talent show, and I watched the bodies stack on the horizon like bad souvenirs. I got fed up. Not the kind of fed-up that tweets passive-aggressive tripe, but a fed-up that bangs its fist through drywall.
Civil disobedience, being a “break in case of emergency” tool in my toolbox, I came up with something equal parts legal theory and bad poetry: I’d go to the place Americans entrust their wounded veterans to and light the signal flare. The obvious mission: the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Tucson, Arizona. My Hospital.
Not the doctor’s office, not the rose garden—the pharmacy. Straight into the machine. If the system wouldn’t prescribe it, if they refused to acknowledge that people were dying while bureaucrats played dress-up, then I’d make them an exhibit in my circus.
I wanted to force a conversation by making the stakes personal and public—my body as evidence, my record as testimony.
That’s the twisted bit of calculus behind the following act I’m fixin to describe: if I couldn’t get a doctor to sign a script, maybe I could get a jury to do it. If the VA wouldn’t talk, I’d make them a subject. If the institution preferred denial, I’d find the limit where denial becomes action.
There was no plan, not really—just a line crossed in the sand and the sudden, visceral need to light it on fire. By that point, I’d already been bled dry by the church of clinical betrayal. The whole psychedelic R&D missionary cult, promising salvation for a footnote in their next grant proposal.
And I wasn’t just mad. I was revelatory.
Out of patience. Out of favors.
Out of fucks.
So I did what any red-blooded, spiritually naked, strategically dangerous bastard might do under the flicker of the American Dream in decline:
I dressed for jail.
Flip-flops. Gym shorts. Wallet at home. ID in the pocket like a last will and testament.
And the tank top? Oh, the tank top. Fresh off the mail route of fate itself. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, bug-eyed and stoned, clutching a Uzi like a paranoid Boy Scout. Space cats floating through constellations of marijuana leaves. It didn’t say “arrest me”—
It screamed:
“I DARE YOU TO UNDERSTAND THIS.”
Before I left, I rolled a joint fat enough to earn its own Social Security number. Called my girl, and told her she might need to lawyer up on my behalf by sundown. Didn’t explain why.
And then—
The VA.
Lighting Up at the VA
Pharmacy entrance. No hesitation. I walked in, straight to the window.
The pharmacist asked how she could help.
I sparked it.
I took a long, deviant inhale.
Blew the smoke through the security glass slit,
and told her absolutely nothing.
Because the message was already airborne.
She stammered. Blinked. Asked what I was doing.
So I did it again—bigger.
And told her I’d be finishing “my business” just over there.
Seated. In the middle of the fucking pharmacy. Packed.
I sat down like it was a confessional booth and I was absolving myself in smoke.
That’s when the murmurs started. People catching the scent. Heads swiveling.
The aroma of righteous disobedience making its way down the prescription queue.
A woman asked what I was doing.
“I’m making a statement,” I said.
She nodded. She fucking nodded.
Then went back to scrolling like it made perfect sense.
A tap on the shoulder came next…
Not the iron grip of armed response. Not the stern voice of Uniformed Authority.
No.
Just an old-timer. White hair, soft eyes, volunteer badge.
A grandfather of the system that broke me.
He asked, politely—politely!—if I wouldn’t mind moving to the designated smoking area.
I blinked. Reality broke like a bad molar.
I expected a chokehold. I got a park bench.
So I left.
Obedient as a dejected seeing eye dog.
Puffing on my doobie in a desolate VA parking lot while pigeons dodged the truth.
And that, dear reader, is how I failed to get arrested for smoking my cannabis at the Southern Arizona VA Hospital.
I didn’t get a mugshot.
I didn’t get a charge.
I got… validation. Confusing, psychedelic non-opposition.
No headlines. No cuffs. Just a man in a Sessions tank top and flip-flops,
smoking a joint so loud the system decided to mute itself.
And that’s when I knew:
They don’t know how to fight us.
They only know how to ignore the fire until it burns through the walls.
So I went home. Stared at the ceiling. Then I picked up my pen.
When Defiance Meets Silence
That was about a decade ago. Since then, I have refined my tactics. I truly have embraced writing as an effective medium to share stories, to be heard, to shine a light on important issues within the veteran community, and by extension, the cannabis culture itself.
Color me in gratitude.
Because the revolution doesn’t always look like a riot.
Sometimes it looks like a parking lot… and the joint that didn’t get you arrested.
Onward.
This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.
