Editor’s Note: This story contains descriptions of suicide and mental health struggles that may be distressing for some readers. If you or someone you know is in crisis, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or visit 988lifeline.org for free, confidential support.
I came back from Baghdad in 2005 in a fog so thick you could cut it with a KA-BAR. Two years overseas between Europe and the Middle East, and the re-entry felt like smashing face-first into civilian life at 70 mph with no seatbelt. Panic attacks. Valium. Booze. Therapy sessions where you don’t want to open your mouth because you know the moment you admit weakness, your military career is dead in the water.
So I drank. From sunrise to blackout. Pilled up, liquored up, strung out. The VA was my drug dealer with a badge, and I was their favorite customer.
The next three years were a demolition derby of self-destruction: bar fights, ER visits, psych wards, jail cells, divorce papers, foreclosure notices. The final stop was back home in Tucson, in the same childhood bedroom I once swore I’d never return to. That’s when I pressed a pistol to my temple, letters written, blankets on the floor to catch the blood. My parents walking in on that scene flashed across my mind, and shame ripped the gun from my hand. I collapsed into the fetal position and sobbed myself unconscious.
Lighting the First Lifeline
When I woke up, I knew: the pills were killing me, the booze was drowning me, and the only way out was a hard pivot. I moved out, ditched the VA cocktail, and lit up my first real ally—cannabis.
Cannabis didn’t just dull the pain. It cracked open a window to something resembling life. Suddenly, I could wake up, breathe, walk to school, maybe even think about the future. I took what I had started at Cochise Community College, clawed my way to the University of Arizona, and found a tribe in the VETS Center. I learned my service didn’t end with the uniform; it just shifted targets. Helping other veterans became my rehab, my purpose. Volunteer, show up, give back—repeat.
Rebuilding Purpose Through Service
And here’s the thing: all that progress, all that productivity—the leadership roles, the grades, the speeches, the organizing—was fueled by cannabis. Medicate before class, after class, and between volunteer shifts. It wasn’t a crutch. It was a tool. My record speaks louder than any DEA scheduling chart: cannabis kept me alive and functional when the VA’s chemical cocktail had me one bad night away from the morgue.
By 2013, I was flying high in another way. Accepted into the Flinn-Brown Fellowship—Arizona’s so-called pipeline for civic leaders—and working with Dr. Sue Sisley on the nation’s first federally approved study of cannabis for treatment-resistant PTSD. This was history in the making, and I was ready to carry the torch.
But civic leadership in this country is a snake pit wrapped in a smile.
I played the game for the better part of a decade. I shook hands. I listened to the lectures about bipartisanship and “wicked problems.” But behind the curtain, it was the same old hypocrisy factory. At UofA, before I accepted my Fellowship, I blew the whistle on a mentor of mine who faked combat service and conned the Pat Tillman Foundation. The institution tried to bury it. When I exposed the fraud, I became radioactive on campus. Combine that with openly admitting to using cannabis, not just supporting Sisley’s research, and suddenly I was persona non grata in polite civic society.
When Leadership Turns Its Back
Gatekeeping in civic circles often masquerades as ‘professionalism’—when in reality, it’s a thin veil over cowardice and control.
Meanwhile, MAPS and Dr. Sisley (also a Flinn-Brown Fellow) weren’t saints either. I thought I was helping pioneer breakthrough research. Instead, I watched veterans’ stories twisted, simplified, exploited for grant money and headlines. When I deviated from the script somewhere around 2015, the machine turned on me—blacklists, slander, canceled speaking gigs. The veteran becomes a prop until they stop playing ball, then they’re tossed to the curb like a broken rifle.
The Flinn-Brown Fellowship? They loved my résumé but hated my truth. At first, it was subtle—cold shoulders, polite rejections, the kind of exclusion that feels like being erased in real time. Then it escalated at the end: threats from lawyers, letters promising “all available legal remedies” if I so much as spoke to another Fellow. A veterans’ leader blackballed for talking about cannabis while the state marched toward legalization. Irony so thick it choked.
By 2020, the hypocrisy hit full Technicolor absurdity. Arizona voters were about to legalize recreational cannabis. Everything I’d been told for a decade—“too radical, too political, never going to happen”—was suddenly happening. You’d think the state’s flagship civic leadership program would want to discuss this tectonic shift. I begged them for a serious conversation. Dawn Wallace, the new VP, responded with gaslighting and ghosting. Their grand gesture? A limp Capitol Times webinar with all the urgency of a book club meeting.
Within a year of me calling out the bullshit, the Flinn Foundation clutched pearls, called lawyers, and iced me out for good. Not just kicked out of the cool kids’ party—scrubbed from the yearbook like I never even went to the school. Erasure as punishment, hazed for my civic leadership pursuit.
The War Isn’t Over—It Just Changed Shape
So here I am: a veteran who crawled out of the suicide pit, traded the VA’s pharmaceutical chains for a plant, built a life on recovery and civic service, and got punished for it at every institutional checkpoint. The Army broke me, the VA numbed me, cannabis saved me, and civic leaders shunned me.
But I’m still here. Still fighting. Still telling the story. Because if I don’t, they get away with burying it.
I don’t care if I never get another invitation to their banquets or back-patting ceremonies. I don’t care if my name’s stricken from their polished directories. What I won’t accept is being whitewashed out of existence, erased for daring to say what too many vets already know: the system is broken, hypocrisy is killing us, and cannabis works.
Recovery isn’t a straight line. It’s jagged, chaotic, laced with betrayal and breakthroughs. I’ve been laughed at, threatened, lied about, and smeared. But I’ve also stood shoulder to shoulder with amazing people who know the same war in their veins, the same bureaucratic meat grinder, the same desperate need for something—anything—that keeps the gun off their temple, the rope from their necks, and pharma-narcotics from their guts.
What if the most revolutionary thing we can do… is tell the truth?
Cannabis isn’t the only answer, but for me, it was the bridge between death and a second chance. Without it, none of this story would exist. With it, I’ve built a life, a purpose, a voice.
And that’s why I keep going. Because every time some suit tells me to shut up, every time an institution tries to erase me, every time I watch veterans used as pawns in the great civic chess game, I remember that night on the floor in Tucson, gun thrown across the room, crying myself to sleep.
I survived that. The rest is just politics.
Before I became a national cannabis policy advocate, I was building systems of veteran support on college campuses — expanding reintegration services, negotiating infrastructure, coordinating remembrance ceremonies, and organizing alumni leadership. That groundwork shaped my approach to drug policy: practical, principled, and rooted in care. Cannabis reform became the next chapter of my service, not a departure from it.
So let them blacklist me. Let them lawyer up and hide behind tax codes and 501(c)(3) excuses. I’ll keep pushing toward the light, fighting for what I believe in, and calling bullshit on the contradictions—because I didn’t come this far to be disappeared by wanna-be patriots.
A life of service is a small price to pay for the grace of a second chance.
Onward.
Photos courtesy of Ricardo Pereyda.
This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.
<p>The post The Audacity of Survival: A Veteran’s War Beyond the Battlefield first appeared on High Times.</p>
