Touted as a wonder drug for the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic pain, medical marijuana use is exploding among Canada’s battle-scarred, fully insured, veterans and companies are rushing into the untapped market.
Lars Hagberg
Retired soldier Robert Kennedy with some medical cannabis at
Marijuana for Trauma in Trenton, Ont.. Kennedy helps organize a cooking
class showing ailing veterans how to use marijuana.
He has served in one capacity or another in
seven conflicts, killed and captured countless enemy fighters and was a
founding member of Canada’s top-secret counterterrorism unit, Joint Task
Force 2.
But Kevin Whitenect, 48, is coming out of the
shadows for his newest mission: that of “brand ambassador” for a
Toronto-based medical marijuana company, CannaConnect.
Along Highway 401, a short drive from CFB
Trenton, the Canadian military’s main transportation hub, retired
Warrant Officer Robert Kennedy is also settling into an unlikely role.
After a 28-year career with the Royal Canadian
Dragoons came to an end last summer due to a mix of post-traumatic
stress, chronic pain and OxyContin prescriptions, he found himself one
morning this week helping to organize a cooking class showing ailing
veterans how to incorporate marijuana into their culinary routines.
“We’re looking at the longevity of people
because if you can eat certain stuff and it’s not brownies and
sweets—it’s healthy stuff,” said Kennedy, the volunteer manager with
Marijuana for Trauma Trenton, one of several outlets the New
Brunswick-based company operates in eastern Canada. “You can put it in a
shake and the troops are happy, the vets are happy—and they’re
healthy.”
Kevin Whitenect, a founding member of the
Canadian military's counter-terrorism unit, has become a "brand
ambassador" for Toronto-based medical marijuana company CannaConnect.
Both men are at the sharp end of the spear, as
soldier-types like to say of those headed into battle. Theirs is a sort
of rescue mission, with the goal of clearing the stigma around medical
marijuana in order to help their ill and injured comrades whether from
the Afghan war or from as far back as deployment to Bosnia in the late
1990s.
But they are also on the front lines of a
booming and largely untapped market, acting as agents of companies that
are looking for former soldiers who are covered in full by the federal
government for medicinal marijuana prescriptions.
In the two years that Veterans Affairs Canada
has been reimbursing clients with a prescription for medicinal
marijuana, there has been a nearly sixfold increase in the number of
cases, a departmental official told the Star.
But the cost last year of paying for
prescribed pot topped $5 million, 12 times higher than the previous
year, mostly because of increases in the price of marijuana. The
increasing popularity could see those numbers continue to increase.
Shane Urowitz, CannaConnect’s vice-president
of business development, says his upstart company is bringing in about
25 new veterans each month from as far afield as Sherbrooke, Que.,
Sudbury, Ont., and Oromocto, N.B.
“One guy becomes a client. He wakes up in a
few weeks or a couple of months and his life is a bit better and he
tells his buddy at the legion or in the motorcycle group or whatever it
is, and you get pockets of these guys,” he said.
In most cases, those veterans turning to
medical marijuana have run out of patience and hope in the
pharmaceutical cocktails made up of sleeping pills, antidepressants and
antipsychotics that may treat their symptoms but can also create other
problems, not least of which is dependency, Urowitz said.
Lars Hagberg
Retired members of the Canadian Armed Forces learn to cook with medical cannabis at Marijuana for Trauma in Trenton.
“They’re on a Skittles bag worth of pills and they’re depressed, they’re drooling, there’s no quality of life there.”
The problems of the current regime for
veterans suffering from battlefield injuries range from depression,
amplified by years of fighting for adequate care and benefits, to
suicide when soldiers lose hope and slip through the cracks.
Despite those well-documented problems, the
medical marijuana companies are still encountering reluctant troops who
have been told only about the evils of illegal substances.
Marijuana has been cleared for medical use by
Health Canada and is even set to be legalized by Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau’s Liberal government. But current military health directives
still stress the lack of scientifically proven benefits or established
dosages and the risks associated with marijuana use by serving members.
Just last May, Erin O’Toole, the former
Conservative Veteran’s Affairs Minister — an air force helicopter pilot —
said there was “no clinical support” for the claim that pot is an
effective treatment for post-traumatic stress.
The Canadian Medical Association agrees. In
its latest policy statement on medical marijuana, the national body said
that physicians are worried about the lack of regulator oversight and
research into safety, dosages and side-effects that have been done
before the drug was authorized for use.
“It’s not a cure for PTSD, it’s not a cure for
chronic pain,” Urowitz admits. “But it’s the best damn Band-Aid they’ve
been given so far.”
Companies focused on putting potential
patients in contact with doctors and helping with the raft of mandatory
paperwork under the federal Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations
have taken a range of approaches — both traditional and novel — in order
to drum up business among veterans.
That includes organizing walk-in clinics,
publishing newspaper advertisements and even touring a
camouflage-painted vehicle around Ontario bases with promotional
T-shirts and other freebies.
Lars Hagberg
Most veterans turning to medical marijuana have
run out of patience with the pharmaceutical cocktails made up of
sleeping pills, antidepressants and antipsychotics.
One firm that specializes in serving veterans,
Cole Harbour, N.S.-based Trauma Healing Centers has a deal with
OrganiGram, a licensed, publicly traded medicinal marijuana producer, to
provide 1,500 kilograms of pot for its patients this year. The amount
doubles to 3,000 kilograms in 2016 and will increase by 20 per cent each
following year for the next decade.
All that is to show that this is big business,
and it is only growing. Key to the companies’ plans for tapping the
veteran market is putting other veterans prominently in the shop window.
That’s where Whitenect, who was a founding member of JTF2, the elite special operations force created in 1993, comes in.
“I’ve been on pretty much every major
operation the unit’s been on. Both those that are on the books and those
that are off the books — that people aren’t aware of,” he said.
“I’ve been in seven wars. I have been bloodied in battle and I’ve killed in battle. I’ve had men die around me.”
He has no injuries or condition requiring
medical marijuana, but said that he has seen enough ailing veterans in
his post-military work as a private contractor, a counterterrorism
trainer and a service-dog handler that he jumped at the opportunity to
help out.
“I like the idea that guys can find an
alternate solution to their chronic pain — physical and emotional — and
get functional so they can get up in the day, do what they’ve got to do,
get focused, maybe run a small business, or maybe it’s just to go out
and buy groceries,” he said.
Urowitz hopes that Whitenect’s involvement with the company acts as a “sticker of approval” for others.
“Now we’re able to say not only is it OK but I
can put you on a call with a top-tier officer from JTF2,” he said.
“When they hear of someone with Kevin’s pedigree endorsing what they’re
doing, it’s taking down that barrier.”
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