Recovery

The VA's standard cocktail of psych meds, opioids, and sleeping pills isn't healing warfighters — it's sedating them. Boone called it the Zombie Cocktail. Blast wave injuries get mislabeled as PTSD. Physical brain damage gets treated with psychiatric medication. The result: dependency, declining will, and warfighters who can't fight their way back.

“We've completely convoluted the whole issue and as a result, there have been a lot of people that have come back from war that have been put on psych meds, made them more suicidal. They died or they've just completely lost the will to do anything.”

— Boone Cutler

“If you could see TBI on someone's arm, you would treat them completely differently.”

— Boone Cutler

The drugs are supposed to stop the impulse to hurt yourself. But when you're already there, they also stop the impulse to stay alive. Boone held his trigger and the only thing that kept him going was a question: why don't I want to stop? That curiosity — that intellectual refusal to just roll with it — saved his life.

“The only reason I didn't pull my trigger is because I was like — why don't I want to stop? Why don't I have a sense of self-preservation? The curiosity kind of kept me going.”

— Boone Cutler

“It's so easy to make you kill yourself when you don't have a sense of self-preservation. And that's what those drugs do.”

— Boone Cutler

Boone did 17 days in a lockdown unit coming off VA drugs. He'd tried every modality, every medication, every protocol the system had to offer. Then someone suggested cannabis. His response: "I'm not that kind of guy." But he'd tried everything else. So he tried it. And everything changed.

“I did 17 days in a lockdown unit coming off the drugs. I've tried everything medical science has to offer. I've done every modality. I've done every drug. I haven't tried cannabis. And I'll tell you what I came away with — I wish I would have done cannabis first.”

— Boone Cutler

“In 2010, you couldn't get anybody to respond to you when it came to cannabis. I'm kind of like the Snoop Dogg of the warfighter community.”

— Boone Cutler

The opiates blew out Boone's kidneys — stage two, stage three kidney disease. That was destroying his heart. He went to Panama for expanded stem cell therapy because the US wouldn't do it. The FDA isn't working for us, he said. They're working for the people who sell drugs. But the stem cells worked. "That's my story. It truly did save my life."

“The kidneys were blown out from opiates, just blown out. And all that stuff almost killed me. Stem cells — that's my story. It truly did save my life.”

— Boone Cutler

“I woke up one morning with a gallon of ice cream in the bed, a spoon, ice cream's gone, and 12 pairs of sunglasses. Evidently they had a sale at 7-Eleven that night.”

— Boone Cutler — on Ambien

The invisible casualties of war are the families. Wives who can't work. Spouses managing medication schedules and TBI episodes. Samantha came into the caregiver program at 22 — two babies, overwhelmed, alone. Through mentorship and connection, she became a community leader. Healing the warfighter means healing the family.

“Every warfighter needs two things to survive in any operational environment — a battle buddy and a mission.”

— Boone Cutler

“I see the wives finding each other. It's as simple as — are they going to forget to turn off the stove? Are they going to miss a medication time? It's the simplest things and the hardest things.”

— Caregiver Mentor — Tipping Point