Cannabis Saved Me From Opiates My Recovery Story

When I just stopped everything as far as the zombie, I was still on the opiates for a couple of years or for a year, maybe I forget how long it was, but until CBD really proliferated, I was still on the opiates, which was hard, but at least I was off the psych meds and I could get sleep and things were better. And then CBD pops up. I'm like, okay, this is a new thing. Cause at that time I was on the radio and you can't, I can't do it. Some guys do it. I can't be on the radio, you know, on cannabis. I just can't, I can't, I can't. Yeah, yeah. It's with the, with THC in the bus. It's just, it's just not my thing. Uh, some guys can do it. I can't do it. So I was still using opiates and then CBD pops in and it was just like, wait a minute. I walked off the opiates and I detox several times. She's like, anybody knows who's done opiates. You have to detox maybe a couple of times a year. So they keep working and going through that detox process. It's painful. I mean, it's painful. And, uh, you're kicking dope. I mean, that's all there is. You're kicking, you're kicking dope. It doesn't, it's all there is to it. And I always started using CBD and it was like, holy, I walked off the opiates. I just literally walked off the opiates. I didn't have the withdrawals like I had in the past. I didn't have, it was just better. And then I started, I started playing around with the different kind of noise. I started playing around THC and CBD and, and now I'm playing around with CBG. And I really want to get into some CBN and, you know, I mean, all this stuff, because, because cannabinoids, a lot of people understand just like you have opiates. Well, there's different types of opiates. You can be taken, you know, you could be tricked in, uh, the, uh, this is the little one. So, yeah, anyway, there's just, there's different pills you can take, whether it's, it doesn't matter, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Sorry about this. Sorry about that. Yeah. Uh, obviously my word finding skills still suck, but yeah, exactly. So opiates is a classification of medication. It's not a medication. Well, cannabinoids is a classification. It's not a medication. And I think there just needs to be so much more research and I, and it can be done. There's just so much more that can be done to understand the effects of cannabinoids and how they can help people. Again, we're talking about something that is non-addictive or at worst has the addiction rate of coffee, uh, how many coffee drinkers are out there. And it cannot stop your breathing and you cannot overdose on it. Why are we not working with this? Why isn't this more of a priority? And this is, these are my questions and that's why I'm going to join the fight. Yeah. Absolutely. So, so you probably saw a lot of drugs be replaced just by cannabinoids. Oh yeah. I mean, uh, all the psych meds, uh, all the sleep meds and all the pain meds have been replaced by cannabinoids. How many prescriptions was that? Oh man, a dozen or more at different times. And have you, have, is this a common experience among vets? It's a very common experience. I think it's better now, uh, over the last, over the last few years, you know, the opioid thing, when that became, when that hit the nation's consciousness and people started complaining about, they started training doctors differently. So they start pulling the opioids back. So that changed things. But before that, I mean, I was getting, you know, I had a, I had a football size bottle of, of, of opiates every month I was taking, you know, I was taking like 90 milligrams of morphine, 70 milligrams of Oxycontin every day. Every day. And, and then we'd switch them out. Like, okay, here, take my Oxy, let me get some hydrocodone for a while. And, you know, just let me get some Percocets for a while. I'll switch those around and okay, we'll do morphine. Okay. Now I'll do morphine. I'll do Oxy for the breakthrough pain. I mean, it was ridiculous. This juggling that went on with these opiates for years. And it just didn't need to happen. And, and as a result, not only are guys being not getting better because of these prescriptions, they're getting worse because those opiates, they're going to blow out your kidneys, you know, before I had stem cell therapy, my kidneys were sitting at, you know, stage two, stage three kidney disease, which did not help my heart. I mean, it just goes, it just goes on and on the problems these drugs are causing, especially the amount and the frequency that they're given within the veteran community. Yeah. It's my, my limited experience with veterans and, and the VA has been that it seems that they prescribe these drugs, many drugs, just almost haphazardly. And, and then there's no plan to get somebody off of them at any point. I had a late friend, God rest his soul, man. I miss him. He, he was on, I mean, he sounded like you, he was on so many meds, so many opiates every single day and he was just dying. The, the neuropathy from the Agent Orange exposure he got in NAMM was, I mean, it was, it was, it was killing him. He was just, he was just dying in a, in a hospital bed in his own living room. And then the VA cut off his pain meds, said, you've lived too long, told the guy you have lived too long and took his pain management away. He was done. He was ready to die. I, I mean, obviously you can tell I get livid talking about this even now. He, he found cannabis, he quit cold turkey. Uh, it's three different kinds of opiates he was taking every day, all day. He cut that stuff, pulled turkey and went to cannabis. And you know what? He didn't die. That should have killed him coming off of opiates like that. I mean, your system can't handle that kind of, of, of instant detox. You'll die, but no, it is very traumatic. And there's a, when the, the VA did not, the VA is much better now. They have gotten better. There's no doubt about it. But when this stuff was going on, they did pull guys, uh, they, they pulled guys' opiates and they weren't detoxing them. They're just, they just didn't renew their prescription. So that happened to a lot of guys. And unfortunately, fortunately, a lot of guys got off the, the opiates and found other ways and other modalities to help themselves. A lot of them got pushed into cannabis. Unfortunately, uh, at the same time that happened, the price for heroin on the street came way down fentanyl came, you know, came out and started stuffing me into heroin, so the price came way down and I wasn't getting calls, you know, help calls for things like heroin, uh, you know, I didn't get. I mean, only years and years without calls on that. And then I started getting multiple calls on that right when they, they pulled the opiates, so, you know, there's, there's, we're going to have to deal with that too. Now, you know, we're just, we're going to have to deal with that, but I can't, I can't help, but think that had cannibinoids been available across the board for everybody. Uh, none of this would have happened. It could have just avoided it. Now I know as I've interviewed people over the years, different war fighters in different eras, I talked to the Vietnam veterans. A lot of those guys, the guys that came back and drank, ended up in jail, ended up in prison, ended up in, in, in problems with the law, ended up, you know, just, just problems, the guys who dropped out and just smoked weed, like on, like, like they did in the sixties, they just literally just dropped out of society, lived on a farm somewhere and smoked weed, those guys came back to society in about two years with no criminal records and they did fine. They went on to get advanced degrees and go to college and have families. And they just did better than the guys who came home and drank and the guys who came home drank, they didn't, they didn't want to take that other option, that quote unquote hippie option because they were against it, but because of the, you know, people identify with things in their personality, they didn't see themselves as hippie, therefore they would not use cannabis, but the ones who related to the hippies used cannabis got better faster. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's amazing. Do you, do you think there is a, a greater openness within the VA to cannabis medicine these days? It depends on where you go. Some yes, some no, and still individual doctors are going to have their own bias. I haven't had the issues a lot of you. I'm so open about it that, and I'm so public about it that, you know, when I walk in, they, they know I've got, I have that, and I also have a pretty good voice. So if they treat me wrong there, I know they know they're going to hear about it. But so I don't, I don't, I haven't had that issue, but I've had some great doctors at the VA who just let, who just wants you to explain, you know, your cannabis usage and then they're like, okay, and make sure you watch out for this. Edibles are better than smokeables. I mean, they're not giving me advice, but they are, they're not, they're not pounding me on it, but I'm also not walking in there asking for stuff.