On the recordApril 29, 2015
I thank my friend, the chairman, for yielding. As a practicing physician and a veteran myself, the way we approach health care is not to just allow any healthcare provider to do whatever he or she wants to do at the time. That is simply not the way health care works. Let's look specifically at the problem of PTSD, which is one of the worst problems that we are dealing with today among veterans. What have we found just in the last year? Smoking pot increases psychotic episodes by a factor of two to four times normal. The conversion to schizophrenia, a permanent mental disorder, is enhanced by pot by a factor of two--double. Why in the world would we give a drug that is addictive, that is prohibited under schedule I, that is not accepted for any specific mental disease or disorder and enhances psychosis and schizophrenia, why are we going to give that to our veterans, especially those with PTSD? That is just absolutely insane.
