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What the VA Won’t Prescribe: A Joint.Broken healthcare, cannabis prosecutions, and billion-dollar privatization schemes are pushing veterans toward alternatives the federal government still punishes them for using.Rico walked into the VA pharmacy in Tucson with a joint and a lighter and no camera, because he wasn’t there to perform.“I went to catch a case,” he told me.Like he was reading off a grocery list.“A federal case.” Ricardo “Rico” Pereyda.Over 300 combat missions in Baghdad.Medically retired at 23, 100% permanently disabled, combat-related.He spent years doing everything the machine asked before the machine decided he was the problem.They burned him down faster than a Seattle pinner.Fellowship programs, community leadership roles, civic engagements, all gone.His prospects evaporated.And the institution legally obligated to keep him alive watched every bit of it happen with an impressive sense of antipathy.His dogs kept wandering over as we talked, pushing their heads into his hands.He’d scratch behind an ear without breaking the thought.“This kept a bullet out of my mouth.” Ricardo “Rico” Pereyda, U.S.Army veteran, 300+ combat missions, medically retired at 23 “I’m telling them,” he said.“This kept a bullet out of my mouth.You were excited to put me in front of cameras, have me on panels, run your dog and pony show.But the second I start sharing my experience and the experiences of others, you shut us down.Stigmatized us.After telling us nothing was off the table and that you were so goddamn concerned about the suicide rate.” So he walked into the pharmacy and lit it.Nobody in that building could reconcile the rulebook with the man standing in front of them.All they could do was stand there while the smoke curled toward the fluorescent lights.Pereyda engineered that moment with the precision of a man who’d run 300 combat missions and understood that sometimes, the most devastating thing you can do to an enemy is force them to see themselves for what they are.“Please Hold” Here is what the VA is: The largest integrated healthcare system in the United States, with nine million veterans served annually, 360,000 employees, and a 2024 budget of $328 billion, up 583% since 2001.What essentially equates to Five Mayo Clinics stacked on top of each other, with a big flag out front and a suicide hotline that’s currently understaffed.The VA: By the Numbers 9M Veterans served annually $328B 2024 budget — up 583% since 2001 137/139 VA health centers reporting severe staffing shortages 17.6 Veterans who die by suicide every day — a number that has barely moved in a decade “Please hold.” Here is what the VA cannot do: Acknowledge that a plant legal in 40 states might be worth discussing with the human beings in its waiting rooms, or treat those humans like they’re capable of making an informed decision about their own body.Their own survival.Here is what the VA can do, and does, every single day, without a single congressional review: Hand opioids to a population twice as likely to die from an accidental overdose as the rest of the country.Sign the prescription.Wish them luck.In a survey of 510 veterans using medical cannabis, 91% said it improved their quality of life, 80% reported fewer psychological symptoms, and 21% used fewer opioids.The VA’s official 2023 clinical guidelines recommend against cannabis for PTSD treatment, while remaining legally barred from conducting the trials that would generate evidence to revisit that recommendation.They cite insufficient evidence.And they are prohibited from gathering sufficient evidence.The snake is eating its tail in a tightly controlled environment.What Veterans Say About Cannabis: Survey of 510 Veterans 91% Said cannabis improved their quality of life 80% Reported fewer psychological symptoms 21% Used fewer opioids after starting cannabis The VA’s official 2023 clinical guidelines recommend against cannabis for PTSD treatment — while remaining legally barred from conducting the trials that would generate evidence to revisit that recommendation.It’s what you call a managed outcome.So why is the VA failing the people it exists to serve on a budget bigger than most countries’ entire economies?The VA serves patients carrying nine to twelve simultaneous medical conditions when the average American walks in with three to five.Congress keeps expanding who qualifies—burn pits, Gulf War syndrome, Agent Orange—without funding the infrastructure to absorb them.The financial management software was built in 1992 and has never been meaningfully updated.137 of 139 VA health centers report severe staffing shortages.137 out of 139.Then there’s the money bleeding out of VA facilities and handed to private providers, jumping from $15 billion in 2018 to $28.5 billion in 2023.When the money leaves, the VA loses staff.When the VA loses staff, it fails more veterans, and those failures get harvested as evidence that veterans should be routed to private providers.Rinse and repeat until the VA is a shell, and the money is somewhere else entirely.Concerned Veterans for America, funded by the Koch network, has had a seat at the table in both Trump administrations, engineering exactly this outcome, and the current VA Secretary Doug Collins arrived in office having already carried three of their bills in Congress.Then the political mythology rolls in, covering everything in a fine mist of manufactured gratitude.Politicians love veterans the way they love the flag.Loudly, right on cue, in front of the cameras, and always at a safe distance.But the VA budget, the unglamorous, politically inconvenient line item, gets picked apart by the same politicians who just gave a standing ovation at the Veterans Day ceremony.Every year, Congress passes the Veterans Equal Access Act by voice vote, a practically ceremonial event, then quietly guts it from the final bill.Which keeps almost passing.And then doesn’t.And then doesn’t.And then doesn’t.Robb Harmon has helped over a thousand veterans navigate the actual mechanics of getting and keeping a medical card.He knows exactly what a voice vote means and exactly what it doesn’t: A recommendation without infrastructure creates delay.A recommendation without support creates abandonment.And a recommendation without real access is not progress, it’s policy theater.Meanwhile, 17.6 veterans die by suicide every day, a number that has barely twitched in a decade of speeches, appropriations, and ceremonial voice votes from people who will never spend a night in a VA waiting room, wondering if the thing that actually helps them is going to put them in prison.The Glove Capital of the World Upstate New York is the kind of cold that feels inconsiderate, almost personal, and Gloversville hunkers there like a town that got left behind mid-sentence and never stopped waiting for the rest of the story to be told.Two hundred glove manufacturers once employed half the county, with money flowing through the streets, until NAFTA made the math ugly, the factories left, and the people who stayed learned that decisions made in rooms you’re not invited to can hollow out everything you’ve ever known.And there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it.Jason Ambrosino runs Veterans Holdings out of Gloversville with a lock on moon rocks in New York, and when the state pulled a bait-and-switch on compliance systems and torched a year of his preparation overnight, he sued them.Because when you’re building something real in a place that’s already been abandoned once, you don’t lie down.He came home from the Army, pharmaceutically managed into a fog of gabapentin and whatever else the VA had decided constituted appropriate care.He found Acid Test in that chemical haze and followed the thread to psychedelics and cannabis, treatments the VA would never sanction and certainly wasn’t going to prescribe.Cannabis and psychedelics did not just help me personally.They exposed how broken the