Sean Worsley and the Untold Damage of the War on Weed
A growing chorus of vets say toking up helps ease the pain wrought by war. Why won't the government listen to them?
Just before midnight on August 15, 2016, a black Army veteran and Purple Heart recipient named Sean Worsley was filling up his tank at an Alabama gas station, and playing air guitar to a song on the radio.
His behavior caught the attention of a cop named Carl Abramo, who deemed the loud music in violation of a local noise ordinance. Abramo was also disturbed by Worsley’s conduct, which, according to his police report, included “dancing,” “laughing,” “joking,” and “shaking his head.”
Abramo stomped over to Worsley and his wife, Eboni, and demanded they turn down the music, so they did. He then smelled marijuana, and asked the couple to explain themselves. Sean quickly presented a valid medical marijuana card issued by the state of Arizona, and made clear that he was a disabled veteran. Pot eased his pain.
The Worsleys may have avoided the Heart of Dixie altogether were they aware that, at the time of their road trip, black Alabamans were more than four times as likely as their white fellow citizens to be arrested for possessing marijuana. In keeping with this disparity, Abramo — whose Facebook page is littered with racist memes and Blue Lives Matter material — disregarded Sean’s careful explanation, and arrested him. Then he called for backup, and searched the car.
What he found was a prescription bottle filled with pot, a pipe, rolling papers, a few bottles of alcohol, and some pain pills prescribed to Eboni. Because the pills weren’t in the original bottle, Abramo falsely alleged that Eboni had committed a felony, and arrested her, too.
This botched police interaction kicked off a years-long struggle by the Worselys that continues to this day. Sean lost his job, battled homelessness, and was slapped with additional charges stemming from minor bureaucratic missteps. He now faces five years in the Alabama prison system, a troubled network of barren rooms and sharp fences that claims the highest homicide rate in the country.
For many years now, politicians of all stripes have jumped at the chance to explain that they understand the unique and oftentimes severe struggles of returning veterans. And many, to their credit, have worked earnestly to stem the sort of spiral Sean has suffered. Their veterans’ initiatives have been largely successful in reducing homelessness, boosting employment, and curbing incarceration.
What Sean’s experience grimly illustrates is that this assistance can be undercut in the blink of an eye so long as the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) refuses to remove marijuana from its axis of evil.
Sean was deployed to Iraq in 2006, a particularly bloody year marked by intense sectarian violence and a spike in the use of roadside bombs targeting American service members.
Sean was a driver for an Army team that defused these explosives. His supervisor at the time, Ellis English, described this work as a series of gnarly brushes with visceral violence, and death.
During one particularly harrowing mission, a powerful explosion took the hearing of one soldier and knocked Sean out cold. He suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) that day, which immediately shifted something inside him. English recently explained some of the haunting changes he witnessed to Sean’s lawyers, who’ve written an infuriating narrative of his case:
The young soldier who used to work hard and get things done quickly became unreliable. He zoned out in the middle of work. He stopped taking care of himself. His personal hygiene declined.
One night, he showed up in English’s room weeping and clutching his rifle. English was afraid he was going to kill himself and referred him to mental health. He no longer felt safe having Sean drive him.
“I got him into mental health, he was off the mission for a while,” English said. “Finally, he came back but he wasn’t the same.”
It wasn’t until two years after Sean sustained his TBI that Congress first acknowledged this type of injury through passage of the Traumatic Brain Injury Act. This law mandated that the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) establish solid diagnostic and treatment tools for this invisible wound, which has left a grisly signature on many who fought the War on Terror.
This work has been steady, but slow. As such, Sean and thousands of other veterans today have access to few beneficial treatments. (In addition to his TBI, Sean also suffers from severe back and shoulder pain and PTSD, which causes depression and nightmares. )
The VA sought to ease Sean’s conditions through a cocktail of antidepressants, antipsychotics, and pain medications. But these traditional treatments didn’t really work.
While the department’s done a good job in recent years of promoting holistic pain treatments like yoga, meditation, and healthy eating, they’ve remained incredibly resistant to other options, like service dogs and medical cannabis.
This reluctance is due in large part to the department’s long-standing and generally respectable ethic of only backing evidence-based treatments. But the Trump administration has deeply degraded this cardinal rule in troubling ways. His VA, for instance, has promoted a number of wacky, evidence free PTSD treatments and blindly embraced hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment. (After fast-tracking the Lupus drug into VA hospitals, a study showed “no benefit” and even “higher rates of death” among those who took it.)
Despite this reckless and experimental spree, the VA still hasn’t budged on medical cannabis. Clinicians may not prescribe or even recommend the leafy green substance. All they are today allowed to do is “discuss” the treatment if a patient brings it up. Luckily for Sean, his VA counselor bent the rules a bit and divulged that she’d seen other clients with PTSD benefit from pot.
While the research into the efficacy of marijuana for struggling veterans is frustratingly limited, the available evidence is fairly positive. This work has suggested that pot-smoking veterans are less reliant on opioids and alcohol, and may notch level lower levels of suicidality.
Any relief Sean found in smoking marijuana has likely been erased by the deeply destabilizing impacts he’s shouldered for possessing it. This honorably discharged veteran today sits locked up and alone, without access to the major pillars in his life: the wife and kids. In a recent letter shared by his lawyers, Sean bluntly said he feels entirely discarded.
“I feel like I’m being thrown away by a country I went and served for,” he reflected. “I feel like I lost parts of me in Iraq, parts of my spirit and soul that I can’t ever get back.”
The government’s long-held justification for not letting veterans smoke pot is that it may be dangerous and damaging. Belying this argument is a long and dark history of Uncle Sam poisoning service members and veterans with virtually every other substance under the sun.
As I documented last year for The Baffler, the military industrial complex has plied its people with caffeine, cigarettes, alcohol, amphetamines, sleeping pills, opioids, tear gas, sarin gas, mustard gas, pesticides, shoddy vaccines, and a cocktail of other sedatives, antipsychotics, stimulants, and neuroleptics. Since 9/11 alone, the Pentagon has poisoned service members through on-base burn pits overseas and based them and their families in government housing saddled with mold where the drinking water is contaminated by cancer-causing chemicals.
The brass hats have rarely, if ever, expressed remorse over this troubling work, even in the most insane of cases — Project MKUltra — a Nazi-supported, Cold War mind control project where 7,000 soldiers were covertly dosed with LSD.
Perhaps the reason why the military has always demonized marijuana is that it cannot be exploited in the Generals’ unending quest to improve lethality. The Pentagon, as we all know, prefers substances that pump up the heart. Marijuana, for the most part, mellows out the mind.
Marijuana was the signature drug of the Vietnam War, in large part because it was widely available. John Adams, a Marine Veteran who served two tours based out of Da Dang, told the weed website Leafly that he remembers reefer growing in wild patches throughout the jungle.
“Over there we were getting the premium stuff—no stems and seeds,” he recalled. “You’d get in a Jeep, run down to Four Corners, and get 20 pre-rolled joints for 10 bucks. It was pretty; I wish I had a picture of it.”
In a seminal Pentagon report titled “The Vietnam Drug User Returns,” roughly 50 percent of those who served overseas admitted to smoking pot, often because it made them feel less afraid. As I note in my Baffler piece, reefer madness dominated government thinking after the My Lai Massacre, where politicians seized on the fact that the murderous soldiers had toked up the night before the bloodshed:
During a 1970 Senate hearing on the massacre, psychiatrist Joel H. Kaplan proclaimed that pot could “cause people to become fearful, paranoid, extremely angry” and has led to “acts of murder, rape and aggravated assault.” Asked for his professional opinion on My Lai, Dr. Kaplan said weed “could have contributed” to the violence if it was clear the soldiers were “chronic pot heads.”
This anti-pot attitude was solidified a decade later, when a Marine jet crashed on the USS Nimitz, engulfing the aircraft carrier in a ball of flames and killing fourteen. A subsequent government investigation found that six of the dead men had marijuana in their systems. None of these men were part of the flight crew or contributed in any way to the crash. Yet the incident was deeply embarrassing to military brass, and they responded by launching a war on drugs inside the ranks. Again, from my piece in The Baffler:
In quick succession, leaders launched expansive urinalysis efforts and new punitive measures for drug use. They also created the Pentagon’s Drug Demand Reduction Program (DDRP).
Urinalysis was then a fledgling industry and an inexact science. Two years after the Pentagon’s testing efforts ramped up, an audit found the Army and Air Force’s piss tests were wildly inaccurate. More than ten thousand discharged service members were offered their jobs back. Nevertheless, the chiefs at DDRP continued to ramp up their urinalysis efforts. This major government investment led to the commercialization and proliferation of drug testing in America and laid the groundwork for President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 Executive Order requiring all federal civilian employees be drug tested.
Reagan laid the groundwork for President George H.W. Bush’s War on Drugs, which continues unabated to this day.
Even as some states have loosened marijuana laws in recent years, Trump’s government has stayed the course. While his first VA Secretary, an Obama holdover named David Shulkin, supported studying medical marijuana, the VA has more recently opposed every bill to study marijuana’s potential efficacy for veterans, and currently denies home loans to vets working in the cannabis industry
In March, Shulkin’s replacement, Robert Wilkie, issued a stern memo reminding VA employees— a third of whom are veterans — that they would be subject to dismissal should a wink of THC show up in their system.
The draconian directive made clear that no mercy would be shown towards employees living in states that have legalized pot or have a medical marijuana card. It also warned that VA employees who experimented with volatile substances like CBD-infused Kombucha or CBD-infused chocolates could also turn up a positive test, which is grounds for the boot.
Thirty-three states now have medical marijuana statutes on the books, but they’re far from perfect. Places like Texas, for instance, don’t acknowledge PTSD on the list of qualifiable conditions for a medical card. Moreover, this patchwork of state laws is incredibly fragile. At any time, feds can pull rank and crack down by invoking DEA rules that bunch marijuana alongside heroin and peyote as Schedule I drugs that have “no currently accepted medical use.”
Faced with this uncertainty, many veterans now navigate the black market, which increases their likelihood of experimenting with other, more dangerous drugs or being slapped with criminal charges. Take the case of Derrick Harris, a Gulf War veteran who was sentenced to life without parole for selling just $30 worth of marijuana, or Dale Schafer, a Vietnam-era veteran who spent five long years in federal prison for growing medical marijuana at home. (Just the other day, Harris' sentence was overturned, and he should soon be released after serving nine long years.)
A growing chorus of veterans are pushing for meaningful action at the federal level. This work is overwhelmingly supported by younger veterans, with 81 percent of respondents in a recent survey from Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America demanding the legalization of medical marijuana. Their feelings are fueling advocacy from a smattering of new, dynamic non-profits including The Veterans Cannabis Coalition, Veterans for Medical Cannabis Access, and the Weed for Warriors Project.
Their advocacy got a boost from a major veterans’ institution in 2016, when the American Legion passed Resolution 11, which urged greater federal study of medical cannabis and called for the rescheduling of the drug in the Controlled Substances Act. But as I revealed last year for Task & Purpose, the Legion soon-after suppressed all work on pot after a shadow group of septuagenarian Legionnaires known as “The God Squad” voiced their opposition to the work.
This move significantly blunted political momentum on the issue, most visibly by slowing down bipartisan work in the House from Democrat Lou Correas and Republican Phil Roe on the VA Medicinal Cannabis Research Act. Each lawmaker had their own slightly different vision for the bill, with Correas’ language importantly mandating that the VA launch clinical trials to study the efficacy of cannabis in treating pain and PTSD.
By the time Correa's more ambitious version of the bill was marked up in the spring of 2020, it had 105 co-sponsors. But at the last minute, Roe inserted an amendment that largely defanged the bill by removing the clinical trial requirement.
Eric Goepel, a former Legion staffer and founder of The Veterans Cannabis Coalition, was disappointed by this move, but he understood the headwinds associated with studying a Schedule I drug.
A year earlier, he had pushed a more moderate plan in a meeting with academics, lawmakers, and the VA’s head of research, Dr. Rachel B. Ramoni. Instead of directly studying marijuana, Goepel asked the VA to conduct clinical trials with existing FDA-approved cannabinoid drugs, specifically investigating the efficacy of dronabinol (which is a synthetic but chemically identical analogue of THC) for pain.
Romani agreed that VA had the budget and authority to conduct a dronabinol trial and asked for the House Veterans Affairs Committees help to coordinate with FDA to move forward on this work. While lawmakers expressed support for this work, and sketched a 12-month timeline on coordinating the research, deadlines have come and gone with no discernible progress.
A major challenge to any change is the reefer madness that has long infected many in Washington. One veteran advocate recently told me that they were warned ahead of a planned meeting with a conservative lawmaker that if they broached the topic of medicinal cannabis in any way, shape, or form they’d be immediately asked to leave.
This aversion to pot is fortified by a flurry of special interests. Some are ideological, like the Family Research Council, which, according to the federal lobbying database, has opposed efforts to ease restrictions on pot for veterans.
Most arm-twisting, however, comes from corporate entities that benefit greatly from marijuana’s continued illegality. They include pharmaceutical companies, the drug-testing industry, the private prison system, prison-guard unions, drug rehabilitation programs, and others.
Sources say Big Pharma represents the most powerful of these special interests. Oftentimes, their messaging lines up with groups they’ve donated generously to — like Smart Approaches to Marijuana and The National Alliance on Mental Illness.
To Goepel and many other pro-pot vets, it’s synthetic drugs that are hurting veterans most. While the VA has done impressive work lowering opioid prescription rates in recent years, Goepel argued that vets are still prescribed untold amounts of other pills with dangerous side effects, like Benzodiazepines, even as the VA and DoD clinical guidelines raise serious and growing concerns over the drug’s efficacy and side effects.
“These drugs are normalized, even celebrated, but they contribute to why you never feel right or happy,” Goepel recently told me. “You’re either in pain or in a daze, which is why so many veterans have desperately turned to cannabis.”