A recent story that troops and Defense Department civilians cannot hold security clearances if they invest in companies that legally sell marijuana and cannabis products has turned out to be half baked.
Federal News Radio reported on Feb. 26 that Air Combat Command had sent an email to airmen saying that they could be denied security clearances for owning stock in companies that legally sell pot products, even if they did not chose the stocks themselves.
A Vietnam veteran and career educator at an elite military training school now finds himself resorting to a Reagan-era executive order in hopes of clearing his name. Henry Cobbs' crime — vaping a non-psychoactive form of cannabis to treat his prostate cancer.
The U.S. military dangles cash bonuses and post-military college money to entice recruits into the service. Meanwhile, the Canadian military has beards and weed.
A veteran is 250 times more likely to die from suicide or an opioid-related overdose than their counterpart currently serving in Afghanistan. In 2017, according to icasualties.org, there were a total of fifteen U.S. military fatalities in Afghanistan. The same year, the Veterans Administration released a seminal report placing veteran deaths by suicide at an average of twenty per day. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of these deaths are directly related to the over-prescription of opioids and other psychotropic medications that plague our veteran population.
