Your testimony has been a fascinating two hours. I appreciate the effort you've made to be here.
I have a couple of issues.
The observation you made about soft drugs and hard drugs is one I've heard about. Soldiers are very clever about getting around whatever tests they need to get around.
I want to go back to the beginning, in terms of when you decided the military needed to run peer support programs. My observation, from testimony here, is that the walk and the talk don't actually match up all the time. Soldiers say, “We really need this kind of therapy”, and the brass are saying, “We don't have any empirical evidence that this actually works”, and there are arguments to be made on both sides.
I'd be interested in your experience with respect to the genesis of the proposal for the peer support program and what your observations were with respect to getting it off the ground, as well as what resistance, if any, you received, and how you measure success.