To the first part of your question, many of our veterans find marijuana for medical use to be beneficial to them. Again, it is very compelling, and the challenge is that it's very anecdotal. As Dr. Courchesne indicated, we don't have a medical research branch in Veterans Affairs, but with National Defence and Health Canada we partnered to create the the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research. It's basically a system of systems of all of the medical schools across Canada with research branches in all of our universities who do research on both military and veteran health issues. It also links to our allies in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and the Netherlands so that we are aware of the best practices across the board. Dr. Courchesne is our link in that network of researchers, and this is clearly a significant body of research that challenges the evidence that, as has been mentioned, isn't there yet.
Yet, anecdotally, it is so compelling. When you meet our veterans, they will lay out all the bottles of various medications they no longer take because they are now able to take marijuana for medical use. They are able to sleep, they're able to eat, and they're able to undergo treatment at our operational stress injury clinics. They're able to undertake vocational rehab and education, whereas under all of these other various drugs whose names I can't pronounce, they were in a fog and could not function. We have that anecdotal information that, again, was an education to me, as it was to many in the department. Again, hearing from the medical experts from across the field, I think, is really important.
I think there was a media story about this recently, indicating that our spending on opioids and other pharmaceuticals had gone down, as has been mentioned, while that on marijuana for medical use has gone up significantly. While we recognize that those two numbers are correct, we do not have sufficient evidence to make a causal relationship.