Mr. Chair, Madam Vice-Chair, Mr. Vice-Chair and esteemed members of the committee, it is a great privilege and honour to speak with you today about veterans and medical cannabis, veterans' well-being, and how medical cannabis might affect and influence that.
In my 35 years of medical practice, I've been privileged to care for a great many military service veterans at veterans administration hospitals in my post-graduate training in the United States and in my practice in Colorado. Although it's always been a privilege, it's also been frustrating at times, especially when the therapies at my disposal have been less effective than hoped. This is in part because military veterans present physicians with a different set of challenges from those presented by civilians. Military service itself presents unique challenges, and can result in a variety of different medical problems that conventional pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical products are often incapable of addressing adequately.
Furthermore, veterans might present with several different medical problems simultaneously—for instance, with PTSD, anxiety, pain due to wounds and musculoskeletal injuries, and traumatic brain injury caused by explosions, all simultaneously and in the same patient. Such concomitant problems often require that several different prescription medications be provided, and each might have a side effect that, by itself, might not be of any particularly great concern, but the combination of side effects from increasing numbers of prescription drugs can create many additional problems for the patient, alongside the conditions for which they are being treated. It is now known that merely taking a number of different prescription medicines carries elevated risks. Studies have shown that as the number of prescription drugs approaches eight, the likelihood of a serious adverse event, such as hospitalization or even death, rises to nearly 100%. It's therefore essential that other therapeutic approaches be sought and provided, particularly since military veterans are among those most likely to be taking large numbers of prescription drugs.
A more urgent but related problem is that military veterans are much more likely than their civilian counterparts to commit suicide. That includes especially the Canadian veterans of the war in Afghanistan and the American veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. One should not forget, either, those who served in Rwanda. It is almost certain that post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is the underlying cause of this epidemic, really, of suicide among military veterans, but as with so many other medical problems related to military service, identifying the problem is only the first step in developing and providing effective treatment.
Now, it's been my experience that many conditions, including PTSD, that have defied effective treatment with conventional medications will often respond remarkably well to medical cannabis. Many of my patients were able to reduce their doses of prescription drugs significantly, and many others were able to stop using them altogether, when medical cannabis was added to their treatment regimens. In the last 10 years, I myself have seen a total of about 30,000 patients and have accumulated a body of experience that is supported by the research that has been done in this arena. As Dr. Waisglass said, clearly more research is needed, but it is quite clear that cannabis is an effective treatment modality when appropriately used.
This is because each of the 110 or so different substances called “cannabinoids”, which are unique to the plant, has a different effect that is somewhat variable from the other cannabinoids. Taken as a whole, cannabinoid therapies can address a number of different medical problems with fewer side effects than single compound prescription drugs when administered in combinations. Clearly, if the need for certain drugs can be eliminated or the required doses can be significantly reduced without compromising efficacy, then such novel interventions as cannabinoid medicine should be considered. They are certainly worthy of serious consideration.
Now this doesn't mean that medical cannabis products are perfect. The dosing forms that are currently approved by Health Canada, such as tinctures, oils and smoked or vaporized cannabis, leave much to be desired. That is true not only in Canada but everywhere that medical cannabis has been approved and is in use.
I'm working with a retired deputy surgeon general of the Canadian Forces and a drug development expert, who established the equivalent of Health Canada and the FDA in Israel, on studies that, we are confident, will result in properly formulated, innovative, pharmaceutical-grade cannabis-derived products, which we think will be far superior to anything that's currently available.
For the veteran and also for the active service member, cannabis can offer effective treatment when conventional therapies fail or, in other cases, may provide comparable efficacy with reduced overall side effects, thereby improving the risk-benefit profile of many therapeutic regimens in military medicine.
We look forward to being able to make these advanced products available to patients in Canada and to military veterans, whose resilience in the face of physical and psychological illness is really quite remarkable, and whose willingness to embrace new and novel treatment approaches is both courageous and inspiring. I think we owe Canada's military veterans, and those everywhere, nothing less.
It has been an honour to speak with you thus far. I appreciate the opportunity and look forward to answering your questions.