He was smoking with a veteran whose PTSD is triggered by sound when a car with a loud engine drove by outside. A sound like that would usually trigger this individual, and he still got a look of fear on his face, but that uncertainty, or colorado marijuana “edge,” as Drew calls it, didn’t take hold of him as it usually would. “Because you’re in a different head space, you’re not as anxious and not as on edge,” Drew explains. “Even though, in my memory, I remember a half-second of ‘edge’ popping up, and it just took a smile, as opposed to twenty minutes of talking him down. When it comes to PTSD, I’ve seen it be one of the only things that can help.” Matt Kahl suffered a traumatic brain injury and sustained spinal injuries and facial fractures during his military service; he came home to Colorado in 2013 not only with PTSD, but in a lot of pain. He was on so many pharmaceutical drugs that his liver failed. When his kidneys also started to fail, Kahl tried cannabis. “Almost instantaneously, I recognized it could help,” he says. “It was the first time I was able to relax.” Once he realized the benefits of marijuana, he started studying.
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