Dr. Phil Leveque, a World War II combat veteran and longtime physician in Oregon, is a proponent of medical marijuana as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. He fights for the rights of veterans who want to use marijuana as a medicine and for PTSD, from which he, too, has suffered. Recently on Salem-News.com, he wrote:
But others remain skeptical. Andrew Rasmussen, a psychologist on faculty at New York University School of Medicine, writes on his blog:
Nicholas Burgin, a Marine and Iraq war veteran from Oregon with PTSD, insists that pot saved his life. He writes that he had nightmares every night but didn't want to take the addictive drugs prescribed to him by the Veterans Administration. So he turned to marijuana, and now he doesn't have hallucinations anymore, or rarely any nightmares. Paul Culkin of New Mexico, who in 2004 was a member of an Army bomb squad in Kosovo, told National Public Radio that the counseling and antidepressant drugs he's received from the VA for his PTSD have helped, but that marijuana is what relieved his anxiety. His wife, Victoria Culkin, tells NPR:
