Congress Tells the VA to Embrace Weed and Shrooms for Veterans
As summer appropriations season kicked off, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee quietly dropped a bombshell in its report on the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs (MilConVA) spending bill: Maybe let veterans use cannabis and psychedelics. The July 21, 2025 report acknowledges that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has concurred with a Department of Health and Human Services recommendation to move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III under federal law. It then directs the Department of Veterans Affairs to prepare for that reality. If rescheduling happens, the VA should issue guidance letting Veterans Health Administration doctors “discuss, recommend, and facilitate access to medical marijuana” for veterans in states with legal programs. That’s a long‑winded way of saying: stop pretending cannabis doesn’t exist.
The committee goes further by encouraging the VA to study whether access to state‑approved cannabis programs reduces opioid abuse among veterans. Lawmakers want data on how medical marijuana impacts opioid use and for those findings to land on their desks within a year. It’s almost as if Congress suspects that letting veterans access a plant with a ridiculously low LD-50 coefficient might be safer than pushing them towards illicit fentanyl.
Even more astonishing, the same report instructs the VA to get serious about psychedelic‑assisted therapy. Recognizing that the department and other agencies are already researching psychedelic treatments for PTSD, depression and other conditions, the committee demands a status report within 180 days on ongoing research and a five‑year longitudinal study tracking outcomes for veterans.
The study must include details like how many patients receive psychedelic therapy, how many sessions they undergo, gender distribution, disability ratings and relapse rates. For an agency that still can’t spell “psilocybin” without a red pen, this is a huge ask—and a welcome one.
The committee also tells the VA to stop clawing back GI Bill benefits from veterans who enroll in cannabis‑related courses and even orders the Department of Justice to report on illegal marijuana grow operations. Taken together, these directives amount to Congress telling the VA: “Catch up with science and veterans’ needs.” It’s equal parts progressive and bureaucratic—studies, reports and more reports—but for once the federal government is treating plant medicines as something other than contraband. For anti‑prohibition activists, this is the crack in the dam we’ve been waiting for.
