A Republican congressman has submitted another cannabis bill legislation to be launched in the new Congress. The new reform will protect veterans from being penalized for using medical marijuana according to federal law.
Representative Greg Steube filed a more extensive version of the proposal in 2020. The new measure would additionally codify that America’s VA(Veteran Affairs Department) doctors are permitted to talk about the benefits and risks of cannabis with the patients.
VA doctors are presently authorized to talk about marijuana with a patient and document his/her medical paperwork and veteran folks are currently protected by department policy against losing merits for cannabis use. However,the new reform would include these regulations into state statute thus preventing them from being changed administratively in future.
Steube’s last year entailed a unique provision that additionally authorized VA physicians to officially write cannabis recommendations.
However, that text wasn’t featured in this year’s reform, which would create issues to access since most federal medicinal marijuana programs need a written prescription. Thus, multiple veterans would need to partner with non-VA suppliers to be eligible for legal cannabis access.
According to Carson Steelman(Steube’s office’s communications director), removing the part was politically crucial to ascend the previous proposal past a House commission as an update of another reform.
He said that the bill was approved through omission of that section. He added that several members had issues about it.
Distaso Doug, Veterans Cannabis Project’s executive director, congratulated Steube for both bills, stating that the agency constantly sees the denial of veteran merits such as medical prescriptions and VA loans.
