VA will not prevent medical marijuana

I was looking up something else I wanted to post about online when I came across an article saying that the VA has now created a policy that patients who live in states that allow medical marijuana will not have their treatment dropped if they use marijuana as a treatment. The VA will not prescribe it, since the VA is under the control of the federal government, who still does not allow medical marijuana. But the VA policies state that if a person uses illegal drugs, he or she will be banned from receiving any care by the VA facility. That seems rather harsh to me; I don't know whether they would give detox care to a patient who wanted to get off illegal drugs. But the federal government recognized marijuana as illegal. It's Schedule I, while even things like GHB (the so-called date-rape drug), LSD, and ecstacy are Schedule II, allowed to be used in limited cases (the latter two as elements treating PTSD, at least as far as I know). So if someone uses medical marijuana, that person would have been denied treatment by the VA. But now, they have changed the rules to allow patients to get medical marijuana from outside doctors and not be denied treatment for other things from VA doctors.

Personally, my bone to pick with medical marijuana is that decisions on how it should be used are purely political, not medical. The DEA won't allow researchers to test it for its medical treatment possibilities. I understand it does test a lot to look for bad things in it, to use as an excuse for why it won't allow it to be used medically. But without allowing trials to show that it helps patients, it can't be considered for approval by the DEA. Therefore, everything in this debate is run by politics, not medicine. It's the politicians and voters who approve the state-wide laws (14 states and D.C. allow medical marijuana) that do anything here, not the medical research.