Finler:Stop talking and start doing

This is what I've been screaming about!!!!!

“The VA can set up five commissions – yet the real problem goes unresolved. We all know that convening meetings to study an issue in order to formulate a report to offer recommendations IS NOT ACTION. I strongly encourage the VA to proactively reach out to all our returning veterans now. Veterans cannot wait – and should not have to wait – for a blue ribbon panel to come out yet again with another report.

“We KNOW what needs to be done. Each and every service member, Reservist and Guardsman must be given a thorough and mandatory medical evaluation by competent medical personnel when they separate from military service for PTSD and TBI. The VA Secretary was asked to do this weeks ago.

“The time for panels has past. I expect immediate action to address the immediate needs of our veterans.”
go here for more
http://www.vawatchdog.org/08/nf08/nfMAY08/nf052408-7.htm

Hearing after hearing, listening to one heartbreaking story after another has accomplished more heartbreaking stories following all of the ones already heard. That's it. What good does it do to already know we failed in taking care of our veterans to hear more of them we failed? Does it make the problem go away to listen to the stories of these shattered lives? How many hearings does it take before they actually do something about any of this?

There is nothing new about PTSD. Humans have not changed and war is still war. What good does it do to listen to the new kids on the block when they already have several generations of older ones who have been there and done that and lived to tell their own stories? What good did it do to call on people who just stepped into this landmine and expect solutions from any of them? It accomplished a gigantic waste of time and in the process, more lives that could have been saved if they acted on what was already known.

I apologize to some of the people who have been testifying to congress on this, but the truth is, they can only talk about the problems the new generation of veterans have but they can offer nothing in the form of answers. I've heard all the hearings. I've read the transcripts and it is just rehashing what was already known in the 80's. The names have changed but that's just about all of it. The numbers are coming in sooner than they did after Vietnam, but most of that has more to do with outreach work (thousands of us have been doing since Vietnam) and the fact the redeployments increase the risk of developing PTSD by 50%. We have the numbers in from Vietnam and they are devastating,but we need to understand that as bad as those numbers are, they will be repeated faster simply because so little has been done to deal with it. Talking about it is not dealing with it and fixing the problems, helping them heal and compensating them for their wounds. It's all just more of the same.

A New Look At Ecstasy To Treat PTSD

Breaking the Drug Taboo: Group of Traumatized Veterans Get Experimental Ecstasy Treatment

By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted February 11, 2008.


An experimental study that treats PTSD veterans with the drug MDMA could make life after war a lot more livable.

"We need to be positioning ourselves now to provide the assistance that our veterans need," said House Committee on Veterans' Affairs chairman Bob Filner (D-CA) during a hearing, called "Stopping Suicides: Examining the Mental Health Challenges Facing the Department of Veterans Affairs," held in December 2007. "Not only for those brave men and women who are returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, but also for our veterans from previous conflicts. We cannot afford to put this issue off."

Filner's choice of words is instructive, as are his sentiments: With upwards of 25 million veterans in the United States, not counting those overseas in the morally murky theater of Iraq and Afghanistan who may return home sometime after the 2008 presidential election, that's a lot of assistance and funding needed to head off what he called a "rate of veteran suicide [that] has reached epidemic proportions," to the point that it has doubled the suicide rate of civilians. Safeguards already put into place have failed, for a variety of reasons, and given the severity of the mental and physical problems carried by returning soldiers, some daring out-of-the-box thinking is not only desperately needed, but required.

Enter the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and its currently funded trials using 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methamphetamine -- otherwise known as MDMA, or ecstasy -- to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although the U.S. Army had carried out lethal dose studies of MDMA back in the 1950s, work which was not classified until the close of the 1960s, it was only centered on animals and was mixed in with a variety of other compounds. At the closure of that research, MDMA languished in clinical obscurity until its rise as a club drug in the '80s and '90s brought it the kind of attention that dooms better drugs to Schedule I classifications -- that is, illegality -- and lesser drugs to approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But MAPS founder and president Rick Doblin became aware of MDMA in 1982, and since then has been convinced of its therapeutic uses. Accordingly, his organization has coordinated and/or funded recent studies into MDMA treatment of PTSD and has its eyes set on a higher goal.

"We're looking to make MDMA into a prescription medication in the United States, United Kingdom and elsewhere," he explained by phone.
go here for the rest
http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/76576/

This report came out in 2005

Ecstasy trials for combat stress
David Adam,science correspondent
Thursday February 17, 2005
The GuardianAmerican soldiers traumatised by fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are to be offered the drug ecstasy to help free them of flashbacks and recurring nightmares.The US food and drug administration has given the go-ahead for the soldiers to be included in an experiment to see if MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, can treat post-traumatic stress disorder.Scientists behind the trial in South Carolina think the feelings of emotional closeness reported by those taking the drug could help the soldiers talk about their experiences to therapists. Several victims of rape and sexual abuse with post-traumatic stress disorder, for whom existing treatments are ineffective, have been given MDMA since the research began last year.............................
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1416073,00.html