Brandon Sparks, of USMC, finds calm with cannabis.
Brandon Sparks, 19, saw more at his young age than many men will see in a lifetime on a dark night in 1996. Sparks would recall 20 years later the horror of the night when two US Marine Corps helicopters collided in mid-air claiming the lives of 14 marines.
A member of the Quick Reaction force, Sparks was called to the scene with fellow teammates to recover the bodies of the fallen and in a North Carolina swamp, that’s not an easy task in any type of weather or light conditions. That moment in time would change his life forever, as he recalls his exposure to the sheer carnage of retrieving bodies that had literally been hacked to pieces by the tail rotor of one of the aircraft. Sparks said of that night, “I just kinda started falling apart.” He would leave the USMC within a year and squashed his memories of that fateful night into the corners of his mind for the next 20 years, when he was finally diagnosed with PTSD – post traumatic stress disorder.
In 2018, Sparks would apply for and receive his medical marijuana card in an effort to lower the use of five different kinds of medication to treat his insomnia, bipolar disorder, as well as anxiety, depression, and insomnia. Smoking cannabis flower has led him to a place where he says he has been able to reduce his medications and only take pharmaceuticals for bipolar and anxiety.
Today, Sparks says “I wake up in the morning, I have a cup of coffee and I smoke a bowl or smoke a vape and within 20 minutes I’m just calm, I’m not over processing things in my brain. I’m not hypervigilant, I don’t have a ton of thoughts.” A true believer in the power of the plant medicine offered by cannabis, Sparks is now a 42-year-old father to three girls in Buffalo, New York.
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