Every Veterans Day brings a wave of gratitude, from parades and discounts to social media posts and advertisements thanking those who served. But in the cannabis industry, the holiday carries extra weight.
Veterans have helped build the industry as founders, managers and customers, and many found their way to it through their own experience with the plant. Federal policy, though, has been much slower to catch up.
“Thank-yous are easy. Access is harder,” says Josh Riggs, co-founder and CEO of Social Dispensary, which opened in 2022 as Denver’s first social equity licensed dispensary. For veterans who turn to cannabis, access still runs into federal rules, from Veterans Affairs doctors who can’t recommend it to careers that can be put at risk by using it.
Across the industry, veterans and those who serve them describe the same gap: plenty of appreciation on Nov. 11, and real obstacles the rest of the year.
A New Mission
On paper, Socrates “Soc” Rosenfeld’s path looks like a straight line. He commanded an Apache company in Baghdad, then studied at MIT, and went on to co-found cannabis technology company Jane Technologies, where he is CEO. The transition, he says, was harder than the résumé suggests.
“The intensity I needed in combat didn’t turn off when I came home,” Rosenfeld says. He didn’t try cannabis until age 29. It helped him slow down and be present with the people he loves, and that experience is what drew him to spend the last decade building in the industry.
When asked why so many veterans follow a similar road, he points to what disappears at discharge. “When you leave the military, you lose your mission and your team at the same time,” he says. In cannabis, he adds, many veterans find both a purpose and a personal conviction, since they often discovered the plant through their own experience before they saw it as a career.
Shane Breen, a service-connected disabled Army veteran, co-founded Silly Nice, a Black-owned, family-run New York cannabis brand, with LeVar Thomas in 2024. He sees the same pull toward purpose and community. “We’re used to working hard, figuring things out, and being part of something bigger than ourselves,” Breen says.
Narith Panh, chief growth officer of Dragonfly Wellness, the first medical cannabis pharmacy to open in Utah, isn’t a veteran. But veterans make up a big part of his pharmacy’s patients and its team, and he sees why the fit works. “Veterans are used to working inside strict rules, under pressure, toward a mission bigger than themselves, and that describes regulated cannabis pretty well,” he says. Many, he adds, arrive as patients before they ever arrive as employees or founders.
Taught to Fear It
For many veterans, the road into cannabis started with years of avoiding it. Rosenfeld, a self-described DARE kid, puts it this way: “Many of us grew up being taught to fear cannabis by the same institutions we went on to serve
