Pictured: Eric Jansen, SSDP ambassador who participated in a recent lobby day in Sacramento opposing 7-OH criminalization. Below is his testimony about the issue:

“It’s 2026, and somehow we are still having the same tired conversation. Lawmakers keep introducing fear-based, science-less bills that treat plants like the enemy, while ignoring the real crisis veterans are facing: opioid dependence, over-prescribing, and suicide. I’m not writing this as an academic or a lobbyist. I’m writing this as someone who lived it.

My name is Eric Jansen. I’m a United States Marine Corps veteran. I served with 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines and deployed to Sangin, Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011, one of the most kinetic, casualty-heavy places in the entire war. Like a lot of veterans, I came home with injuries you couldn’t see. PTSD. Traumatic brain injury. Clinical depression. Severe Anxiety. And like a lot of veterans, the system’s primary answer was a prescription pad. Opioids. More opioids. And then more when the first ones didn’t work.

A few months after my best friend died by suicide, I hit my breaking point. Crushed by grief and untreated trauma, I attempted to take my own life using those same opioids I had been prescribed. I survived, but only by chance. That moment burned one truth into my brain forever, the medications we give veterans to “help” them are often the very things putting them in the ground.

After that, I made a decision to survive. Like many veterans, I started looking for ways off opioids, not new ways to get high, not shortcuts, not escapes. Ways to stabilize. Ways to function. Ways to live.

That’s where plant-based alternatives came in. Not because they’re trendy. Not because they’re perfect. But because they gave me an off-ramp. Plants like kratom didn’t numb me into oblivion. They helped me step down, regain agency, and stay alive long enough to do the real work of healing.  And yet here we are, watching policymakers talk about banning these substances as if veterans are reckless children who can’t be trusted with their own recovery.

Let me be clear, taking away safer alternatives does not reduce harm. It increases it. Prohibition doesn’t eliminate demand. It just pushes people toward more dangerous options, back to opioids, back to illicit markets, back to substances with a far higher overdose risk.We’ve seen this movie before. Alcohol. Cannabis. The War on Drugs. It always ends the same way: more bodies, more prisons, more broken families.

Veterans don’t need more bans. We need regulation. Transparency. Education. Data. We need policy rooted in public health, not panic. Most importantly, we need lawmakers willing to listen to people who have lived the consequences of these decisions, not just the headlines. I recently submitted testimony opposing the criminalization of 7-OH to the California Senate Health Committee because I refuse to stay silent while the same failed approaches keep getting recycled under new bill numbers.

This isn’t theoretical for us.

This isn’t political theater.

This is life and death.

If we actually care about veteran suicide, opioid dependence, and public safety, then we need to stop pretending prohibition is a solution. It never has been. And it never will be. What does work is meeting people where they are, giving them safer options, and trusting adults, especially veterans, to make informed decisions about their own recovery.

We survived war. We shouldn’t have to survive our own government’s fear of plants.”