Steve Gloade spent 27 years with the RCMP, and for a long time after, he was afraid to fall asleep. Many veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder say the same thing: the day is manageable, and the night is when the trauma comes back. After he started using medical cannabis, Gloade told CBC News that he now looks forward to going to bed.
Canadian veterans have been saying this for years. In August 2026, a clinical trial in Germany put hard numbers behind it.
PTSD by the numbers
Nightmares are not a side issue in PTSD. The US Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that between 71% and 96% of veterans with PTSD have them.
The standard treatment has not held up well. For two decades, doctors prescribed prazosin, a blood pressure pill, for trauma nightmares. In 2018, a trial of 304 US veterans found it worked no better than a dummy pill.
With few good options, Canadian veterans turned to cannabis in large numbers. According to Veterans Affairs Canada's own figures:
- VAC reimbursed medical cannabis for 27,643 veterans in 2024-25, at a cost of $245 million.
- That spending was $168 million just two years earlier.
- By September 2025, 28,592 veterans were authorized for coverage, and about a quarter of them used more than 3 grams a day.
In a 2023 national survey of Canadian medical cannabis patients, 80% of the veterans said they used cannabis for sleep, compared with about half of non-veterans. Veterans rated how much it helped with both their PTSD and their insomnia as better than 8 out of 10. The survey was small, 90 veterans, but the pattern matches what clinics hear every day.
The veteran perspective
Gloade, who now works as a veteran ambassador for a medical cannabis company, does not oversell it. "I don't think they magically went away," he told CBC, "but the cannabis does something to suppress the nightmares."
Retired Lieutenant Colonel Robert Martin served two tours in Afghanistan and came home in 2009 with PTSD. He told CBC Radio's The Current that sleep is critical for anyone recovering from PTSD, and that cannabis let him quit the sleeping pill he had been relying on. "Within two days I was off my highly addictive chemical sleep sedative," he said.
The accounts tend to share three features. The nightmares fade rather than vanish. Sleep returns, and with it the ability to get through the next day. Some veterans cut back on other sleep medications. These are personal stories, not proof, which is why the German trial matters.
New evidence emerges
Researchers at Charité, Berlin's university hospital, gave 171 adults with PTSD and frequent nightmares either THC drops or identical drops with no THC. Neither the patients nor their doctors knew who got which. Everyone took the drops at bedtime for ten weeks. The THC dose started at 2.5 mg and rose slowly to no more than 15 mg.
The results:
- 37% of the THC group had no nightmares at all by the end, compared with 15% on the dummy drops.
- Another 21% had their nightmares cut by at least half, so 58% improved in total.
- About five out of six people taking THC said their health had markedly improved.
- The most common side effects were dizziness, headaches and a bigger appetite, mostly mild to moderate.
- When the drops stopped, the researchers saw no withdrawal symptoms.
The lead researcher, Stefan Röpke, said THC appears to reduce dreaming during REM sleep, the phase when the most vivid dreams happen. That is close to what Gloade described in his own words: the nightmares are suppressed, not erased.
What the results don't show
The headline figure is real, but four details change how a veteran should read it.
First, 15% of the people on dummy drops also became nightmare-free. The fair measure of THC is the difference: about 22 more people in every hundred.
Second, this was not a veterans' trial. About 80% of participants were women, and most were survivors of assault. Only 19% traced their PTSD to war or captivity.
Third, THC helped the nightmares, not the PTSD as a whole. The researchers could not show it improved overall symptoms or depression. It is a sleep tool to use alongside trauma therapy, not instead of it.
Fourth, ten weeks is short, and the drug's maker, Bionorica, supported the study. Longer, independent trials are needed to know whether the benefit lasts.
The best evidence in veterans specifically comes from Canada. In 2015, doctors with the Canadian Forces in Ottawa tested nabilone, a lab-made relative of THC, on ten soldiers whose nightmares had not responded to standard treatment. Five of the ten were much improved on nabilone, compared with one in nine on placebo. The group was small, but every participant was military, and the result points the same way as the German trial.
Bringing the evidence home
Röpke told Earth.com where he sees the treatment fitting: "If established psychotherapeutic and pharmacological treatments have not provided sufficient relief, our findings suggest that dronabinol could be considered as an additional treatment option for trauma-related nightmares." That describes many Canadian veterans, who have already been through therapy and a list of sleep medications by the time they ask about cannabis.
The trial used a small, steady, measured dose at bedtime, raised slowly. An oil or capsule with the THC content printed on the label is much closer to that than a joint, where the dose changes from puff to puff. That is the approach the evidence now supports: one low dose of THC at night, aimed at the nightmares, adjusted slowly and alongside whatever else is working.
CBD, the non-intoxicating compound in cannabis, is the question many veterans ask next. The evidence is limited but promising. A 2019 case series of 11 patients taking CBD alongside regular psychiatric care found PTSD symptoms eased in 10 of them, and the authors noted relief in some patients with frequent nightmares, but there was no placebo group to compare against. The German trial tested THC alone, so it says nothing about CBD either way.
A step toward relief
For years, veterans like Steve Gloade said cannabis gave them back their nights. Now a controlled trial has the numbers to match: more than a third of patients on a low bedtime dose of THC stopped having nightmares. The trauma stays, but the dread of going to sleep does not have to.
