Poll: Most Veterans Back Marijuana Legalization, Medical and Recreational

October 19, 2026

Photo by JCDCreative via Pixabay.

A new survey from Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, released October 15, 2026, puts hard numbers behind something advocates have argued for years: veterans want cannabis treated like medicine, not contraband. The poll surveyed 470 veterans spread across 47 states and Washington, D.C., and the results aren't close. Eighty-seven percent back legalizing marijuana for medical use, 61% support recreational legalization outright, and 69% want the federal government to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III.

Those figures land at an awkward moment for federal policy. Rescheduling is technically underway but legally stuck, VA-related cannabis legislation is sitting in Congress without a finish line, and veterans themselves are already using cannabis in large numbers whether or not the law has caught up to them. The IAVA poll doesn't describe a population waiting for permission. It describes one that's already made up its mind and is mostly asking the federal government to stop pretending otherwise.

What the IAVA Survey Found

Photo via Unsplash.

IAVA fielded this survey specifically to capture how veterans feel about cannabis policy at a moment when federal rescheduling is actually in motion, even if stalled. The sample size, 470 respondents, isn't massive, but the geographic spread across 47 states plus D.C. gives it real breadth, and the results were lopsided enough that sampling noise isn't doing the heavy lifting here. Medical legalization support hit 87%, which is about as close to consensus as you get on any policy question involving a federally controlled substance. Recreational support came in lower but still a clear majority at 61%, and 69% specifically backed the Schedule I to Schedule III move that's been grinding through DEA and DOJ review for most of 2026.

One detail stands out: nearly three in four respondents said they already knew about the federal rescheduling effort before IAVA even asked them about it. That's a notably high baseline awareness for a bureaucratic process that most Americans couldn't describe in detail. It suggests veterans are tracking this issue closely, not reacting cold to a pollster's prompt.

The research appetite was just as strong. Ninety-one percent said marijuana should be studied for its medical potential, and 88% specifically want the VA itself to conduct that research rather than leaving it to outside institutions or state-level medical programs. That's a meaningful distinction. Veterans aren't just asking for cannabis to be legal somewhere else and hoping the benefits trickle down to them. They want the agency that manages their healthcare to be the one doing the studying, presumably because VA-backed research would carry more weight with VA clinicians and VA formularies than a university study ever could.

The Comfort Gap Between Veterans and Their Doctors

While 70% of veterans say they are comfortable discussing medical marijuana with their doctor, only 29% have actually had that conversation—highlighting a significant gap between willingness and action.

The most telling numbers in this survey aren't about legalization at all -- they're about conversations that aren't happening. Among the 212 respondents who said they're interested in marijuana as a treatment option, 70% said they'd feel comfortable bringing it up with their primary care doctor. Only 29% of that same group had actually done it. That's a 41-point gap between willingness and action, and it's too large to chalk up to simple forgetfulness.

Context helps explain it. Of the full sample, 271 veterans reported past recreational use of marijuana and 179 reported past medical use, meaning a sizable chunk of respondents already have firsthand experience with the plant, legal status aside. Among veterans with that prior experience, 72% said they'd be interested in using marijuana or cannabinoid products as treatment if it were available through proper channels. So the interest is there, the experience is often there, and the comfort level with their own doctor is there too, at least in theory. What's missing is the actual conversation.

That gap points toward stigma, or more specifically, uncertainty about what a VA doctor is even allowed to say back. A veteran who isn't sure whether mentioning cannabis use could affect their benefits, their pain management plan, or their relationship with their provider has every incentive to stay quiet, even if their doctor would respond reasonably. It's not that veterans doubt their own interest in cannabis as medicine. It's that the rules governing what VA providers can discuss, let alone recommend, have been murky enough for long enough that silence has become the safer default. That's a policy and communication failure, not a sign of low demand.

IAVA's Ask: Research Funding, Not Just Rhetoric

IAVA isn't just publishing numbers and moving on. The group is using this survey to push Congress toward a specific ask: real federal funding for rigorous, veteran-specific research into cannabis safety and effectiveness, rather than more hearings and position statements. The framing matters. Decades of Schedule I status have made large-scale, VA-backed clinical research nearly impossible to conduct domestically, which means the evidence base clinicians would need to confidently recommend cannabis for conditions like chronic pain simply doesn't exist at the scale it should.

This isn't an isolated push. It echoes a Veterans of Foreign Wars poll from March 2026, in which 83% of veterans said VA doctors should be allowed to recommend medical marijuana directly. The two surveys, run by different organizations with different veteran memberships, landing in similar territory within the same year is worth noting. It's not one advocacy group amplifying its own base.

Legislatively, there's been actual movement, if not resolution. In May 2026, the House Veterans' Affairs Committee advanced the Veterans Medical Marijuana Safe Harbor Act, H.R. 2435, sponsored by Rep. Earl Blumenauer, on an 18-14 vote. The bill would shield veterans and VA providers from certain federal consequences tied to medical marijuana use and discussion in states where it's legal. Separately, Congress passed FY2027 Military Construction-VA appropriations language, driven by Reps. Brian Mast, Dina Titus, and David Joyce, that allows VA-affiliated doctors to recommend medical cannabis to patients in states where it's legal. That's a narrower fix than full rescheduling, but it's a concrete one, and it's already law rather than a pending bill.

Where Federal Rescheduling Actually Stands

The federal rescheduling picture is more tangled than headlines about marijuana moving to Schedule III suggest. On April 22-23, 2026, the DOJ and DEA, under Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, finalized a rule shifting only FDA-approved marijuana drugs and state-licensed medical marijuana programs to Schedule III. Recreational marijuana stayed exactly where it's long been: Schedule I, alongside heroin, legally speaking the same as a drug with no accepted medical use.

Broader rescheduling of marijuana as a whole substance is being handled through a separate DEA administrative hearing process, and that process hit an 11-day evidentiary session in June and July 2026 that produced no final resolution. Then, on September 29, 2026, Chief Administrative Law Judge Derek C. Julius stayed those proceedings entirely, pending review of a new GAO report, with the government's response due October 13, 2026 -- just two days before IAVA released this survey. In other words, the broader rescheduling question remains legally frozen at almost the exact moment veterans are being asked how they feel about it.

Practically, this leaves a patchwork. Veterans living in states with legal medical marijuana programs can now get referrals through VA-affiliated doctors under the new appropriations language. But VA providers still cannot directly recommend cannabis nationwide, and a veteran's actual access depends heavily on which state they live in and how that state's program is structured. Anyone trying to figure out what's actually permitted should treat this as a moving target rather than settled law, and check current state rules and VA guidance directly rather than assuming last year's answer still holds.

Strip away the legislative tangle and the IAVA numbers tell a simpler story: veterans aren't waiting on Washington to make up their minds. Large numbers of them have already used cannabis, medically or otherwise, and the 72% interest rate among those with prior experience suggests that gap between law and behavior isn't closing from the law's side first. Policy is trying to catch up to practice, not the other way around.

The actual bottleneck isn't public opinion among veterans, and it hasn't been for a while. It's whether Congress follows through on funding VA-specific research at a scale that produces usable clinical evidence, and whether the DEA's stalled rescheduling hearing ever reaches a conclusion rather than another stay pending another report. Until both of those move, bills like the Safe Harbor Act and piecemeal appropriations fixes will keep patching around the edges of a federal classification that most veterans surveyed no longer think reflects reality.

For individual veterans, the practical takeaway is less about the national debate and more about local specifics. What a VA provider can discuss or refer a patient for still depends on the state someone lives in, and that framework has shifted multiple times in 2026 alone. Anyone considering cannabis as part of their own treatment should talk to their VA provider directly, check their state's current medical and recreational marijuana laws, and not assume federal rescheduling has settled anything yet -- because, as of this survey's release, it hasn't.