Jose Belen
Company: Mission Zero
Title: Founder and CEO
Age: 36
For the past 12 months, the editorial staff at Marijuana Venture has compiled a list of candidates for our third annual 40 Under 40 feature. This year, we narrowed our list down from hundreds of worthy candidates to come up with a cross-section of personalities across the U.S. and Canada, from salt-of-the-earth farmers to tech savants. All of them have unique stories, successes and ambitions and all represent the excitement and promise of the cannabis business. We feel honored to share their stories and look forward to watching them push forward in our ever-evolving industry.
As founder and CEO of the nonprofit Mission Zero, Jose Belen is working to allow other vets the same recovery he has made, through “any responsible tool to end veteran suicide,” including cannabis. Belen often cites the statistic that every 65 minutes a veteran commits suicide. The goal, the mission, if you will, is to get that number to zero.
“Veterans deserve better,” he says.
To this day, Belen is haunted by the things he saw during his time in Iraq at the beginning of the U.S. invasion. As a member of the U.S. Army’s field artillery unit, Belen experienced the horrors of war from the inside, even losing his best friend during a battle a few days before Christmas.
“For those 14 months it was intense combat,” he says.
One incident, however, hits particularly close to home. It involved a 7-year-old Iraqi girl in a beautiful dress who was killed by crossfire. Belen says his team received her body while she was still alive and they began to deliver medical treatment. As the girl died, Belen was among those on hand when they closed her eyes.
Years later, back safely in the states, Belen took his daughter to the dentist to get an X-ray. She was wearing a Christmas dress at the time and when they laid his daughter on the table, the image of the young Iraqi girl came screaming back in a classic post-traumatic stress disorder episode.
“That’s just one example of an incident that will plague a veteran his entire life,” Belen says.
Belen has dealt with PTSD since returning from Iraq 14 years ago. Initially, his doctors at Veterans Affairs gave him a laundry list of prescriptions, but Belen says instead of helping him, they made his PTSD worse and actually had him contemplating suicide, despite a loving wife and family and a cushy, corporate job in the insurance industry.
He was also self-medicating with alcohol, something he called a “red flag” given his teenage years spent in an abusive household. Back then, Belen turned to a different substance to help him get through and again turned to it to help deal with his PTSD.
“I knew cannabis to be a healing medicine from my adolescent years,” he says.
But as professional in a non-legal state — and as a veteran afraid of losing benefits — Belen kept his PTSD and his cannabis usage hidden until 2016. He says cannabis allowed him to feel emotions again, making him a better father and husband.
“Cannabis allowed me to find my smile again.” he says.
And while Belen and his organization are starting to get national recognition — including an April segment on “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” — the former military man is quick to put the focus back on what he is trying to accomplish and why.
“Don’t look at Jose Belen,” he says. “Look at the invisible veterans I carry on my back. It’s all about the mission.”