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A professor treats her autistic child's aggression with marijuana
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Deluged by the Opportunists in Autism, parents are fraught with heartbreaking dilemmas. Whether or not to utilize drug therapy for behaviors is a conflict that many parents face. There has been no more compelling a scenario than one shared by Brown professor Marie Myung-Ok Lee. Given the risks involved with mainstream drug protocols for autism, Ms. Lee chose to go "rogue" in a most dramatic way. She applied for a license for the use of medical marijuana and gave her son "pot" in order to defuse aggressive behavior. She writes:
When I think of the embarrassment I may feel if my colleagues see this article, or teachers or parents at J's school, or his less open-minded doctors, I pause. Although I occasionally smoked pot as a teenager (believe me, in northern Minnesota, there was not much else to do), now that I'm a law-abiding adult, all the scary anti-drug messages are flashing in my brain. But when I researched cannabis the way I did conventional drugs, it seemed clear to me that marijuana at the very least wouldn't harm J, and might help. It's strange, I've come to think, that the virtues of such a useful and harmless botanical have been so clouded by stigma. Even the limited studies that have been done suggest marijuana's potential as an adjunctive therapy for cancer. Marijuana, you need some rebranding. Maybe a cool new name.
Both articles by Ms. Lee are written with deliberate and compelling motivation. Why I Give My 9-Year-Old Pot explains her journey, while Part II highlights certain undisputed success in the cannabis (Marijuana) trial. She reports:
How is J. doing now, four months into our cannabis experiment? Well, one day recently, he came home from school, and I noticed something really different: He had a whole shirt on.
Pre-pot, J. ate things that weren't food. There's a name for this: pica. (Pregnant women are known to pica on chalk and laundry starch.) J. chewed the collar of his T-shirts while stealthily deconstructing them from the bottom up, teasing apart and then swallowing the threads. By the time I picked him up from the bus stop after school, the front half of his shirt was gone. His pica become so uncontrollable we couldn't let him sleep with a pajama top (it would be gone by morning) or a pillow (ditto the case and the stuffing). An antique family quilt was reduced to fabric strips, and he even managed to eat holes in a fleece blanket-so much for his organic diet. I started dressing him only in organic cotton shirts, but we couldn't support the cost of a new one every day. The worst part was watching him scream in pain on the toilet, when what went in had to come out. I had nightmares about long threads knotting in digestive organs. (TMI? Welcome to our life!)
Almost immediately after we started the cannabis, the pica stopped. Just stopped. J. now sleeps with his organic wool-and-cotton, hypoallergenic, temptingly chewable comforter. He pulls it up to his chin at night and declares, "I'm cozy!"
Next, we started seeing changes in J.'s school reports. His curriculum is based on a therapy called Applied Behavioral Analysis, which involves, as the name implies, meticulous analysis of data. At one parent meeting in August (J. is on an extended school year), his teacher excitedly presented his June-July "aggression" chart. An aggression is defined as any attempt or instance of hitting, kicking, biting, or pinching another person. For the past year, he'd consistently had 30 to 50 aggressions in a school day, with a one-time high of 300. The charts for June through July, by contrast, showed he was actually having days-sometimes one after another-with zero aggressions.
Given that the utilization of medical marijuana has been legalized in 13 states, investigating its use for autism therapy just may open new doors. Whether it is a case of "desperate times; desperate measures", parents may identify. Marie Myung-Ok Lee has pioneered an intervention to help her son.
Let the research begin.
