Pot cookies calmed autistic boy’s rages
The mother of a severely autistic boy says it’s time to re-examine the restrictions placed on pot — and its use in treating ailing children The facts on four B.C. authors
It took me a while to NEW YO R K perfect the cookie recipe. I experimented with ingredients: Blueberry, Strawberry, Sour Diesel, White Widow, Bubba Kush, AK-47 — all strains of cannabis, which I stored, mixed with glycerine, in meticulously labelled jars on a kitchen shelf. After the cookies finished baking, I’d taste a few crumbs and annotate the effects in a notebook. Often, I felt woozy. One variation put me to sleep. When I had convinced myself that a batch was OK, I’d give a cookie to my nine-yearold son.
At the time he was consumed by violent rages. He would bang his head, scream for hours and literally eat his shirts. At dinnertime, he threw his plates so forcefully that there was food stuck on the ceiling. He would punch and scratch himself and others, such that people would look at the red streaks on our bodies and ask us, gingerly, if we had cats.
But when I got the cookies right, he calmed down. His aggressions became less ferocious and less frequent. Mealtimes became less fraught. He was able to maintain enough self-composure that he even learned how to ride a bike — despite every expert telling us it would never happen.
I realize that some people may look askance at parents who keep pot in the house, let alone conduct semi-legal medical experiments on their children. But it’s time we re-examine the cultural and legal restrictions we put on cannabis, especially as it pertains to kids. My son’s life has changed because of it.
Since he was an infant, I’d watched my son struggle. At 18 months, he underwent two major spinal-cord tumour surgeries, only weeks apart, and was immobilized in a cast for a year. After that, the violent rages began — sometimes as many as 300 in a day.
My husband and I didn’t understand why he acted this way until he was diagnosed at age three with a gut disease that left him in pain for most of the day and severe autism that made it difficult for him to express himself or ask for relief.
We tried all kinds of treatments, including applied behaviour analysis (the supposed gold standard in autism therapy), occupational therapy, horse therapy and auditory integration. We even got him a session with Soma Mukhopadhyay, a celebrity in the autism world, whose Rapid Prompting Method has helped some people learn how to communicate by pointing instead of vocalizing. By the time he was five, our son was in a special school and on a hypoallergenic diet. His gastroenterologist prescribed powerful anti-inflammatories, which left him vulnerable to violent episodes triggered by, say, hearing a dog bark 30 metres away, but stopped the worst headbanging — on our cast-iron tub.
Then, a couple of years later, the medication stopped working. And his aggressions exploded.
His school insisted he see a psychiatrist, who recommended the drug Risperdal to treat his “autistic irritability.” I was reluctant. Adults taking Risperdal often refer to it as a “chemical lobotomy.” In kids, there are also reports of alarming weight gain and sleepiness. Additionally, back then I could find only one study on the medication’s use in children with autism. It tracked 49 children who took the drug for eight weeks to six months — hardly long-term — and showed uneven results on behaviour, with side-effects including an average weight gain of six pounds in the eight-week period, elevated insulin levels and tremors. My husband said he’d rather our son attack us every day than suffer through that. But the school was calling us weekly, demanding that something change.
I was desperate and frantic. It seemed like I’d run out of options. Then I happened upon a paragraph in Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire. Pollan argued that cannabis is great for pain relief and can slow short-term memory formation. Might this, I wondered, help mitigate my son’s pain and the onslaught of sensory input that he struggled to process?
To research this question, I dropped in on a medical-marijuana patient group that met at Brown University, where I taught. The collection of severely ill patients couldn’t have been further from the giddy stoner convention I’d imagined.