Why give a pot cookie to a nine-year-old?

Answer: Because he can’t figure out the bong.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s son is autistic and has medical problems that probably leave him in serious pain. That’s “probably” because her son, whom she refers to as “J”, isn’t verbal enough to say. Lashing out at family members and caregivers, J was a challenge to deal with.

But none of the medical alternatives seemed worth the risk:

Last year, Risperdal was prescribed for more than 389,000 children—240,000 of them under the age of 12—for bipolar disorder, ADHD, autism, and other disorders. Yet the drug has never been tested for long-term safety in children and carries a severe warning of side effects. From 2000 to 2004, 45 pediatric deaths were attributed to Risperdal and five other popular drugs also classified as “atypical antipsychotics.”

So, after gradually coming around to the idea, Lee and her husband got their son licensed to use medical marijuana, bought $80 worth of pot, in various forms, and started experimenting with ways to get him to take the drug:

We made the cookies with the marijuana olive oil, starting J off with half a small cookie, eaten after dinner. J normally goes to bed around 7:30 p.m.; by 6:30 he declared he was tired and conked out. We checked on him hourly. As we anxiously peeked in, half-expecting some red-eyed ogre from Reefer Madness to come leaping out at us, we saw instead that he was sleeping peacefully. Usually, his sleep is shallow and restless. J also woke up happy.

The story doesn’t yet have a fully happy ending — the family is still in the early stages of trying out medical marijuana. But it’s still worth the read, and I was particularly intrigued by how Lee feels about the social stigma of pot.