A few months ago, I blogged about the mother of a severely autistic child. After having tried everything traditional — including some seriously heavy pharmaceuticals, she was about to try giving her nine-year-old son marijuana.
It wasn’t a choice that she just made willy-nilly. As she wrote then, she didn’t smoke pot herself, but she did do a lot of research, and all the research she did into marijuana made it seem like the logical choice. So, she got a certificate for medical marijuana, and gave it a shot.
The early results were promising. But they were early, and her son still had enormous difficulties.
Now, a few months later, she’s written a follow-up essay in Slate, exploring the transformation in her son’s behaviour. It’s startling — and heart-warming:
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.
That brief paragraph doesn’t begin to capture some of the longer anecdotes that she tells, but it’s best if you go and read through her full story (part 1) (part 2) for yourself.
Now, I’m not saying that pot is a cure-all for autism (it’s not) and I’m not saying that too much self-medication on anything is good — including marijuana, but also including alcohol and many pain medications.
But I do think it’s a tragedy that so little research has been done into marijuana, which, to this layman, looks to have a bunch of useful properties.
Now, were there any negative side-effects to the marijuana experiment? Yup, but they weren’t what I expected. J’s mother writes that, pre-pot, they were so wrapped up in caring for their son that they hardly ever left their house. In the neighbourhood, they were the family that kept pretty much to themselves. But the marijuana has made it possible to take J out for excursions — and now some of their neighbours have realized how different he is. And shun him.
Shame on them. I know how difficult it can be to interact with people who are severely handicapped or have extreme behavioural problems. It’s difficult and exhausting, sometimes. But it can also be exceedingly rewarding — and if you’re just the neighbour who has to make a decision to either wave and say “hi” or turn away and mutter, well, come on. Just be neighbourly.
Grant Hamilton
3 Responses to “Tot on pot, Part 2”
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That sounds very cool, but I don’t buy the mom’s story. On the day with 300 aggressions, for instance, assuming it’s a 7-hour school day, that means we’re looking at a mean of 42.85 aggressions per hour. Who was observing and recording all of these? Was anyone teaching? Did each aggression last a minute or less? Were some of them long tantrums? Does a tantrum count as one long aggression or a series of shorter aggressions? Are we to believe he was allowed to bite, punch, or kick someone almost every minute of the school day? Really? And no one sued the school or J’s parents?
So let’s assume that the teacher had him removed from the classroom after a mere 3 hours of such aggressions, so he spent the rest of the day in the principal’s office or something. That means he would have committed 100 aggressions per hour, which is difficult to comprehend, but at least we don’t have to assume he was allowed to do this on a minute-by-minute basis all day. It still means someone would have to have been recording these aggressions in some way. Maybe it wa sa teacher’s aide who follows him around with a pen and a clipboard.
On his better days, we’re looking at an aggression every few minutes. I wonder what the school would say if we were allowed to hear their side of it? I’d wager they’d say these figures are exaggerated. Thankfully, J’s mom has kept her son’s identity, and the school’s identity, a secret so that she doesn’t have to produce results.
So I’m calling bullshit. I’m not anti-marijuana, but its adoring fans can be deceptive and uncritical in the pursuit of the Greater Good (not you, J’s mom). Perhaps she’s been learning research methodology from her homeopath.
Lol. But I suspect her child is not in a regular classroom, but in a segregated area for kids with severe challenges. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if J had two or even three TAs all to himself, even if he was in a regular school building; such is the nature of our current “mainstreaming” ideology. I’ve been in “classrooms” like that, and for many of the students, the focus is on teaching basic life skills, like how to wash dishes or even how to wash your own face. But for some students, even that level of self-sufficiency is impossible.
Having working with severely autistic kids (not quite on J’s level, but close) I can easily believe 300 aggressions in a day — with caveats. I suspect, for instance, that he’s in an extended school day, perhaps spending as long as 9 or 10 hours with caregivers. And I also suspect that they have a set of guidelines for what counts as a single act of aggression, and when they can count it as two or five or even 10, if it goes on long enough.
I’ll also bet that “aggression” is pretty loosely defined. For example, I’m sure that yelling or shouting or otherwise vocalizing at someone would sometimes count as an “aggression.” And I’ll bet that so do acts of self-aggression.
Anyway, no matter how loose they are in their definitions or how lax they are in their methodology, the starkness of the difference pre- and post-pot sounded pretty convincing to me. Certainly it’s intriguing enough to suggest that perhaps a more stringent study be undertaken.
Yes, we can fill in the blanks for her, and thus make her “case” appear far more impressive than it is.
It’s funny how people will see something like this and think, “Yeah! Let’s keep that kid stoned! Further study is warranted” But then with Ritalin they say, “Hey, why would you put drugs in a child’s body? That’s immoral!”