Weed For Kids With Autism??!
I saw this article today and was completely horrified. The author, a teacher at Brown University (so much for the Ivy League), admits to doping her nine year old autistic son because she can't deal with his tantrums.
My sister has autism. A severe case similar to this author's child. And my parents and my sister's teachers dealt with years of her tantrums through traditional therapies, which, while long, frustrating, and often-times grueling, have helped my sister learn to live life in spite of the limitations autism attempts to place on her.
The author of this piece didn't have the patience or time for that. Her solution was to drug up her 9-year-old... basically, keep him high all day so he didn't act out. Because the author saw her child as a problem, and not, well, a child, she didn't have any issues with this.
Let me make this analogy: Say your baby keeps you up at night all hours with crying. A traditional parent would rock the baby back to sleep, give it a bottle, play music, read another bedtime story until the child finally went back to sleep, even if it came at the cost of their own slumber. But the author of this piece would probably fill a baby bottle with a couple shots of Southern Comfort and make their baby drink till she passed out from drunkeness. Problem solved!!!!
This author is getting her child high... because it makes him easier to deal with. It's hard to get an autistic child to swallow pills, or undergo therapy. But give a kid with autism a cookie? They'll eat it right up. And then it's easy to get a high child to do just about anything... like Jaycee Dugard's kidnappers discovered.
What a horrific person!
The author wrote a part 2 presenting evidence of how pot has helped her child. For instance, he smiles more! But then again, she's not concerned with helping her child adapt to the world and gain some sense of independence. Rather, she is perfectly content to make her child a drug-dependent invalid, who will go his whole life not learning how to live with his condition, but instead, how to live in a cloudy daze.
Her concern is with a happy child. What if all parents tried to make their children happy in the same way? Maybe my mom could have fed me pot every day since childhood. I'd be pretty happy... at least until the drugs started to wear off and I realized I was a pothead still living with my mom at age 27.
What happens when the marijuana runs dry? The author better hope it never happens. Because she'll be left with a child who hasn't learned, hasn't grown, and hasn't adapted to cope in the world, despite his limitations. She'll be left with a kid begging for his pot.
She's learned to control her kid with drugs. Congrats.
