accepted as a medicine, but thc, the psychoactive part of the plant that gets you high or stoned, he said. he thought that thc might help calm kara. they were willing to try anything, but their home state of texas has the most restrictive cannabis laws. it s illegal. it has to be illegal for a reason. it took us a long time to get over the stigma. a stigma that this woman also understands all too well. when we first started nobody thought of using cannabis in a pediatric setting. an award-winning novelist wrote about giving her son cannabis, but only now was she willing to sit down to talk about it and introduce us to jason, who she calls jay. i think one of the biggest mischaracterizations that i got was, oh, you don t want to deal
because of the insect infestation, we just saw so completely how it was helping him. if this all sounds audacious, overwhelming even, it is. just because it worked for jay does not mean it would necessarily work for another child, no matter how similar they are. there s not yet the data. there aren t the studies as of now. there isn t the confidence to plunge forward. it s not a good idea to run out and buy it and just try to use it on your own. it s not clear what dose is the best dose if it does work. also whether what you are buying really has the dose you think it does, because it s unregulated. and then the final thing is that you don t know what else is in that bottle. there could be pesticides, there
be reasonable, how he stopped being aggressive. reporter: changes that have continued long after ezra stopped taking the study drugs almost a year ago. he has had no regression whatsoever. i don t think it s it s a cure. i think it s just going to make him make it easier for him. you know? easier for him to live. reporter: interestingly, these were the same kind of long-term changes jay also experienced. i don t know if i would use the word heal but it s more like helping him become more himself. like, he has a right to be healthy, to be happy, to feel joy. and this is certainly helped him do that and that s all i can ask for. reporter: i want to be very clear, again. no one is saying there is a cure for autism. there isn t, either. but the idea that cannabis might not just treat the symptoms of autism but also help repair, even protect the brain, is something that came up again and
even hypocritical she said, because the medications that were prescribed for jay were stronger than cannabis. they were essentially, tra tranquilizers, they are kind of a chemical lobotomy. like the zartlers, marie tried all the conventional medicine to help her son, and none of it worked and it was brutal. as soon as he got home, he would start to scream, whale and as a person, he didn t want to be touched. he had a lot of aggressions. he would attack us all the time. the college professor and award-winning writer used her skills to search for answers. consistently her research kept leading her back to cannabis,
but jay s neurologist was initially reluctant to even consider it. he was very worried that if he helped us get a license by prescribing it that if it ever got out that he was prescribing pot, that was going to look very bad for him. i remember, it was 2008, barely a dozen states legalized medicinal cannabis, afederally t was still illegal, and the thought of giving it to a child, unimaginable. but they were lucky, they lived in rhode island where cannabis was legal. he was probably the youngest person in the nation to have a cannabis license. with that license in hand, marie was able to access cannabis from a grower in rhode island. but she was still nervous. there was no road map for a strain or a particular dosage. i am a big guidelines person,