Today we had Alex driven up to our house for his visit, and to meet his new baby sister. His mood was all over the place, and we had a few really great moments, but overall the visit was terrible.
The interesting thing is that the hash concoction (hash + coconut oil) seemed to pull him out of a very aggressive, bad mood. When he arrived, he was hitting his head with his hands very hard, and doing his “chin snap” where he bashes his chin into his shoulder, causing an audible “snap” from his teeth colliding. I gave him hash early and he slowly pulled out of the bad mood.
As he was getting happy, we introduced him to his baby sister, and he was adorable. He even moved his head very gently toward hers in what appeared to be a “nose kiss”, something he has been fond of doing with me. It was unbelievably sweet.
Unfortunately, this didn’t last long. His calm slowly got replaced by a frantic happiness where he was increasingly more aggressive as time passed. By the two-and-a-half-hour mark, I had to call his home and tell them he needed to be picked up, because he wouldn’t stop head-butting, biting, hair-pulling, and slapping me. His younger brother was getting very scared, and at one point asked a question that just crushed me: “when are his parents coming to pick him up?” He realized he’d misspoken pretty quickly, and it was an innocent mistake, but it tears me apart all the same.
With prohibitionists fighting so hard to keep marijuana illegal, and to keep science from finding its way into the debate, we really are at the mercy of the government. Could the hash have been too strong? Too weak? The wrong strain for calming Alex? Too high in THC? Too low in THC? Too much or little of other compounds? We know from experience that cannabis does amazing things for Alex under the right circumstances, but we don’t know how to replicate those circumstances. As long as the DEA can be judge, jury, and executioner, we will probably never know how to properly treat our son, and many other parents will never even think of cannabis as an option even when their situations are dire.