Doctors urge caution for child, adolescent marijuana use

In spite of the fact some parents are declaring that medical marijuana may have beneficial uses for children with autism spectrum disorder, doctors are countering against it.

Medical findings so far have indicated that marijuana has a detrimental effect on the developing brain.  Hence physician recommendations that it not be used for children and teens.


Parents with autistic children face a host of obstacles in raising them.  The biggest one is behavioral in that the children have difficulty focusing, throw tantrums, bang their heads and offer hyperactivity and loud noises in public places, making it difficult for parents to take them out to public places.

For that reason, some parents have turned to various medications to help calm the children's behavior.

Yet it has not been found that autistic children actually benefit from medical marijuana.  Research findings counter claims that the children can be helped by cannabis, yet physicians sympathize with the parents' wish to find something that can help with controlling the behavior of the children:

"Children with severe ASD cannot communicate verbally and may relate to the world through loud, repetitive shrieking and hand-flapping that is very disruptive to their families and all those around them," comments Dr Knight, the study's senior author. "So my heart goes out to families who are searching for something, anything to help their child," he continues. "But in using medicinal marijuana they may be trading away their child's future for short-term symptom control."

Teen use of marijuana has actually been found injurious in some cases for their development.  Attention, memory and learning have been found negatively affected.

The child's developing brain has been found to be especially sensitive to certain medications, which includes cannabis.  Research has indicated that offering it to children aids them, but in fact it may actually cause harm to the young who are still in the process of forming ideas, using language and developing cognitive function.

The exception to use of cannabis for children has to do with seizures, as it has been found beneficial in controlling seizures in children with research that substantiates the benefit.