Freedom Fighter of the Month
August 2010 – Mieko Hester-Perez & Marie Myung-Ok Lee
Mothers battling childhood autism with medical marijuana
By Russ Belville, NORML Outreach Coordinator
This month’s co-Freedom Fighters are Mieko Hester-Perez (left) and Marie Myung-Ok Lee (right), two mothers who are bringing awareness of medical cannabis as a treatment for severe childhood autism.
Mieko Hester-Perez received national attention after being featured on ABC’s Good Morning America as a parent who uses medical cannabis as treatment for her autistic son. Her 10-year-old son was dangerously underweight, “you could see the bones in his chest. He was going to die,” she said on the nationally syndicated television morning show. “My son had self-injurious behaviors. He was extremely aggressive, he would run out of our house… he was a danger to himself and others.” A few hours after giving her son a cannabis-infused brownie she saw a major change in her son’s eating habits and behavior. “Marijuana balanced my son,” says Hester-Perez.
Marie Myung-Ok Lee is another brave mother who found medical cannabis to work miracles with her son’s autism and in May of 2009 bravely wrote a long article called “Why I Give My 9-Year-Old Son Pot” in Slate Magazine. Her son’s illness had caused him to have violent aggressive outbursts, chew holes in his shirt, and suffer from other major debilitating behaviors. She mentions in the article the effects of the medical cannabis on her son were life changing. “Since we started him on his ’special tea,’ J’s little face, which is sometimes a mask of pain, has softened. He smiles more.
Lee goes on to note, “It’s strange, I’ve come to think, that the virtues of such a useful and harmless botanical have been so clouded by stigma.” It’s a stigma that has these two women facing the accusations of bad parenting for “getting their kids stoned.”
These women are part of the growing NORML Women’s Alliance, which you can learn more about at http://www.norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=8059.
