can smoking weed make autism worse

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"In addition Marijuana also does permanent damage to the sperm and egg cells of the reproductive tract, and can affect ones sperm levels, as well as the ability to "perform."

What's so wrong with that? not everyones looking to have babies...don't know if its true though, the rest of the post that is from is false though.

That's funny because I know plenty of people who get horny when they smoke...

You know what else? If you step on a crack, you'll break your mother's back... Just because something gets spread around and lots of people hear about it, that doesn't mean it's true.

So go ahead, think whatever you want about pot. Ignore the countless people who do it all the time and have no real negative effects from it.

My NT friends (some of them) have done it, but I have not. The *ONE* contact buzz I got once kind of disturbed me. Of course, that is because the other people smoking saw something (we had gone to see it, btw) that figured in a local legend. One of the "Ghost" lights. They panicked & it rubbed off on me. I just felt jittery & dizzy..
That said, I'm fine with its use if its legal & under responsible supervision.

Sincerely,
Matt

Did you mean "ingest" rather than smoke? If not, I'm confused. I would think if you inhaled it without first setting fire to it, and thus inhaling the smoke, you would choke on it.

Maybe they meant if you vaporize it, as that still requires inhaling, but does not do damage. Though they have found even more evidence cannabis smoke is not nearly as harmful as cigarette smoke.

Well, my psych prof did a unit on drugs--incidentally, she's a child of the 60s and has tried lots of them herself--and what she told us about marijuana is that it has the effect of reducing your ability to censor what you're aware of. Usually, a person will take in sensory information, but only the relevant stuff will enter conscious awareness. Marijuana lowers that threshold, so that there is less of a filter, and the person is flooded by sensory information usually considered irrelevant.

Now, for many autistic people, sensory problems are exactly that: They can't filter sensory information well enough. For those people, it would not surprise me to be told that their sensory integration problems were heightened under the influence of marijuana; though, since it also has a sedative effect, this might not be a distressing experience.

Bottom line? Yes. It can make autism worse.

I don't know that it makes it worse, I mean maybe it causes more outside information to be processed, but if it reduces the discomfort associated with the sensory sensitivity wouldn't that be a good thing? Also it seems to slow the thinking process down a bit which can be good for me because I usually have lots of over-analytical, stressful thoughts going on but cannabis slows it down so I can better process those thoughts and come to more helpful conclusions.

When I am sober I have a hard time breaking my rules of interpersonal interaction. This leads me to think and choose every word that I say before I say it. This also keeps me from looking people in the face, not that I have an easy time catching their reactions anyhow because my eyes focus on very minute details. I should mention that I work sober.

When I smoke I am able to either forget the rules, or start to notice the negative reactions in people's voices. I can hear when they start to lose interest in what I am saying and try, albeit still awkwardly, to shift the conversation to something they would find more interesting. I can tolerate people I wouldn't want around me by allowing me to excuse their misrepresentations or when they violate my moral code. I am also able to prioritize things in my daily life with better results. I really enjoy what it does to music, I can tolerate music I don't like and music I do like becomes a powerful opus. Colors become more intense, but I never had a noticeable sensitivity to light. It also makes everything taste better and I have learned to appreciate foods that I normally won't eat. Most importantly it has helped me widen my area of focus visually so if I look people in the face I can recognize the emotions they exhibit. I am experimenting with mirroring their emotions in my face while I converse with people and it works pretty well for keeping discussions moving without even figuring out what to say.

It will intensify some of the negative AS traits. I can have problems speaking, even when I want to, if I overmedicate. But it also does this to NTs and they actually get what it means to be stuck in your head. My compulsions to flap can be more intense, but not so much that I act out in public. I pace a lot more as well.

Bison

Unless you've smoked it yourself, I don't feel you really have the right to answer that question. Plus, it depends on who does it. I've seen all different kinds of reactions to smoking pot.

I will say this... It definitely relieves anxiety and depression, at least for me. It also opens up my mind to new ways of thinking I never would have even considered without it. It makes many experiences better, and it even seems to enhance certain abilities. For instance, I've noticed that when I'm high, it's easy to block out outside interference... In other words, it makes it easier to concentrate on the task at hand. But it depends. Sometimes it can also make it more difficult to focus on things... It really depends on the pot and other factors I haven't quite figured out yet, but sometimes when I'm high, I'll be better at playing footbag or videogames. Sometimes I'll listen to a song I've heard or watch a show/movie/whatever i've seen a billion times before, but this time, I'm high, and for whatever reason, certain lines that always sounded like gibberish or something that never quite made sense, for whatever reason, suddenly become clear to me. It's almost as though smoking marijuana somehow alleviates the problems I have with processing sound properly. In addition to this, I've noticed recently that when listening to certain music while high, I'll become just overcome with emotion(i don't know of a better way to describe this) as a result of the music combined with the high, to the point of tears. It's like... It makes the music give me this awesome euphoric feeling. Marijuana is such a wonderful HERB. The worst thing it really does to me is screw with my short term memory, so sometimes I forget where I put my keys...

So anyway, I would say NO, it doesn't make autism worse, but then again, I don't have autism, and I'm not even totally sure that I have aspergers. However, it seems to make it easier to talk to people and focus on things, but at the same time, sometimes when I'm high I don't want to talk to anybody at all. I think it might depend on the kind of weed being smoked and the mood I'm in in the first place. I will say that it hasn't made any of my supposed aspergers symptoms any worse, at least not that I can tell, in the almost 7 years I've been smoking it.

Bottom line? Whose bottom line?

I love how people who have never tried pot or any drug for that matter, will go to great lengths to convince others that they're terrible. And what I REALLY don't understand is the fact that a lot of times religious people will condemn marijuana. They believe in god and that god created everything, including pot. Man made alcohol, god made marijuana, which should you trust more, especially if you're a devout christian? They don't even follow their own rules or logic... I'll never understand stupidity.

As much as I enjoy cannabis, I have to say it definitely has the potential to make anxiety worse. In fact, Too much THC can cause panic attacks. As far as how it makes you feel, it really is dependent of the strain of marijuana you are smoking. Pace yourself, moderate it if you choose to smoke. It can help your autism as well as make it worse. It's dependent on so many factors. So many different types of cannabis strains are out there, and you never really know what your getting in the illegal market. Just don't smoke that synthetic stuff. That's hell for your brain!

It's just a matter of knowing the right people in the illegal market, then you can get some good things.

This isn't anybody's agenda. It's just my theorizing based on what I know about it and its effects--and, like I said, while I don't have direct experiences with it, the person who taught me about it did have direct experiences. (And another professor did research on THC with human subjects, and agreed with those same conclusions.)

I'm pretty sure that, given the way it causes you to notice the outside world much more than usual, and given that a common problem for autistics is noticing the world too much (i.e., being distracted or flooded by information), that adding those two together would mean you are using more mental resources for sensory processing, and less for other cognitive functions like problem-solving, planning, and self-regulation.

I'm not talking about distress here. It may well reduce distress; that, I don't know. But if it did that at the cost of reducing your ability to function--or, worse, reducing both your ability to function and your ability to self-monitor and know your ability to function had been reduced--it would be a very, very bad trade-off. For those of us teetering on the edge of independence, it could be the difference between living on your own and needing to move into a group home; or the difference between being employable and living at 50% below the poverty line on welfare.

There are potential uses for marijuana, and they should be researched. But, when we do the research and gather the data, I sincerely doubt this will be one of those uses. Maybe it will be useful for anxiety disorders. We already know it helps with nausea. There are applications, and useful ones.

But it's nowhere near the miracle substance some of you guys seem to think it is. If you want to ingest the stuff, don't use the "it's medicinal" excuse; frankly, I think it sounds like you're ashamed of it, like you're pleading that you're an upstanding citizen who wouldn't possibly ever use an illegal drug unless you were forced to do so by some horrible affliction. That ain't so. Autistic people who use mind-altering substances do so mostly because they like the experience. That's a human universal--we've been eating mildly toxic stuff since the dawn of time, just to see how it changes how we experience the world. I like caffeine, myself.

Just because something is interesting to do, or feels good, or causes you to think in a different way, doesn't mean it's good for you. In this case, the problem isn't the health issue so much as the lost time, lost productivity. It's not the worst thing you could do to try to cope, but it's not particularly healthy, either. I look at self-injury much the same way--it's something you do because you haven't got the skills you need to deal with your problems without it. It can become an escape or even a way of ignoring the world, giving up on life in general.

People who get high every once in a while to relax don't have those problems; but start using it as a substitute for proper coping skills, and you most certainly will have those problems. And the way a lot of you guys are talking about it, like it's a miracle substance that makes life perfect, doesn't sound like recreational every-now-and-then fun time to me. Sounds more like it's being used as a substitute for learning to deal with the real world.

See here is a thought medical related data about marijuana and data about harmful effects aside. Is smoking a bowl to chill out after say a long day of work that much different then having a drink to relax? should we really be criminalizing something so trivial? I mean come on I know a number of people with jobs who smoke and hardly touch alcohol. That is more than I can say for myself so why are we criminalizing non-violent drug offenders?

I don't think it should be a crime. I also don't think it's a cure-all, or that it's perfectly safe, or that it isn't often used as an unhealthy coping strategy.

"Should it be illegal?" and "Is it wise for me to use it?" are two totally different questions, and they shouldn't be smushed together. Plenty of unwise things are legal, and I don't think they should be made illegal. People should be free to make their own choices; only when their choices hurt others should the law step in. Legal does not equal "good idea". It just means that there's no reason for the law to address that particular action. In this case, I think the laws are useless; all we're doing is clogging up the justice system for no good reason and no benefit.