Criminally in Pain – When Politics Meets Medicine

Earlier this year I captured some thoughts on the plight of cluster headache sufferers and issues raised by research into a particular drug for its treatment.   I’ve updated the original article with only a few changes as, unfortunately, nothing much seems to have progressed….

While society vacillates over the role of controlled drugs in medicine, the devastating pain of cluster headache is driving some sufferers to the ‘magic’ of the psilocybin mushroom, turning them into lawbreakers of the highest order.

More Than A Headache

Imagine being taken out of normal life for two or three months every year and, for an hour or more every day, having metal spikes driven through your eye socket and into your brain – all with no anaesthetic!

The metal spikes are dilating blood vessels pressing against the trigeminal nerve, sending an acute, disabling pain down the side of your head; but the analogy well describes cluster headache – a rare but devastating condition for its 10,000 or so UK sufferers.

Drugs are of some help, when they work, but side effects can be serious and unpleasant.  As a result, some self-tagged ‘cluster heads’: a highly motivated collective of networked self-helpers, are pushing the boundaries on what they’re prepared to try for some respite.  And that can include self-medication with unconventional substances like the psilocybin found in ‘magic’ mushrooms, a practice carrying its own side-effects – of a legal nature.

There are similar, more widely publicised, issues around medicinal cannabis, another drug that despite its illegality sufferers find effective for a variety of conditions from nausea to multiple sclerosis.

It’s not just recreational consumption of the psychedelic neurotransmitters psilocybin and psilocin found in the mushrooms that’s banned, but serious research too.  That’s the case in the USA and the UK, where, as a Class A drug, psilocybin users and would-be researchers alike risk lengthy seven-year prison terms.

Despite this gloomy background, there was a ray of hope in 2006, when Harvard researchers Dr Andrew Sewell and Dr John Halpern published survey results taken from 53 cluster sufferers who were also illicit users of psilocybin and LSD.

Psilocybe cubensis (Wikicommons)

The positive indicators from the study were put forward as justification for full clinical trials, with a view, ultimately, to the drug attaining legal prescription status.  Yet, two years on in 2008, with the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) still refusing trials,  it doesn’t look like psilocybin will be joining the list of approved cluster headache remedies afterall.

 Sewell and Halpern put the reluctance down to over politicisation of the ‘War on Drugs‘.  And for sure, this does look like an inflexible policy approach holding back the valid scientific study of psychedelics, leaving legitimate patients as the real victims.

Until that changes, probably the best advice for sufferers persisting with mushroom self-medication is to keep one bloodshot eye firmly on the door.

Find Out More

Here’s a video of a guy suffering a Cluster Headache attack. Not pleasant.

OUCH – Organisation for the Understanding of Cluster Headache

www.clusterheadaches.org.uk

www.clusterheadaches.com

Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)

Also see: “The Effects Of Psilocybin And LSD On Cluster Headache: A Series Of 53 Cases.” Abstract.

Sewell, R. Andrew, M.D.; Halpern, John M., M.D. National Headache Foundation’s Annual Headache Research Summit. February, 2006.

UPDATES AND RELEVANT LINKS

Psilocybin and cancer (article in LA Times, September 2010)

Picture ‘Headache’ copyright Erin Conel Jones