Psychedelic Outlaws
The Movement Revolutionizing Modern Medicine
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Award-winning sociologist Joanna Kempner unearths how a group of ordinary people debilitated by excruciating pain developed their own medicine from home-grown psilocybin mushrooms and fought for recognition in a broken medical system.
“A deeply absorbing examination of pain and perseverance ... an ode to self-experimentation that manages to be as clear-eyed as it is moving.” ―Susannah Cahalan, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire and The Great Pretender
Cluster headache, a diagnosis sometimes referred to as a ‘suicide headache,’ is widely considered the most severe pain disorder that humans experience. There is no cure, and little funding available for research into developing treatments.
When Joanna Kempner met Bob Wold in 2012, she was introduced to a world beyond most people's comprehension—a clandestine network determined to find relief using magic mushrooms. These ‘Clusterbusters,’ a group united only by the internet and a desire to survive, decided to do the research that medicine left unfinished. They produced their own psychedelic treatment protocols and managed to get academics at Harvard and Yale to test their results.
Along the way, Kempner explores not only the fascinating history and exploding popularity of psychedelic science, but also a regulatory system so repressive that the sick are forced to find their own homegrown remedies. From the windswept shores of the North Sea through the verdant jungle of Peruvian Amazon to a kitschy underground palace built in a missile silo in Kansas, Psychedelic Outlaws chronicles the rise of psychedelic medicine amid a healthcare system in turmoil.
Kempner’s gripping tale of community and resilience brings readers on a eye-opening journey through the politics of pain, through the stories of people desperate enough to defy the law for a moment of relief.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this enlightening report, Kempner (Not Tonight), a sociology professor at Rutgers University, sheds light on the individuals and organizations working to legitimize and legalize the medical use of LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and other psychedelic drugs. Her account centers on Clusterbusters, an online community for individuals suffering from cluster headache (a disease that causes excruciating bouts of acute pain). Kempner describes how Chicago construction worker Bob Wold founded the group in 2002 after discovering that small doses of psychedelic mushrooms gave him the relief that dozens of prescription treatments had failed to provide. Clusterbusters was initially focused on sharing how to grow and use mushrooms to treat headaches, but the group's ambitions swiftly expanded to include convincing the medical establishment to take psychedelic therapies seriously. Kempner profiles major players in Clusterbusters' campaign, including Rick Doblin, whose psychedelics advocacy organization MAPS helped Wold interface with medical research institutions, and R. Andrew Sewell, a renegade Harvard doctor who in the mid-aughts worked with Wold and Doblin to research psychedelics' efficacy in treating cluster headaches. Kempner's empathetic reporting illuminates how collaborations between patients and medical professionals are reviving scientific interest in psychedelic therapies, and she provides historical background showing how moral panics around drugs in the 1970s and '80s halted promising research on medical applications of MDMA and LSD. This will open readers' minds to the health benefits of psychedelics.
