[spores in Cali]

I found lots of info on the shrooms and looked at doing my own research on spores. but they cannot be shipped to California. 

If you don't have an out of state friend to order them and forward to you, here's an alternate method.

Go online and set up an account with a private out-of-state mail forwarding outfit that accepts mail addressed to you to its street address (most do) and they will forward it on to you. Rates run around $30 a month, but once you get your spores, you can cancel the mail forwarder. This protects the supplier who has no way of knowing if they're mailing to a mail forwarder, and even if they did, have no way of knowing the ultimate destination. I researched a big mail forwarder in Nevada and was on the verge of ordering spores, but decided against the investment in equipment and burning up time becoming an amateur mycologist. Instead, I chose to just buy them in dried form. Ask your local 23 year-old male who wears his rejection of middle-class American culture like a badge, and most likely he can hook you up. They're available everywhere including small towns.

Next, get yourself a digital gram scale (8 bucks from Amazon). I chop an entire mushroom up and mix it so the entire pile proportionally represents the entire mushroom in case that matters. I keep a filing card with the scale showing the date and weight of each dose. Then I load weigh out the selected dose and put it ina a German-made Finum-brand six inch long, chlorine-free paper tea bag (also from Amazon) that prevents the dose from entering the potion like a conventional tea-ball won't. I then let it steep in a cup of water just off boil for around half an hour, adding honey, lemon, and fresh ginger to kill the taste. I used LSD in the 1960's and after a classic bad trip, swore off psychedelics. But last year the clusters were hitting me so hard, I had no choice but to turn to mushrooms. I started cautiously with very tiny weekly doses, and gradually increased them. After six weeks, I gained a years remission and dropped my doses back to every 4-5 weeks. After a year I began believing they had burned themselves out due to my age. But I was wrong. After 2 months without dosing, they came back with a vengeance, so now I'm back to a weekly 1.5 gram dose till they disappear.

Good luck, my friend.

[Lethal dose rates of recreational drugs]

From drugwarfacts.com, here's some documentation of what most of us already know on the relative safety of ingesting psilocybin or marijuana.

(Lethal Dose by Substance) "The most toxic recreational drugs, such as GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate) and heroin, have a lethal dose less than 10 times their typical effective dose. The largest cluster of substances has a lethal dose that is 10 to 20 times the effective dose: These include cocaine, MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine, often called “ecstasy”) and alcohol. A less toxic group of substances, requiring 20 to 80 times the effective dose to cause death, include Rohypnol (flunitrazepam or “roofies”) and mescaline (peyote cactus). The least physiologically toxic substances, those requiring 100 to 1,000 times the effective dose to cause death, include psilocybin mushrooms and marijuana, when ingested. I’ve found no published cases in the English language that document deaths from smoked marijuana, so the actual lethal dose is a mystery."

Source: Gable, Robert S., "The Toxicity of Recreational Drugs," American Scientist (Research Triangle Park, NC: Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, May-June 2006) Vol. 94, No. 3, p. 207.

http://www.americanscientist.org/libraries/documents/200645104835_307.pd...

- See more at: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Causes_of_Death#sthash.lpM3BhYm.dpuf

[How old is too old for clusters?]

Those people are making BIG $$$$ off Clusters for sure...  O2 is maybe $3 per attack instead of $60 to $125 per shot for imitrex... 

It's outrageous that any American should have to substitute industrial gas for medical oxygen, and that brings up all the restrictive oxygen rules that make us jump through hoops. In the summers I travel as much as 10,000 miles around the West researching and photographing for a book. Last fall I started out with 9 E-tanks in the trunk which normally would have been way more than enough. But on the advice of my neuro I had just dumped the lithium and verpamil I had been taking for years. And in just a few days of travel I got slammed by the worst cluster ever. By the time I got to Utah, I began to wonder if my O2 would last and decided to find a way to refill. I phoned an O2 retailer who said I would need a prescription. No problem I had one that was only a month or two old from my neuro. But it turns out, oxygen prescriptions expire in 45 days and this one was two months old. Next I tried AirGas which seems to control medical and industrial gas production just about everywhere. But they told me they were forbidden by law to dispense it. Next I was in Wyoming and tried a retailer. If I got a brand new prescription they would be happy to sell me as many tanks as I wanted, but they could not refill my empty rental tanks from California because that was illegal, nor when I got home could California refill my Wyoming tanks, so I'd be stuck with worthless tanks that cost around $70 to buy. Or I could rent them and return the empties for credit, but I rarely stay in the same town more than one night and never retrace my steps.

Of course, it's the easiest thing in the world to take a year-old Vicodin prescription to a drug store, get it filled, and stay high for a week before you overdose and die. You can even get a prescription for cocaine and have it filled if you can find a pharmacy that stocks it. But they surround oxygen with so many rules, you'd think it was worse than plutonium. But maybe there's a workaround. Isn't there some routine medical condition other than CH that requires O2? If so, I would think the solution to securing a prescription and oxygen wherever you go should be obvious.

[How old is too old for clusters?]

I concur with your assessment of our healthcare system.  It's a bit out of whack...  I'm no expert but your mention of $30 imitrex might be a little off.  When I got the stuff as part of my medical insurance I had to pay a $50 copay.  This is when my copay was supposed to be $25.

I use welding O2. Dr. won't even prescribe it for me he is so scared of it, AT MY AGE!!!!!! 

I'm not so sure anymore what an individual hit of Imitrex costs either. Last Fall I purchased 90 units through my union health plan for a $50 copay, but they were the new generic version. And guess who makes the generic version of Glaxxo's Imitrex? Surprise -- Glaxxo makes it. There's no question Medicare is heavily infiltrated by Big Pharma which gives millions to Congress in return for getting billions back from Congress by doing their bidding at the people's expense. It's called elder abuse. An even worse practice by Big Pharma comes when their 17 year patent monopoly expires, and they no longer control the patent. When another company decides to make a cheaper generic version, the original patent holder will often approach the generic company and offer hefty payments running into the millions if they agree not to make the generic version.  Glaxxo is competing in price with itself which of course is no competition at all. Generic Imitrex is now called simply Sumatriptan.

Another trick Big Pharma plays on us is to set a way too early expiration date for their meds in hopes patients will throw away unused expired meds and buy more to replace them. Drug expiration dates are based on profit and politics rather than science. If you use a mail order house for meds, any prescriptions filled in New Jersey are marked as expiring one year from the date of being filled per a state law passed no doubt in exchange for campaign contributions from Big Pharma. Having on occasion ended up with a lot of outdated Imitrex, I have used it as much as five years after expiration and it had not lost a bit of it's potency.

[Episodics, how do your cycles end?]

Just wondering if any of you episodic sufferers, like myself, have noticed any patterns when your cluster series comes to an end? In the past they've always sort of petered out for me.

Mine peter out also, but they start acting differently too. Like a spinning top that becomes erratic as it slows done, my headaches become erratic as I come to the end of a cluster. That is they might come at an odd time. If normally I'd get three headaches at night, and then I get one in the daytime, it could be signaling the end of a cluster.

[How old is too old for clusters?]

I got clusters at age 55 which is when most patients seem to start losing them. This month I'll be 72 and STILL have them.  I asked my neuro, who's a cluster specialist why I still had them at my age. All he could answer is, "What can I say, you still have them." His dad, who was a pioneer in cluster medicine also had clusters, so I asked him about his dad's experience. His dad got them in his 20's and they burned themselves out at age 64.

So my question is, am I the oldest clusterhead? Are there any others out there over say age 65 who are still getting hammered by the Beast? And are those approaching age 65 aware that Medicare refuses to reimburse oxygen for CH on the grounds of "not medically necessary" and their belief that O2 is a deadly substance? Are they aware seniors are advised against the use of Imitrex? How does Medicare which was brought into existence to care for the health of America's senior citizens get off with adopting a pro-suicide policy for clusterheads? This wouldn't have anything to do with Glaxxo, the multi-billion dollar owner of Imitrex not wishing to have their $30 drug competing head to head with oxygen, would it?

Having said all this, I must add that last Fall I had the worst cluster ever which finally prompted me to try the psilocybin cure. My last use of psychedelics was a disastrous nightmare acid trip in 1969, so I approached mushrooms with the greatest of caution. Every Sunday for five weeks I took a dose of psilo starting with a tiny dose and ending at 1.7 grams. My CH seemed to decline at the same rate as the doses grew. Since then I've had several Kip 5-6 headaches easily knocked out by O2, and now I seem to be down to just shadows. Of course, I have no way of knowing if I'm in a natural remission, or if the CH have finally burned themselves out with age, or if the psilo knocked them out for good. I'll make a full report elsewhere on my experience last fall with the psilo and two other rare headaches that converged on me at the same time.

[Clusters after 20 years]

Pill form of imitrix really isnt going to help you. Only shots will 

I took Imitrex in pill form many times before I discovered there were alternatives to the pill. My neuro advised Imitrex shots as the fastest acting, but like many others I can take shots with no problem but can't bring myself to do it myself. So the option I took was Imitrex inhalers. We know from recreational drug users the nasal passages provide a quick route for introducing drugs into your system.

Anyway, I rarely use Imitrex anymore. For me nothing is quicker in aborting a CH than oxygen, which totally erases a cluster in 4 to 11 minutes.

Can you sit still during an attack? No is the answer for clusters

That's not a uniform response to clusters. I've had thousands of clusters over 17 years and I think only once did I feel forced to run around in circles in my little apartment. On the contrary, when I get a cluster while awake, I would retire to my bedroom, dim down the lights, turn on some classical music very low, apply a large ice bag to the pain, click on a countdown timer set at 11 minutes, and begin inhaling O2 at 8 lpm with a conventional mask and in 4 to 11 minutes the headache was history. It was such a restful interlude that sometimes it was hard to bring it to an end. Night headaches are a different story, because they have progressed farther by the time they wake you up. At night it's critical to have a kitchen timer to avoid falling back asleep with the O2 still on and sucking the whole tank down.