Psychedelic Outlaws!

Dallas Denny · November 22, 2023

I saw a comment by Flash on his Facebook homepage this morning about a new, soon to be published book about us by Dr Joanna Kempner!!

How a group of regular citizens debilitated by excruciating pain developed their own medicine from home-grown psilocybin mushrooms—producing near-clinical grade protocols, and their fight for recognition in a broken medical system

Joanna Kempner is the premier expert on the social impact of headache diseases. In Psychedelic Outlaws, she follows a group of people called “Clusterbusters,” a community bound by their experience with cluster headache—a neurological disease so excruciating, its pain is often likened to being shot in the head, repeatedly, multiple times per day. Obtaining a diagnosis can take years and treatments often leave patients worse off than they were before. There's a grim reality behind the disease's nickname, suicide headache.

Kempner’s narrative traces this patient movement to its origins to the extraordinary experiments conducted by a man named “Flash” in Aberdeen, Scotland, and then follows it forward, as the idea of using psychedelics for pain begins to gather in the early days of the internet, and then eventually became a full-fledged effort to bring this knowledge to universities. Their story looks at the politics of pain, why some drugs make it to market when others don’t, and our culture’s complicated history with psychedelics.