Psychedelic Outlaws: Revolutionizing Modern Medicine

This book follows the research of an award-winning sociologist looking into how a community of people suffering from untreatable medical afflictions came to develop their own medicinal treatments through homegrown psilocybin. The author, Joanna Kempner, looks into the world of Clusterbusters, a group of people using magic mushrooms to manage cluster headaches — headaches that cause severe pain and do not respond to conventional treatment methods such as NSAIDs. With little hopes for a cure from an issue that doesn’t receive much funding for research, many of the citizens in this group took matters into their own hands. They designed treatment protocols and even managed to get academics at Yale and Harvard to test their therapeutic results. Through this research, Kempner explores the history of psilocybin use and science, as well as a look into the system that has forced other groups of people to home-brew their healing — even in the face of defying the law.