eleweek

Psychedelics are usually known for many things: making people see cool fractal patterns, shaping 60s music culture, healing trauma. Neuroscientists use them to study the brain, ravers love to dance on them, shamans take them to communicate with spirits (or so they say). But psychedelics also help against one of the world’s most painful conditions — cluster headaches. Cluster headaches usually strike on one side of the head, typically around the eye and temple, and last between 15 minutes and 3 hours, often generating intense and disabling pain. They tend to cluster in an 8-10 week period every year, during which patients get multiple attacks per day — hence the name. About 1 in every 2000 people at any given point suffers from this condition. One psychedelic in particular, DMT, aborts a cluster headache near-instantly — when vaporised, it enters the bloodstream in seconds. DMT also works in “sub-psychonautic” doses — doses that cause little-to-no perceptual distortions. Other psychedelics, like LSD and psilocybin, are also effective, but they have to be taken orally and so they work on a scale of 30+ minutes. This post is about the condition, using psychedelics to treat it, and ClusterFree — a new initiative of the Qualia Research Institute to expand legal access to psychedelics for the millions of cluster headache patients worldwide. Cluster headaches are really fucking bad If you’ve been on the internet long enough, you’ve probably seen memes like the one above. Despite what it tries to imply, pain intensity is not really about the amount of red on a schematic — or even the size of the actual area affected. A tension headache is just your regular headache — most people get these from time to time. A person with a tension headache can usually function, especially if they take some ibuprofen or aspirin. I get these headaches occasionally and I can easily imagine someone preferring a mild one to some CHRISTMAS MUSIC. Migraines are much worse — there is debilit