Psychedelic Outlaws is a sobering, often distressing, look at pharmaceutical development and protocol approval by Dr Joanna Kempner (PhD in sociology and healthcare policy). Released 4th June 2024 by Hachette, it's 384 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links.

This is a layman accessible, fascinating, and often frustrating examination of a group of patients with cluster headaches on their search for relief from their chronic pain. The pharmaceutical research system is absolutely set up to be completely outside practicality for small/single/individual researchers (however legitimate and well meaning) in order to winnow out the charlatans and "snake oil" salesmen. It's expensive, eye-wateringly expensive, to research and bring a drug to clinical trials and eventually to market.

This book is written as a human interest history about a group of cluster headache sufferers (aka "suicide headaches" for the brutal pain they cause) who found one another online and eventually banded together to find treatments in a system they felt abandoned by and to advocate for research.

Not written in impenetrable academic style, the book is well annotated throughout, and the chapter notes, bibliography, and references will provide readers with many hours of further reading. It's good that it's not written as a "gotcha" story, but it does take a frank look at the sometimes unfair treatment of smaller groups of sufferers who are nonetheless in desperate need of healing.

Five stars. Highly recommended for science/nonfiction readers, as well as for public library acquisition, or possibly gift giving to someone touched by chronic medical issues.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

I really enjoyed this book! It's such an eye-opener into how far people will go to find relief from intense pain when the medical system fails them. The author's exploration of the "Clusterbusters" was both inspiring and heartbreaking, shedding light on a broken medical system that leaves many without hope. I did wish for a bit more detail in some parts, but overall, it was a powerful read that I’d totally recommend to anyone curious about alternative medicine and the fight for better healthcare.

The note in this blurb about independent researchers finding that “Harvard and Yale” professors are willing to put their names on research conducted by others confirms my own findings about the prevalence of ghostwriting in academia since the dawn of print in the Renaissance through the present. Pharmacological science was primarily created by a couple of ghostwriters across Britain’s 18th and 19th centuries, as famous bylines such as “Darwin” and “Newton” were one of many bylines that referred to merely 11-12 active ghostwriters across all genres per century. This book opens with the “Psychedelic Timeline” that begins in 8000 BCE when “Psychoactive drug use across globe indicated by archeological evidence.” The next entry is from 1799 when “The London Medical and Physical Journal publishes the first medical description of a psychedelic mushroom experience, which it characterizes as a poisoning.” My current research of handwriting and linguistic evidence from the Royal Society’s archives for the 18th century indicates only around 4 different handwriting styles across their scientific manuscripts, which have been assigned to hundreds of different puffed bylines. And frequently, as in “Darwin’s” case, scientists in other countries solved puzzles such as evolution at least a century earlier, but Britain’s propaganda machine claimed that they were first by forging manuscripts that had earlier dates (“Newton”), or simply ignored earlier foreign claims from the French etc. (“Darwin”). Across the Opium Wars with China, Britain was fighting for opium, while it was China that was attempting to block Britain’s corrupting influence that was poisoning its population. Mushrooms had been used as psychedelics from around the 8000 BCE point just mentioned, and Britain only learned about this use in 1799, and yet its “discovery” is used as this field’s origin-point. Those who are in academia pay for paper-degrees, and for ghostwriters to write their papers, as industry also hires ghostwriters to create papers that help them maximize their profits by keeping humanity maximally sick. While the pharmaceutical invention industry is thus entirely corrupt and has no room for authentic scientists who are purely interested in curing diseases, it is hardly a good solution for the few scientists with access to home-labs to seek escapist drugs that merely help to mute reality, without curing anything. The concluding years in the timeline between 2017-23 are marked by FDA’s approval of MDMA and other psychedelic drugs for medical use, after papers arguing for this from the “Harvard and Yale” scientists that had their papers ghostwritten in previous years. It is safer for society if those who want to use mind-bending drugs to do it legally, as they had done it a century earlier when the first drug-bans were instituted. But this history is a circle that began with profit-driven bans, and has circled back to profit-driven permissions. There isn’t exactly progress that has been made, but rather a nonsensical battle that led the field back to its starting-point.
The “Introduction” opens with a painful description of the debilitating condition of an extreme headache. This possibility of debilitating pain is used as a motive to explain why mind-altering drugs or “magic mushrooms” is the solution. Sympathy for somebody in pain might drive readers to agree with this argument, but upon rational reflection: why would it be a good idea for somebody who is experiencing extreme suicidal pain to also be seeing things that are not there in combination with this pain? Having altered beliefs about reality, or hallucinations would only be added symptoms on top of the headache that would create a still more serious mental handicap. The outcome, upon serious clinical testing, might hypothetically be extreme violence towards others or one’s self? Instead of this anticipated outcome, this patient reported that a “low dose of mushrooms, which felt to him more like a strong cup of coffee, could suppress his attacks for nearly a week”. Why on earth are these citizen-scientists believing this anecdote? Why would hallucinogenic drugs have an impact equivalent to a stimulant such as coffee? And why would any stimulant suppress pain? And why would a low dose be sufficient to suppress pain for an entire week? Instead of asking any such questions, the author takes this as sufficient to prove his desired thesis or that psychedelic drugs should not be “demonized”, but rather “hailed as a new transformative medicine”. Psychedelics, in fact, artificially manufacture the main known psychiatric disorder: schizophrenia with hallucinations and paranoia. Even recent research on pot has found that it can cause hallucinations, paranoia and can lead to psychosis, or other mental disorders. If a majority of people in any country want to use recreational drugs to create these mental abnormalities; they certainly should be allowed to do so. But they must be informed that this is the intended goal of the usage, instead of giving them propaganda that suggests hallucinogenic are pain-killers, or stimulants. Why do all sides repeatedly find that fooling the public is the only way to convince them or the government to act in a desired way? Shouldn’t an educated society be capable of making rational decisions based on truths? Kempner is aware that he is hitting the market with his intro because as he reports “20 percent of American adults live with chronic pain. Within this group, a jarring 7 percent endure what’s known as ‘high-impact chronic pain,’ a condition that substantially limits daily activities.” And the solution is for these people to also be experiencing hallucinations while they are immobile? The pop-media debate is about if patients’ should be believed by doctors that they are truly experiencing “pain”. All people who start using pain-medications begin experiencing pain, even if they were not before, because withdrawal (even slightly daily withdrawal when the drugs wear off) causes pain. Thus, questioning how one can prove is pain is real is nonsensical, as instead we should be asking why somebody who is healthy has been manipulated to want to take something that will cause them pain?
Instead of exploring these obvious problems, “Chapter One: Psychedelic Outlaws” begins by puffing the modest appearance of one of these civilian-scientists. Then, this book introduces the first concept I have not read elsewhere before: this modest dude tells a crowd that for $100 and in “forty-five days”, they can “produce all the medicine you need to treat yourself for a year”. He then takes a “canning jar” and a “bag of vermiculite”, and gives a lecture on how they can grow magic mushrooms at home. When I was a kid, I picked mushrooms in Russian forests. On an average trip, half of the mushrooms observed were the brightly-colored hallucinogenic or poisonous mushrooms, while the other half was eatable. You don’t need to grow poison at home, you can just go outside, and you’ll probably find something that can make you vomit that’s a fungus. “Drugs” that are given medicinal use really can only be qualified as such if some kind of scientific manipulation or research is involved. After this shocking explanation, the narrative returns to philosophy that puffs hallucinogenic, seemingly under the assumption that nobody will seriously manage to secure the seeds or the like necessary for home-cultivation. The story digresses into racism, how popular drugs are despite their illegality, before reaching this note: “a CIA-funded brothel in San Francisco served as a setting where CIA agents secretly observed as sex workers gave their clients LSD without consent, then attempted to extract information from them after sex.” Can you imagine applying for a job at CIA and then being required to work as a prostitute to poison “clients” to force false-confessions under mind-altering drugs? Why is this useful in supporting the legalization of these poisons?
I am very tired of reading this book at this point. I almost never drink alcohol, never smoked tobacco, and the last time I was forced to use pot by peer-pressure was 20 years ago. I just do not care about this struggle to escape reality, when there is plenty of falsehoods about what is advertised to be reality to need far more presence in actual reality. Anybody who has been reading this and finds that they want to go into this rabbit-hole, is welcome to carry on without me.