Patients are worried about arrest when they take these substances. Possession of psilocybin mushrooms is illegal everywhere. Psilocybin is a Schedule 1 drug. Fortunately for patients, buying the spores is legal in most states. Several vendors operate online. In California, Georgia, and Idaho, however, it is illegal to buy the spores.
“I go every year to ClusterBusters meetings and meet these patients,” Dr. McGeeney said. ClusterBusters is a support meeting for patients who have cluster headache. “They talk about treatment, and that does include alternative treatments, but not solely,” he noted. “It is not necessarily everybody or even most people who are pursuing that option.”
LSD has been around since the 1940s. “In practice, this is a much more difficult hallucinogen for patients to get,” Dr. McGeeney said. “These are ordinary people. Where are they going to get LSD? It is practically impossible.”
Nonhallucinogenic Hallucinogens
According to Dr. McGeeney, the evidence suggests that to gain the cluster–abortive benefits of hallucinogens, patients do not have to hallucinate. “You can take an LSD molecule and brominate it,” he said. “And you turn it into brominated LSD, which is nonhallucinogenic.”
Is this method useful for cluster headache? That question started to be answered a few years ago. A 2010 study published in Cephalalgia described five patients, four of whom had chronic cluster headache. They were administered brominated LSD, and they did not hallucinate. At baseline, the number of attacks per week in the five patients was 40, 40, 35, 30, and 25. After treatment, all patients had close to zero attacks.
One of the authors of the original 2006 survey in Neurology, John Halpern, is trying to bring brominated LSD to market in the United States. The regulations and red tape have been daunting despite herculean efforts by Dt. Halpern. “But we’re hoping that this may be an option in the near future,” Dr. McGeeney said.
—Glenn S. Williams