Mushrooms
Research

Over the years since Psilocybin first came to Scientific attention, there have been various research projects undertaken across a broad range of spectrums, though mainly from a sociological, spiritual or psychological standpoint. Lately, research is being conducted into the medical applications of psilocybin too, with a lot of evidence to suggest that psilocybin can be used in the treatment of users with Cluster Headaches.

In the pre-prohibition days of the 1950s and early 1960s, many innovative experiments were conducted using new potent hallucinogens. Such experiments were conducted in mental institutions, prisons, theological seminaries, private homes, and in the offices of practicing psychiatrists.  The goals varied somewhat, but the intentions can be understood to be of an exploratory and healing nature. Here we have provided the background to some of the best known research undertakings, either from the past, or the current/future.

The Concorde Prison Project
The Good Friday Project
The Harvard Psilocybin Project
Cluster Headaches
Use of mushrooms in the environment

Timothy Leary was a person who will always have a lasting legacy associated with undertaking Research involving psilocybin mushrooms, and whose work could be argued to have played a fundamental role in increasing awareness and exposure of magic mushrooms' amazing qualities to the outside world, as well as providing an interesting, legitimate 'scientific' perspective to proceedings too. He was at the time a respected academic, and a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, who had revolutionized the field of personality testing. However, after famously trying magic mushrooms, whilst on holiday in a rented villa in Mexico, his life would never be the same again.  Leary was one of the new wave of magic mushroom advocates. that had arisen from the repercussive shockwaves of Wasson’s 'Life' article on magic mushrooms which had, at that time, generated a lot of interest and curiosity about them from people in the west.  A friend of Leary’s managing to obtain some Mushrooms eventually persuaded Leary to try them, as he was initially reluctant to do so.

He later wrote of his experience that until that moment he had been a middle-aged man involved in the middle aged process of dying.  He returned to Harvard both invigorated and determined to abandon all his previous research in favour of further exploration into the ‘strange deep realms’ that the mushroom opened up. He quickly learned, following a judicious meeting with Aldous Huxley, that the mushrooms’ chemical ingredients were readily available from Sandoz – thus solving problems of supply – and so he initiated what must rank as one of the most unusual  episodes in American intellectual history: the Harvard Psilocybin Project.

Leary’s principle concern in initiating the project was to see how people might be beneficially changed through psychedelic experiences.  He decided to reject the clinical, quantative approach – that of statistically comparing personality traits before and after the experience – in favour of one that was subjective and qualitative.  Instead he assembled an ever expanding group of willing volunteers – academics, poets, artists, musicians, students etc.. – and breaking all the rules took psilocybin with them in a ‘supportive environment’.  This typically meant a relaxed home setting where volunteers could listen to music, browse through books on art, or make love even.  Subjects were asked to record their experiences in whatever way they felt appropriate, be that in a painting, a poem, or an annotated report.   

From 1960-1963 some 200 psilocybin doses were administered, and the project began to look less and less like a scientific experiment, and more like a psychedelic tea party, or worse, a religious cult with Leary its leader.  For, quite surprisingly in this rationalistic environment, increasing numbers of subjects were returning from their ‘mushroom’ trips with reports of religious, spiritual or mystical experiences.

Unsurprisingly faculty divisions started to open up over Leary’s steadfast refusal to rein in the project and play by the accepted academic rules.  In the end he attracted too much unwelcome press attention and ruffled too many feathers, particularly over the issue of giving psilocybin to graduate students, and after some wrangling the project was forcibly closed down.

One of the best known of these early research studies to investigate whether Psilocybin could play an important role in creating positive, life changing experiences, was the Concord Prison Project, conducted by Timothy Leary and associates under the auspices of Harvard University’s center for Research in Personality.

One  of the first studies of the Harvard group was to investigate the effects of psilocybin on ‘normals’ in a non clinical, non experimental but warm, supportive setting.  Results were evaluated by a questionnaire, which showed that 88% of their subjects reported that they had learned something of value about themselves and the world, while 62% claimed the experience of psilocybin changed their lives for the better’ (Leary et al. 1963).

Subsequently, Leary sort a controlled setting where measurable long-term results could demonstrate that psilocybin might be a powerful catalyst of behavioural change.  He found it in Concord Prison, where between February 1961 and January 1963, with the co-operation of the prison bureaucracy and staff and of thirty-two inmates, his team conducted in-house experiments using psilocybin in a unique setting of openness and mutual support.  The behavioral criterion of insight and personality change was to be the recidivism rate (the rate of return to prison after release) of the prisoners who had participated in the project.

The concept of the program was to be radical.  Leary’s philosophy of research was to design it as a ‘collaborative group program; we avoid as much as possible the traditional doctor-patient, research-subject, or professional-client relationships.’

When the end results of the Concord Prison project were finally tallied up, some 18 months after the project’s termination, it was found (no matter how Leary tried to dress the facts and statistics, recidivism rates for subjects were reported as not different from the expected base rate for Concord Prison as a whole.  Of all mean released from Concord 56% had returned two a half years later.  Out of the thirty-two involved in the project, four were still in prison, one had escaped , and eleven remained free, a recidivism rate of 59%. 

In a follow up study conducted by Dr Rick Dolbin and his team from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Leary’s original data was painstakingly re-examined.  It was found that Leary had used some unorthodox statistical methods.  When the rather glaring omissions were properly ironed out, it was concluded that Leary had wittingly or unwittingly steered this results in a direction that would endorse his belief in psilocybin as magic cure all.  Dolbin conclude that ‘ The failure of the Concord Prison experiment should finally put to rest the myth of psychedelic drugs as magic bullets, the ingestion of which will automatically confer wisdom and create lasting change after just one or even a few experiences.

However it would be wrong to say that Psilocybin offer no positive applications within research.  It has been used almost exclusively in Europe as an agent to help activate unconscious material in in depth psychology (psycholysis).  This procedure utilizes the properties of hallucinogenic substances to stimulate the emotions and promote a fluid, dreamlike state that is experienced in clear consciousness and with good recollection of what is occurring.  In this manner, subconscious conflicts and memories can be re-created and made accessible to psychotherapy.   It is understood that it is not the pharmacological effect that causes the therapeutic result, but the long-term therapeutic processing of material that has been exposed, backing up Dolbin’s statement to a certain degree.

In utilizing this pharmacologically aided method, many previously therapy-resistant patients could be treated.  Psilocybin, as well as its quick acting derivative, CZ 74 (4 –hydroxy-N-diethyltryptamine), distinguishes itself by its unique properties of short duration of effects, mild neurovegetative side effects, few instances of depersonalisation or anxiety provocation, as well as a stable and positive influence on the emotional experience.  Since it offers a more gentle and direct control of the altered state than LSD, it appears to be a substance of choice for future application in psychotherapy. (Leuner 1968, 1981)

The Good Friday experiment was another research project that was dreamt up from the Timothy Leary stable of thought.  This time a research assistant to Leary, Walter Pahnke, a physician and minister who was studying for a Ph.D. in Religion and Society conducted a study of psychedelic religious experience that has since become known as the Good Friday Experiment.  It was a well designed controlled, double-blind experiment to investigate the relationship between the experiences recorded in the literature of spontaneous mysticism and those reportedly associated with the ingestion of psychedelic drugs. 

The study was also designed as a test of the set-and-setting hypothesis, in t hat it used subjects (divinity students) who presumably had a religious orientation (set) and it was conducted in a chapel during a religious service (setting).

Knowing that there was much resistance among mainstream religious people to the growing idea that genuine mystical experiences could be had from a drop on the tongue or a little pill, Pahnke chose his measuring instrument carefully.  Using classical and modern writings on mysticism, particularly W.T. Stace’s  Mysticism and philosophy (Stace1960), Pahnke developed a questionnaire with a nine-category typology of the mystical state of consciousness, which continues to be a touchstone for inquiry into mystical states today.  Briefly these aspects of religious experience are:

1. Feeling of unity, internal and external.  Internal unity is describes as ‘the loss of usual sense impressions and loss of self without becoming unconscious’.  External unity is ‘a sense of underlying oneness …. Felt behind the empirical multiplicity.’

2. Transcendence of Time and Space.  The loss of the usual sense of time, personal and impersonal, as well as orientation to the three-dimensional world.  Sometimes described as ‘eternity’ or ‘infinity.

3. Deeply Felt Positive Mood.  The most universal of these are joy, blessedness, and peace, experienced intensely, even overpoweringly.

4. Sense of Sacredness.  ‘A non –rational, intuitive, hushed palpitant sense of awe and wonder.’

5. Objectivity and Reality. ‘Insightful knowledge or illumination felt at a intuitive, non-rational level and gained by direct experience’ with ‘certainty that such knowledge is truly real.’

6. Paradoxicality.  There is ‘loss of all empirical content in an empty unity which is at the same time full and complete’

7. Alleged Ineffability.  Where words fail, perhaps due to the paradoxical nature of the essential phenomena.

8. Transiency.  The mystical state passes and normal waking reality is restored.

9. Persisting positive Changes in Attitude and Behaviour – toward self, others, life and the mystical experience itself.

Pahnke then set up the experiment using standard personality testing , and psychological and medical exams to select ten pairs of white male, psychedelically naïve, Protestant divinity  students matched for past religious experience, religious background, and general psychological make-up.  These subjects were then coached  by leaders experienced in psilocybin on how to deal with the experience: “go into the unexplored realms of experience during the actual experiment and not try to fight the effects of the drug even if the experience became unusual or frightening”. 

On Good Friday 1962, these students plus ten group leaders (research assistants) met together in the basement chapel of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel and all were given identical capsules.  Half contained an active Placebo (subjects and leaders were expecting an inactive placebo) containing nicotinic acid, and half contained psilocybin (30 mg for the subjects and, at the insistence of Leary and over the objections of Pahnke, 15 mg for the assistants.  Half an hour later a standard service, actually being conducted in the larger sanctuary upstairs by Rev. Howard Thurman (who was Martin Luther King’s mentor), was piped in to the lower chapel, which had the usual accoutrements of a Protestant chapel, such as stained glass windows, religious symbols, and pews.

The physical effects of the nicotinic acid (facial flushing and prickly sensations) set in very quickly, leading the controls to believe for a time that they were the ones receiving the psilocybin.  Shortly after, when others began remarking on such details as the spectacular candlelight, it became apparent to all who was tripping.  This loss of the double blind was anticipated and not considered significant, as the purpose of the experiment was to “determine whether volunteers who received psilocybin within a highly supportive , suggestive environment similar to that found in the ritual use os psychoactive substances by various native cultures would report more elements of a classical mystical experience than volunteers who did not receive psilocybin” (Dolbin 1991).

Immediately after the 2 ½ hour service, individual reactions of both subjects and controls were taped, as was the group discussion that followed.  In the following week, each subject wrote an account of his experience and completed a questionnaire designed to measure  the factors listed earlier on a qualitative, numerical scale.  Six months later they were interviewed again and completed a follow-up questionnaire. 

The results showed that in all but one of the nine categories, subjects in the experimental group experienced significantly higher scores than the controls.  The one exception was the experience of a “positive mood of love,” which was reported by the controls also.  The difference between the two groups persisted and even increased slightly in a six month follow-up interview conducted by Panhnke. 

In short , “The experience of the experimental subjects was certainly more like a mystical experience that that of the controls who had the same expectation and suggestion from the preparation and setting.  The most striking difference between the experimentals and the controls was the ingestion of thirty milligrams of psilocybin, which, it was concluded, was the facilitating agent responsible for the difference in phenomena experienced” (Pahnke 1966)

Over the ensuing years, until his death in 1971 from a diving accident, Pahnke maintained his conviction that the various psychedelic drugs held great potential for research into the mystical experience:

The results of our experiment would indicate that psilocybin ( and LSD and mescaline, by analogy) are important tools for the study of the mystical state of consciousness.  Experiences previously possible for only a small minority of people, and difficult to study because of their unpredictability and rarity, are now reproducible under suitable conditions.  The mystical experience has been called by many names suggestive of areas that are paranormal and not usually considered easily available for investigation (eg, an experience of transcendence, ecstasy, conversion, or cosmic consciousness); but this is a realm of human experience that should not be rejected as outside the realm of serious scientific study, especially if it can be shown that a practical benefit can result.  Our data would suggest that such an overwhelming experience, in which a person existentially encounters basic values such as the meaning of his life (past, present and future), deep and meaningful interpersonal relationships, and insight into the possibility of a personal behaviour change, can possibly be therapeutic if approached and worked with in a sensitive and adequate way (Pahnke 1966).

Again  25 years later, Rick Dolbin conducted a follow up study, tracking down 19 of the original 20  subjects of the Good Friday Experiment, and re-interviewed them and re-administered the 6 month follow up questionnaire.  From this Dolbin discovered  “ the scores of persisting positive and negative changes in attitude and behaviour have changed remarkably little for either the controls or the experimentals despite the passage of between 24 and 27 years between the two tests.” (Dolbin 1991).  For the experimental group, scores in the mystical categories actually increased by several points, while for the controls the changes were negligible.

In the interviews, subjects reported vivid memories of their Good Friday experience and charcterized it as one if not the high points of their spiritual life.  Some compared it to subsequent mystical experiences and found the drug experience more intense  and had a wider emotional range than their non drug experiences.  The felt the experience had significantly affected their lives in a positive way, enhancing their appreciation of life and nature and deepening their sense of joy and their commitment  to their life’s work.  They felt their appreciation of unusual experiences and emotions was deepened, as well as their equanimity in crisis and their solidarity with beings unlike themselves (women, minorities).  They reported that the feelings of timelessness they experienced reduced their fear of death and emboldened them to take risks in life and participate in political struggles.  (How the Shroom Liberation Front can relate to that).

However we should mention that the Good Friday Experiment was at times chaotic.  One volunteer had something of a psychotic reaction and forced his way out of the building, where his erratic behaviour proved problematic.  He apparently felt that he had been told by God to go forth and proclaim the dawning messianic age, and was intent on doing just that – beginning by confronting the Dean of the University.  He had to be restrained and injected with thorazie to sedate him, a fact that Pahnke curiously omitted to include in his thesis.

Cluster Headaches - nicknamed "suicide headache," is a neurological disease that involves, as its most prominent feature, an immense degree of pain. "Cluster" refers to the tendency of these headaches to occur periodically, with active periods interrupted by spontaneous remissions. The cause of the disease is currently unknown.

Signs and symptoms

Cluster headaches are extremely painful, unilateral headaches of a piercing quality. The duration of the common attack is 15 minutes to three hours. Onset of an attack is rapid, and most often without the preliminary signs that are characteristic of a migraine. However, some sufferers report preliminary sensations of diverse description, often referred to as "shadows," that may warn them an attack is imminent. Though the headaches are almost exclusively unilateral, there are many documented cases of "side-shifting" between cluster periods, or, even rarer, simultaneously (within the same cluster period) bilateral headache. They are often intially mistaken for brain tumors and Multiple Sclerosis often until patients are treated with corticosteroids and then imaged. Trigeminal neuralgia can also bring on headaches with similar qualities.

Pain

The degree of pain involved in cluster headaches is markedly greater than in other headache conditions, including migraine. It has been described by female patients as being more severe than childbirth. The pain is lancinating or boring in quality, and is located behind the eye or in the temple, sometimes radiating to the neck or shoulder. An analogy frequently used to describe the pain is that it is like a red-hot poker inserted into the eye. The condition was originally named Hortons Neuralgia after Dr. B.T Horton who postulated the first theory as to their pathologenesis. His original paper describes the severity of the headaches as being able to take normal men and force them to suicide.

From Horton's 1939 original paper on cluster headache:

"Our patients were disabled by the disorder and suffered from bouts of pain from two to twenty times a week. They had found no relief from the usual methods of treatment. Their pain was so severe that several of them had to be constantly watched for fear of suicide. Most of them were willing to submit to any operation which might bring relief"

Other symptoms

The cardinal symptoms of the cluster headache attack are ptosis (drooping eyelid), conjunctival injection (red-eye), lacrimation (tearing), rhinorrhea (runny nose), and, less commonly, facial blushing, swelling, or sweating. These features are known as the autonomic symptoms. The attack is also associated with restlessness, the sufferer often pacing the room or rocking back and forth. Less frequently, he or she will have an aversion to bright lights and loud noise during the attack. Nausea is not typical of cluster headache, though it has been reported. The neck is often stiff or tender in the aftermath of a headache, with jaw or tooth pain sometimes present.

Cyclical recurrence and regular timing

Cluster headaches are occasionally referred to as "alarm clock headaches", because of the regularity of its timing and its ability to wake a person from sleep. Thus it has been known to strike at the same time each night or morning, often at precisely the same time during the day a week later. This has prompted researchers to speculate an involvement of the brain's "biological clock" or circadian rhythm. In some cases, cluster headaches remain "steady" without cyclical ups and downs for days.

Episodic or chronic

In episodic cluster headache, these attacks occur once or more daily, often at the same times each day, for a period of several weeks, followed by a headache-free period lasting weeks, months, or years. Approximately 10–15% of cluster headache sufferers are chronic; they can experience multiple headaches every day for years.

Cluster headaches occurring in two or more cluster periods lasting from 7 to 365 days with a pain-free remission of one month or longer between the clusters are considered episodic. If the attacks occur for more than a year without a pain-free remission of at least one month, the condition is considered chronic. Chronic clusters run continuously without any "remission" periods between cycles.The condition may change from chronic to episodic and from episodic to chronic. Remission periods lasting for decades before the resumption of clusters have been known to occur.

Other names

Cluster headaches have been called by several other names in the past including Erythroprosopalgia of Bing, Ciliary neuralgia, Migrainous neuralgia, Erythromelagia of the head, Horton's headache (named after Bayard T. Horton, an American neurologist who was the first to accurately describe the headache in 1939), Histaminic cephalalgia, Petrosal neuralgia, sphenopalatine neuralgia, Vidian neuralgia, Sluder's neuralgia, and Hemicrania angioparalyticia. Sluder's neuralgia (syndrome) and cluster pain can often be temporarily stopped with nasal lidocaine spray. If successful, outpatient nasal septoplasty and splinting can resolve the condition.

© Shroom Liberation Front 2007