Ann: Race-Chaim Sheba FTO Biomarker Collaboration, page-99

whoops…I got the drug name wrong…not fentanyl but OxyContin!

all the opioids are bad news due to over-prescribing.

I have followed the psilocybin-as-a-useful-therapeutic story for years and have felt all its pain to gain even the flimsiest traction to assess its potential in the clinic.

Years ago, I mentioned to a reasonably eminent research neurologist specialising in pain that psilocybin had been reported as remarkably effective in stopping cluster headache for long periods of time among cluster headache sufferers who, in desperation, tried magic mushrooms as a treatment.

Cluster headache is one of the worst imaginable conditions to be afflicted with…one sufferer said that the pain is so bad that if he slammed the car door on his fingers during a headache he wouldn’t notice!

There is no known effective treatment for most cluster headache sufferers.

one researcher wrote up a paper summarising the apparent success of psilocybin for cluster headache based on users' anecdotal experience.

I mentioned this paper to the neurologist, thinking he would be interested, but he gave the most bizarre response.

He said, “No, we shouldn’t do research into psychedelics as a therapy as we already have enough problems dealing with the mess from opioids.”

So the opioid disaster has certainly fouled the waters for any other recreationally-banned, schedule 5 drugs.

The underlying driver of bio-medical research is to discover truth (that is, what works?), but the people driving the biomedical research industry don’t appear to primarily driven to discover the truth.

Maybe our capitalist system doesn’t rate truth very highly. We obviously still have a long way to go in our evolution. Bet you we exterminate ourselves before we get there!