Sufferers of chronic CH, however, enjoy no respite at all. They are plagued by up to nine attacks per day, every day; untreated, each attack can last up to two hours.
CH is characterised by a pain so severe that it makes the most debilitating migraine look like a mild hangover. Many chronic CH sufferers eventually take their own lives – earning CH the gruesome moniker “suicide headaches”. Flash says the pain is virtually indescribable. “You go through a point when it’s too sore to scream and all you can do is whimper, begging God over and over and over again. I’ve fantasised about blowing my brains out so many times you wouldn’t believe it.”
…Turning on, tuning in, and dropping out (of university),Flash experimented with the powerful hallucinogenic drug LSD (“The best and worst eight hours of my life”). His next cluster attack, due in January 1992, never materialised. “In my naivety, I thought, ‘It’s just gone away.’ But cluster headache doesn’t just go away.” Not stopping to question his good fortune, Flash finished his degree, got a new girlfriend and started his own business. Free of the headaches for more than two years, life was good.
…Psilocybin and LSD are chemicals called tryptamines, like neurotransmitters such as serotonin; they bind to nerves in the same way. Indeed, arguably the most effective migraine drug, sumatriptan (Imitrex, or Imigran), which can also abort CH attacks, is chemically very similar to DMT, a hallucinogen found in plants native to South America. Similarly, the anti-migraine drug methysergide is based on the LSD molecule, but with virtually no hallucinogenic properties, though it can cause severe fibrosis.
…A handful of CH sufferers thought there was truth in Flash’s unorthodox solution. One man, Bob Wold, decided to start clusterbusters.com, a website devoted to campaigning for research and disseminating information about how to safely use hallucinogenics.
Full story at The Independent