“It's a tuning thing”: The standardization of hallucinogenic mushrooms across institutional contexts

• In Event: 3221 - DIY Medicine: Hacking Health, Opting Out, Self-Medicating, and Consumer Resistance

Abstract

Cluster headache represents one of the most intractable and severe pain conditions known to medical science. However, medical science itself has only recently begun to investigate one of the most promising treatments, at least according to the citizen science researchers who are working on it: psilocybin mushrooms. In this paper, we show how three different sets of actors – individual experimenters working alone, an embodied health movement (EHM) coordinating their work remotely, and a formal group of medical researchers – each attempt to work on the relationship between psilocybin mushrooms and cluster headache, developing and relying upon a different set of standards for evaluating success. We draw on interviews with the individual experimenters, researchers, and members of the EHM, in addition to ethnographic accounts of the EHM's meetings and posts from the EHM's online forum. We argue that, in dealing with the relationship between psilocybin mushrooms and cluster headache, the different actors highlight the importance of institutional context to the development and use of standards.

Authors

• John Bailey, Rutgers University

• Joanna Kempner, Rutgers University-New Brunswick