Standards Without Labs: Drug Development in the Psychedelic Underground
Citizen Science Theory and Practice January 1, 2022 John Bailey, Joanna Kempner 4 citations
A non-profit organization called Clusterbusters, representing an online network of people with cluster headache, developed a standardized protocol for using psychedelic mushrooms as a treatment without laboratory equipment or institutional scientific support. In a digital ethnographic investigation, researchers found that Clusterbusters used homegrown psilocybe mushrooms and created an "embodied standard" for dosage that combined the weight of the dried mushroom with the subjective experience the dosage produced. This hybrid measure enabled a collective phenomenological understanding of a standard dosage. The pragmatic goals of citizen science knowledge production differ from institutionalized scientists' need to legitimate findings with academic journals, peers, and regulatory agencies.