Magic mushrooms on display at an Ottawa store. Psychedelic mushrooms haven’t cured Jody Lance’s cluster headaches, but they make them bearable and help end some attacks. Article content
It’s easier to get access to an assisted death in Canada than to a treatment that could make life bearable, according to the lawyer for a Calgary man fighting for legal access to a psychedelic drug to treat excruciating cluster headaches.
Jody Lance’s request for emergency access to psilocybin, a compound found in “magic mushrooms,” was denied by Health Canada last year, after the regulator claimed there was insufficient evidence psilocybin is safe and effective for cluster headaches and that other alternative and lawful therapies hadn’t been ruled out.
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Lance and his legal team took the matter to the Federal Court of Canada, which last week overturned Health Canada’s decision, ruling the refusal to grant Lance access to psilocybin was unreasonable and lacked the “requisite degree of justification, intelligibility and transparency.”
Among other transgressions, the judge said Health Canada “wholly disregarded” legal arguments that Lance has a Charter right to access the psychedelic.
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Cluster headaches “are capable of inflicting some of the most severe pain known to medical science,” Justice Simon Fothergill wrote in his decision. There is no cure. Lance has tried numerous treatments. Except for small, non-hallucinogenic doses of magic mushrooms, none have provided any lasting relief.
Lance is in his early 50s, and has been suffering from cluster headaches for seven years. A former land surveyor, he’s unable to work and is on long-term disability. He’s lost his house, has been “unable to socialize outside his home,” Fothergill wrote, and says he has contemplated suicide and medical assistance in dying, or MAID, “for which he is potentially eligible.”Article contentArticle content“He doesn’t want to die,” said Lance’s lawyer, Nicholas Pope. “He’s found a treatment that works for him and makes life bearable. But it’s absurd: If he couldn’t get access to this treatment, then MAID really would be a legitimate possibility.”Cluster headaches are sometimes referred to as “suicide headaches,” because of the unbearable pain they can cause.Pope said the federal government is […]
Calgary man could get assisted death but can’t get access to medical ‘magic mushrooms’
