The pain is extremely difficult to describe.
Like somebody's trying to rip my eyeball out of my face
or repeatedly thrust a hot knife into my eye.
I was in a shopping centre of all places
I just felt this pain happen in my head and I dropped to my knees
and I thought I was dying.
For the last 20 years Dan Bailey has suffered from these debilitating attacks
known as cluster headaches.
I can get anywhere between one and ten cluster headache attacks a night.
Which means I don't get any real remission period.
The condition has baffled doctors
and treatment often involves strong painkillers and oxygen therapy.
One doctor gave up and just gave me a script for Panadeine Forte and about ten repeats
And said "I can't do anything for you."
It's estimated 14,000 Australians suffer from the condition.
Also nicknamed 'suicide headaches'
Go away, go away, go away.
I've lost two or three friends through the support groups that just couldn't take it anymore.
And it gets to you.
I've been there in my car on the side of the road.
I lined up the biggest gumtree I could see
and I was going to run at about 120km without a seat belt. I figured, that'll do it.
I won't have to worry about it anymore.
I just sat in that car and I just cried, and cried and cried.
Eventually figured out that I didn't want to die.
I had to take my life back.
And I found that with psychedelics.
I found a psychedelic or tryptamine by the name of 5-MeO-DALT.
I started out with one very small micro dose every five days.
And after the second dose, my headaches basically ceased.
The next thing I did was learn how to grow magic mushrooms.
We have psilocybe cubensis, or magic mushrooms, dried out.
5-MeO-DALT tryptamine, and on the scale there is a 25mg micro dose of 5-MeO-DALT.
These are the alternative treatments that I would use to stop my cluster headaches.
These are the faithful of LSD, or 'acid-heads'.
There's still in some parts of the community a perception that
psychedelics are associated with the hippy movement for example
or with social unrest.
Doctor Martin Williams is a medicinal chemistry researcher
and heads up the country's only psychedelic research organisation.
There's still a range of afflictions, of conditions for which we don't have reliable cures or treatments
People are willing to explore beyond standard Western medicine.
The overall success rate is around the 75% mark.
And that actually expanded a little bit to upwards of 80% at a four year follow up.
Our fears are dancing between us.
The US Food and Drug Administration has just approved the next round of trials.
Which means they could see MDMA used as a viable treatment for PTSD as soon as 2021.
I'd get woken up during the night by shots being fired right outside
where people were trying to climb over the wall, and the Americans were shooting at them.
In 1993, retired army major Steve McDonald was deployed to Somalia during the bloody civil war.
It was a response to a very dire humanitarian situation in Somalia
where many, many people were dying of starvation
While Steve spent just five months there, the images of famine and violence have stayed with him.
Depression and anxiety and inability to sleep, and concetrate and work eventually
I couldn't work at all.
At one point I relied on a handout from the RSL to pay my rent, so I could stay off the streets.
A friend reached out to Steve, to suggest an alternative treatment.
Here's an opportunity to attend an ayahuasca ceremony
and I didn't know what that was, in fact I was totally drug naive.
I had drunk a lot of alcohol in the army but I'd never touched any other type of drug.
My depression pretty much went straight away.
Which was remarkable, and unlike anything I'd experienced before.
So that really started me down the rabbit hole of psychedelic medicine.
But the most profound change happened to Steve when he dosed MDMA.
It felt like all the energy centres in my body lit up, and when I woke in the morning
I felt different, considerably different.
And I guess the best way to describe it would be an absence of background anxiety.
In fact I felt so well I couldn't remember a time in my life where I'd felt that well previously.
The MDMA actually opens up what you would call a therapeutic window
which enables the patient to actually calmly address, re-experience and process the trauma.
But the problem for both Steve and Dan, and many others like them
is that psychedelics are illegal.
And they could face hefty fines and potential jail time.
I'm breaking the law. I could get in trouble, but I'm breaking it so I can be a functioning member of society.
I'm not out there selling anything illegal, it's completely personal.
I do it so I can survive.
But many in the field believe to unlock the true power of psychedelics, they need to be prescribed by doctors
and not dealers.
It would be so much, so much better if we had an above ground, formal process
by which people can attempt to improve their quality of life.
But Martin's efforts to get psychedelic research off the ground in Australia
has been blocked twice by two different ethics committees.
We did prepare another proposal. Just one day before we presented that we were told not to even bother
because the university was simply not going to entertain the idea of psychedelic medical research.
Dan and Steve say they both can't afford to wait
for Australia to catch up to the wave of research taking place overseas.
It's easy for academics and doctors to have theoretical discussions about
"Could we do this? Would it work?" and those sorts of things.
But for somebody like me, been through the ringer with PTSD and came out the other side, and it worked.
Let's look at it, let's at least have a dig around because it could change so many people's lives.