response to pushback from the Surviving Antidepressants website
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
August 8, 2024
On August 7, 2024, I went to the Surviving Antidepressants website and posted my plan to get off Effexor 1 while microdosing on psilocybin. I was (naively) surprised by the pushback in the initial response, to which I responded as follows.
I have to disagree with you about psilocybin. It is a time-honored medicine going back millennia. I invite you to watch the video with Paul Stamets2 on this topic. The problem is that materialist science is extremely conservative and almost completely ignores anecdote and history, the history of positive drug use for positive reasons. The effects of psilocybin read like a "wish list" for the feelings that you would want a person to have who's withdrawing from a drug. And yet the Drug War has taught us to think of psilocybin as just another "drug," and so it's thought to be a mistake to use another "drug" while attempting to get off Effexor.
I already have experience with the drug and its motivational power. It works for me. It motivated me to start a diary for the first time in my life, which I am now keeping daily.
Besides, "the heart has its own reasons," as Pascal once said. I can tell you with 100% certainty that I will never get off Effexor unaided, no matter how many plans I try for yoga, or supplements, or jogging, or breathwork. Been there, done that FOR 65 YEARS!!! Yoga and breathwork are great -- and they are something I would be likely to do more of with the help of psilocybin -- but my whole life testifies against the idea that such "non-drug" activities will help me accomplish my goals by themselves.
I was surprised also to read that 1/365th decreases would possibly be going too fast! But if pauses are needed in the process, I can adjust the schedule so that there are a series of days in which the dose does not decrease. You say that these small increments may be hard to work with, but isn't that what compounding chemists are paid to do?
I have written hundreds of essays on this topic. I forget sometimes that the mainstream is still far behind the curve on this. But mainstream science is part of the problem these days. Mainstream scientists are letting progress proceed at a snail's pace by demanding that holistic drugs like psilocybin pass all sorts of safety standards while completely ignoring the fact that they have been used successfully for millennia. Mainstream science is great at coming up with reasons why we cannot use such drugs, but they are horrible when it comes to acknowledging drug benefits. That's why MDMA is still illegal. The FDA keeps finding tiny potential problems while completely ignoring the fact that MDMA brought peace, love and understanding to the British dance floors in the 1990s. For the FDA, that is no "benefit" -- and yet we let them do a cost/benefit analysis about MDMA 3 drug approval?
The assumption of westerners seems to be that psilocybin is just another drug and should be scorned -- or at least put on hold indefinitely while science picks it apart. I believe with Paul Stamets, however, that psilocybin is a game changer. It makes perfect sense to use its demonstrated micro-dosing power to vaccinate oneself psychologically for the process of withdrawal from Effexor. I'm going to try this, though if I'm going to get support, I think I will have to find a site where there is a greater appreciation of the transformative power of holistic medicines, and a refusal to consider them as "drugs" in the evil sense of that word.
Thanks for your ideas, though. The microdosing advice looks helpful, but we'll have to agree to disagree on much of the rest.
Author's Follow-up:
July 09, 2025
There is a certain class of brainwashed reader who will complain that I am giving medical advice by being honest about my own situation and viewpoint. This is how Drug Warriors censor free speech about drugs4, by declaring that all talk of drug benefits constitutes medical advice. This is just an intolerant canard, however -- albeit I am the only philosopher who seems to have explicitly recognized it as such. This fallacious point of view is the corollary of another pernicious belief, namely, that self-medication5 is a sin, that it is wrong to treat one's psychological state without the help of a materialist doctor. This latter conclusion, of course, depends on a truly metaphysical assumption about the ontological correctness of the philosophy of materialism 6; whereas, I maintain that it was always a category error to place materialists in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place.
Speaking of "my own situation and viewpoint," I consider psilocybin just one of many "tools" in an enormous toolkit of psychoactive medicines that could help me get off of Effexor and stay off of it. One thing is certain, however: I could stop taking Effexor forever, beginning today, if we were to re-legalize all psychoactive medicines, including coca, opium 7 , and the many phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. Fortunately, some state governments have been so magnanimous as to let us use cannabis, expensively, albeit we citizens still cannot be trusted to grow the plant in our own house.
This is what irks me about websites like Surviving Antidepressants: such websites should be all about protesting drug prohibition, the disastrous social policy that shunted so many millions off onto Big Pharma 89 's dependence-causing psychoactive drugs in the first place. Instead, they take prohibition as a given and encourage us to get off of antidepressants 10 by jogging and meditating and sharing our stories with fellow pill-poppers -- providing, of course, that we never mention the inconvenient truth that by ending drug prohibition, we would render the S.A. website irrelevant. And that is a good thing, for almost all such websites are "selling something," at the end of the day, and can never be unequivocally happy about a world in which the individual is in the driver seat when it comes to their own mental states.
Americans HATE big government -- and yet they have no problem with government using drug prohibition to control their pain relief and how and how much they can think and feel in this life.
Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.
The Drug War is a religion. The "addict" is a sinner who has to come home to the true faith of Christian Science. In reality, neither physical nor psychological addiction need be a problem if all drugs were legal and we used them creatively to counter problematic use.
Only a pathological puritan would say that there's no place in the world for substances that lift your mood, give you endurance, and make you get along with your fellow human being. Drugs may not be everything, but it's masochistic madness to claim that they are nothing at all.
Trump is the prototypical drug warrior. He knows that he can destroy American freedoms by fearmongering.
Drugs that sharpen the mind should be thoroughly investigated for their potential to help dementia victims. Instead, we prefer to demonize these drugs as useless. That's anti-scientific and anti-patient.
Did the Vedic People have a substance disorder because they wanted to drink enough soma to see religious realities?
Daily opium use is no more outrageous than daily antidepressant use. In fact, it's less outrageous. It's a time-honored practice and can be stopped with a little effort and ingenuity, whereas it is almost impossible to get off some antidepressants because they alter brain chemistry.
No wonder the "Justice" Department relies on plea deals; otherwise juries could use nullification to free those charged with mere drug possession.
It's because of such reductive pseudoscience that America will allow us to shock the brains of the depressed but won't allow us to let them use the plant medicines that grow at their feet.
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