Tut-tut! This is philosophy, not medical advice. It discusses the ideal world, not the world in which we actually live. Of course, anyone who does not already recognize this fact is definitely reading the wrong website, but today we are so censorious about "drugs," that I feel like it's my positive duty to talk down to you folks! Speaking of which, some of you are looking a little peak-ed to me. Remember, your mother told you to eat vegetables for a reason! Humph!
Note: This morning our author had an informative chat with Austin of The Huachuma Project in Portugal1. They discussed Brian's desire to get off of antidepressants with the motivating help of entheogens2. Brian followed up on the 20-minute call by forwarding Austin the following document via WhatsApp, informing him that reading it was optional but that he (Brian) wanted to explain his (Brian's) views about drug-withdrawal protocol in a little more detail, especially since the duo's video chat had been subject to occasional frame freezes and signal loss. And so here now is his (Brian's) forwarded essay.
I keep hearing from materialist doctors and researchers that one has to "get off" of one drug before getting "on" another.
"So, you want to get off of Effexor? Fine," says the doctor. "You get off of Effexor, and then we'll talk."
Of course that protocol makes drug withdrawal a Catch-22 situation for the user. It provides literally zero hope for the would-be "patient." Moreover, its implementation is designed to benefit the materialist doctor, not the patient. Legally and technically speaking, it decreases doctor/researcher liability and overall workload by providing less variables to monitor and adjust. The patient suffers but the doctor/researcher is "covered." And yet it is psychological common sense that it would help to increase the dose of an entheogen WHILE decreasing the dose of an antidepressant. The "user" is motivated, not just by the entheogen as currently used, but by the knowledge that those entheogen-sparked improvements will continue growing in intensity as his or her use of antidepressants decreases. This, I believe, is precisely the sort of motivation that one needs to "stay the course" in such situations. I have some experience in this area. I spent 10 years getting "off" of Valium, but I am sure I could have done it in a few months had I been given the motivation to do so, and that motivation could have been sparked by "teacher plants" and other drugs.
To put this another way: I don't believe that "getting off" something first (prior to using other meds) is in the interest of the patient, but rather of the researcher or doctor, at least when it comes to the use of psychoactive medicines. I think, moreover, that one of the biggest problems we westerners have with "drugs" is that we refuse to even contemplate the idea of "fighting drugs with drugs." The unspoken goal of most rehab is not so much the improvement of the patient as it is turning that patient into a drug-free individual, and those two goals are not the same.
But we westerners are so convinced that "drugs are not the answer" that we recoil at the idea of using a drug(s) to get off a drug. We consider it a copout. But the shamanic approach would say otherwise, especially when informed by a little western common sense. Drugs are never bad in and of themselves in such an approach but rather substances to be used for human benefit and not to be withheld based on some abstract principles, like those formulated by Mary Baker Eddy.
i say that materialist doctors are biased against fighting drugs with drugs because they are biased against common sense, i. e. , any conclusion that cannot be drawn from observations made with a microscope.
This is why a materialist like Dr. Robert Glatter could write a 2021 piece in Forbes magazine entitled "Can laughing gas help those with treatment-resistant depression?"3 Surely this is a laughable title. Everyone knows that laughing can help the depressed - and not just the laughing itself but the anticipation of laughing4. The Readers Digest has known for a hundred years that "laughter is the best medicine." It relaxes the mind AND body. But Glatter is a materialist and materialists totally ignore that psychological truth, just as they ignore all the historic and anecdotal evidence of the benefits of time-honored plant medicines. They are like Dr. Spock or Sergeant Friday: they want "just the facts, ma'am," and to them, the facts can only be seen under a microscope. For them, the testimony of the spiritually elevated user is a subjective opinion, not a fact.
With these ideas in mind, I maintain that the ideal withdrawal therapy for antidepressants would work something like this:
Have a pharmacist create a year's worth of antidepressants, compounded in such a way that the first pill contains the full dosage that the patient is currently taking (in my case 225 mg. of Venlafaxine) and that the last pill would contain a miniscule fraction of that dosage, with all interim doses decreasing proportionally. In my case, that would mean that each successive pill to be taken daily would contain roughly .6 mgs less Venlafaxine than the previous pill. Thus the pill taken at the midpoint of therapy (on the 182nd day or so) would contain roughly 112 mg. of Venlafaxine.
As one follows the above regimen with Venlafaxine, the potency and frequency of entheogen use would increase correspondingly. Of course, one cannot decide in advance what the correct potency and frequency of use would be on a daily basis, but the dose should be adjusted upward as necessary to prevent and/or counteract any backsliding in the withdrawal regimen stated above. How? By inspiring the user psychologically with plant medicine, thus helping them see their situation creatively and in a new light.
In this way, one leverages the power of anticipation to get the user off of the anti-depressant.
Of course, I am not a doctor (least of all a materialist doctor), but there is what philosophers would call "prima facie" evidence that such a protocol would work, based on what we know about the psychology of motivation and the lengthy lists of psychological benefits that are known to accrue to many, if not most, who work with entheogens like psilocybin and huachuma5.
The protocol's chances of success will only increase as more plant medicines become relegalized, since then the "therapist" can do more than simply adjust the dosage and frequency of entheogens (as in step 2 above), but they can use different entheogens (and/or combinations of entheogens) in their quest to find the most adequate biochemical inspiration for a specific client. Shamans have always had this freedom. It is only in the west that we have determined a priori that psychoactive drugs have no positive uses whatsoever - a position that can only be maintained by the complete abandonment of common sense, not to mention the scientific principle that substances are only good or bad with respect to the context of use. It is also, of course, a lie, historically speaking.
Of course, the dependence-causing nature of SNRIs like Venlafaxine should not be underestimated. Julie Holland says that such meds can be harder to kick than heroin6. Heroin leaves the system in a week or so, whereas SNRIs change baseline brain chemistry and it may take months, perhaps years (if ever???), for the initial baseline to return.
I think there is also a tendency in western medicine to moralize dependency and search for hidden causes. This has its place, of course. But 1 in 4 American women are dependent on these meds. This tells me that the real hidden cause of this mass dependency is prohibition, since I cannot believe that all these women had hidden traumas that got them hooked on antidepressants: rather, it was prohibition itself that got these people hooked. How? By outlawing all other mood-changing drugs, almost all of which are less dependence-causing than antidepressants. Yes, all people have hidden issues of some kind, but when we pathologize women en masse like this, we ignore the obvious culprit behind their dependency, which is drug law.
I could make a much stronger case for the "drug-swapping" therapy that I recommend above, but it will jangle in the ears of all westerners who have been taught from grade school that they must fear drugs.
The fact is that any drug that elates the user could be used in the above routine, not just drugs that today we classify as "entheogens," although entheogens would remain a mainstay of the kind of protocol that I am recommending here. Drug war ideology insists that such use would be morally wrong and even cause addiction, but those are mere biases. Many of the drugs that elate and inspire do not cause addiction - like the phenylethylamines of Alexander Shulgin7. Even addictive drugs can be used non-addictively, notwithstanding the fearmongering of racist Drug Warriors. When all drugs are legal again, the therapist could employ a wide range of mood-elevating substances in such a way that the user need never know which specific drug was being employed at a given time, thus rendering addiction unlikely if not impossible. The therapist could even use those drugs the mere mention of which cause consternation in drug-hating America8.
Of course, this goes against our moral sense in the west that addiction and dependence therapy must be hard and hellish or it is not real therapy. But this, I maintain, is a puritanical prejudice, not a fact.
The problem in "selling" my therapy is that it merely makes psychological sense, the kind of thing that materialists completely ignore. For what is the problem with withdrawal, after all? It's not simply the bad feelings experienced by the subject but the feeling that those sensations will never cease. There is thus literally nothing to look forward to. That's one definition of the hell that many therapists seem to think is the patient's due. If, however, one is given, say, weekly mood elevation in safe and non-addictive ways, one can look forward to a surcease of negative feelings and so "stay the course" on withdrawal from the unwanted substance.
Nor does this bar the user from exploring hidden conflicts. In fact, it gives them a chance to do so since it makes them increasingly eligible for the kind of entheogenic therapies that will help them unmask conflicts. What's more, such substances can help "loosen the tongue" and the mind, enabling them to think and contemplate truths more freely than when both their mind and body are shrouded in a straitjacket of gloomy despair.
To repeat: this is all psychological common sense, but we have a variety of materialist and Christian Science prejudices in the west that keep us from acknowledging it.
This brings up one of the shortcomings of Dr. Gabriel Mate's otherwise fascinating work: his insistence on referring all addiction to what he calls "inner pain."9 By doing so, he completely exonerates the Drug War for its role in creating problematic dependency and addiction. Prior to 1914, there were opium habitues in the States. After 1914, there were only addicts. There had been no sudden mass introduction of "inner pain" in this case. It was drug law which decided by fiat that these individuals would henceforth be considered problematic. When psychologists pathologize such people, they are blaming the victim while helping to normalize the prohibition that created their problems in the first place.
Author's Follow-up: May 6, 2024
Of course when all drugs are re-legalized and we teach people instead of arresting them, the above protocols will not even require a therapist/shaman. One may choose to have one, of course. Who, after all, could not benefit from a little assistance from a pharmacologically savvy empath? But someday we will again treat adults AS adults when it comes to psychoactive medicine and let them decide how much hand-holding they need to use them wisely -- not based on fearmongering public service ads and a self-serving DEA, but based on the facts. And not just the reductively derived facts that myopic science deigns to recognize, but all the facts: including the long and ever-growing list of positive anecdotes about drug use that have been carefully censored from the public discourse by American media and those billionaires who both own and control it10.
Common Nonsense
In the age of the Drug War, psychiatrists, psychologists and doctors lack all common sense. They are dogmatically blind to the power of drugs that elate and inspire, based on their adherence to reductive materialism, which tells them that such things are not "real" cures. The human being is a biochemical machine, after all, and the scientist's job is to fix the biochemistry, not to make people merely feel good. There are hundreds of millions of victims of this mindset, but the doctors never notice them because they are silent: they are the ones who waste their days holed up behind locked doors, contemplating suicide.
Such a materialist mindset completely ignores the power of virtuous circles that a wide variety of pick-me-up drugs could create when properly chosen and scheduled -- on a calendar, I mean, and not by the DEA. Such a mindset completely ignores the power of anticipation. Such a mindset completely ignores the motivating power provided to these individuals of just plain being able to get things done in their lives.
The doctors have no scruples in this regard because, like all Americans, they have been taught since grade-school that drugs must be a dead end, that the creativity of humankind will never find a way to use them wisely.
The cruelty of this modern reductive paradigm is seen in the way that psychiatrists "adjust meds." They insist that the severely depressed patient get off one drug entirely before starting another. Imagine if a drug dealer insisted the same thing. You would think that he was crazy. But the doctor knows best. He or she needs to be in total control of the variables, if only for insurance and regulatory purposes, and so it is for his or her convenience that the patient must go without anything during drug changes, thereby rendering them absolutely miserable.
Doctors praise antidepressants because they do not cause cravings, but for whom is that a benefit? For the prescribing doctor, of course, because the people whom they force to go without medicine merely suffer in a silent hell and do not pester the doctor to help them out.
This is the mindset that teaches doctors to damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than to give them the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions, as soma inspired the Vedic. This is the mindset that causes whole nations to vote in favor of letting people use drugs to die but will not let those same people use drugs that could make them want to live.
It is a complete perversion of values, all wrought by the anti-scientific, superstitious substance demonization of politically scheming politicians, populist pols who come to power by fearmongering.
This is one of the many reasons why the re-election of Trump is an existential disaster, and not just for drug policy but for democracy itself: Trump is the ultimate fearmonger.
I have written dozens of essays about antidepressants and the Drug War, but it is important to read this one first, for it contains the most up-to-date info on my battle to get off such drugs. This reading order is important because I declared premature victory against the SNRI called Effexor in recent essays, only to discover that the drug is far more insidious than I gave it credit for. It turns out withdrawing, at least for me, eventually led to deep feelings of abject despair, far greater than the depression for which I started taking the "med" in the first place.
The frustrating thing is, these feelings could be combatted by a host of drugs that we have outlawed in the name of our anti-scientific and anti-patient war on drugs. That much is just psychological common sense. But we have been taught to believe that there are no positive uses for opium, nor for cocaine, nor for coca, nor for MDMA, nor for laughing gas, nor for peyote, nor for the hundreds of inspiring phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, etc. etc. etc.
The truth is, rather, that Drug Warriors (and the millions whom they have brainwashed) do not WANT there to be positive uses for such drugs. No, they want me to "keep taking my meds" instead and so to enrich their investment portfolios in the pharmaceutical sector. Meanwhile, those without a vested financial interest have been taught that antidepressants are "scientific" and so they cannot understand my desire to get off them. They cannot understand the hell of being turned into a patient for life and having to make regular expensive and humiliating pilgrimages to psychiatrists (who are half one's own age) to bare one's soul for the purpose of obtaining an expensive prescription for a drug that numbs one's brain rather than inspiring it - and a drug which seems to counteract, dampen and/or repress most of the positive effects that I might have otherwise obtained by the few semi-legal alternatives to antidepressants, such as psilocybin and ayahuasca.
But it is just psychological common sense that I could withdraw successfully from Effexor with the advised use of a comprehensive pharmacy, including but not limited to the demonized substances listed above. But materialist science is not interested in common sense. And so they tell me that such drug use has not been proven to "work." But materialist doctors are not experts in what motivates me as a living, breathing, unique individual. The heart has its own reasons that reductionist science cannot understand. If I could look forward, at this moment, to relaxing with an opium pipe tonight, my mood would improve NOW, not just tonight. I would have something to look forward to. I would not feel the need to reach for that bottle full of Effexor pills that I was hoping to foreswear. Likewise, if I could use a drug to laugh and "touch the hand of God" (as with laughing gas and phenethylamines respectively), I could laugh at the pangs of despair that Effexor tries to throw my way.
Science's eternal response to such ideas is: "There is no proof that such things work!"
No, nor will there ever be in the age of the Drug War, in which such common sense use is punished by long jail terms and would never be favorably publicized, even if successful, since America's prime imperative in the age of the Drug War is to demonize psychoactive medicines, under the absurd assumption-laden idea that to talk honestly about drugs is to encourage their use.
Well, we SHOULD be encouraging their use in cases where they actually work, in cases, for instance, when they prevent guys like myself from killing themselves thanks to the knowledge that they are a bounden slave to the combined forces of the Drug War and Big Pharma's pill mill.
Besides, there is no proof that hugging works, but we do not need Dr. Spock of Star Trek to launch a study into that issue: we all know that hugging works by bringing two souls together both physically and spiritually. We do not need a map of brain chemistry to figure this out: the proof is extant, the proof is in the pudding.
But I haven't given up yet despite the setback in my most recent plan. I'm going to search the world for a place where I can get off antidepressants in a way that makes some psychological common sense.
Right now, all I see in terms of resources are a bunch of companies who, for large fees, will help me go cold turkey on antidepressants., or companies that claim to have found the right combination of legal herbal formulas that should make withdrawal easier. But to me, these are all what Percy Shelley would call "frail spells," concocted under the watchful eye of the Drug Warrior to make sure that nothing potent and obviously effective will get added to the mix. In fact, if a space alien came to earth and asked what sort of psychoactive drugs were outlawed, one could honestly answer: "Anything that obviously works."
Meanwhile, drug laws make it impossible for me to visit psychiatrists remotely online, requiring me instead to physically visit my doctors, thereby limiting rural residents like myself to accessing hayseed psychiatrists whose one area of expertise seems to be the writing of prescriptions for antidepressants. Talk to them about anything else, and their eyes glaze over. "That's all unproven," they'll say, "Or, no, we have yet to fully study such things." As if we have to study in order to realize that feeling good helps and can have positive psychological effects.
I'm sure that part of the problem with my withdrawal scheme is that I tried to get off the drug too quickly. But I only tried that because I can find no doctor who will compound the drug for me in a way that makes psychological common sense, namely, with daily miniscule reductions in dosage. My current psychiatrist told me that such compounding was unheard of and that I should drop doses by 37.5 mg at a time, since that is the lowest dose that the pharmaceutical companies create. He said I could start "counting pill beads" once I am down to a 37.5 mg daily dose if I wanted to taper still further.
I did find a compounding company that said it could compound Effexor in the way that I desire. But there's a big catch: they have to receive a prescription for that purpose. And I can find no doctor in the world who is willing to write me one. Even those who sympathize with my plight want me to become their full-time patient before they will even consider writing such a prescription.
So those who warned me against trying to get off Effexor were right in a way: it is extraordinarily difficult. But they feel to realize WHY this is so. It is not just because Effexor is a toxic drug, but also because the drug war has outlawed everything that could help me get off it.
This is why those pundits who sign off on the psychiatric pill mill are clueless about the huge problem with the war on drugs: the way it humiliates and disempowers millions. For it turns out that the phrase "No hope in dope" is true after all, but only when the dope in question is modern antidepressants.
OCTOBER 2024
Here are some of the many articles I have written about the philosophy of getting off drugs. Bear in mind that I am in the process of getting off Effexor myself and am exploring the power of "drugs to fight drugs" in so doing. And this is not a straightforward path given the sweeping limits that are imposed by drug law. So the question of exactly what might work (and how and when, etc.) is still wide open and I am advocating nothing, except the common sense notion that we can benefit from euphoria and mood boosts, yes, and that "drugs can be used to fight drugs," and in a safe way too -- a way that will prove far safer than prohibition, which continues to bring about daily deaths from drive-by shootings and unregulated product while causing civil wars overseas.
I guess what I am saying here is, this site is not purporting to offer medical advice. I avoid using such wording, however, because so many authors refuse to talk honestly about drugs, especially about positive drug use, for fear of being seen as giving medical advice, and this, of course, is just how drug warriors want matters to remain. It lets them shut down free speech about drugs.
Besides, I reject the idea that materialist doctors are the experts when it comes to how we think and feel about life. The best they can do as materialist is to tell us the potential physical risks of using holistically-operating drugs, but individuals are the experts on what motivates them in life, on their own particular hopes and dreams and on what risks they deem necessary to obtain them, to pursue happiness, that is, which objective our legislators outlawed when they outlawed all substances that can help facilitate happiness in the properly motivated and educated individual.
The real answer is not for authors to give groveling apologies for being honest, however: the real answer is for kids to be educated about the basics of wise substance use -- and for America to come to grips with the fact that we will always be surrounded by "drugs" -- and that the goal should be to ensure safe use, not to keep endlessly arresting minorities and removing them from the voting rolls on behalf of the clinically insane idea that we should outlaw mother nature to protect our kids -- and this in a purportedly Christian country whose very deity told us that his creation was good.
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
This is why we would rather have a depressed person commit suicide than to use "drugs" -- because drugs, after all, are not dealing with the "real" problem. The patient may SAY that drugs make them feel good, but we need microscopes to find out if they REALLY feel good.
The Partnership for a Death Free America is launching a campaign to celebrate the 50th year of Richard Nixon's War on Drugs. We need to give credit where credit's due for the mass arrest of minorities, the inner city gun violence and the civil wars that it's generated overseas.
In the Atomic Age Declassified, they tell us that we needed hundreds of thermonuclear tests so that scientists could understand the effects. That's science gone mad. Just like today's scientists who need more tests before they can say that laughing gas will help the depressed.
Science today is all about ignoring the obvious.
And THAT's why scientists are drug war collaborators, because they're not about to sign off on the use of substances until they've studied them "up the wazoo."
Using grants from an agency whose very name indicates their anti-drug bias: namely, the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Scientists cannot tell us if psychoactive drugs are worth the risk any more than they can tell us if free climbing is worth the risk, or horseback riding or target practice or parkour.
To put it another way: in a sane world, we would learn to strategically fight drugs with drugs.
"In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the peyote tells us where to find it." --Antonin Arnaud
"I can take this drug that inspires me and makes me compassionate and teaches me to love nature in its byzantine complexity, or I can take Prozac which makes me unable to cry at my parents' funeral. Hmm. Which shall it be?" Only a mad person in a mad world would choose SSRIs.
If America cannot exist without outlawing drugs, then there is something wrong with America, not with drugs.
FDA drug approval is a farce when it comes to psychoactive medicine. The FDA ignores all the obvious benefits and pretends that to prove efficacy, they need "scientific" evidence. That's scientism, not science.
There will always be people who don't use drugs wisely, just as there are car drivers who don't drive wisely, and rock climbers who fall to their death. America needs to grow up and accept this, while ending prohibition and teaching safe use.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Common Sense Drug Withdrawal: an open letter to Austin of the Huachuma Project, published on May 6, 2024 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
You have been reading an article entitled, Common Sense Drug Withdrawal: an open letter to Austin of the Huachuma Project, published on May 6, 2024 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)