with the help of naughty plant medicines and fungi!
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
October 7, 2024
used drugs to get off drugs!!!
Now, here is where I am expected to backpedal like a cyclist who has just seen a German Shepherd ahead of him en route and remind everyone that I am not a doctor, no, no, no! That's the biggest sin in modern psychiatry (or in Webmaster 101, for that matter), to give "medical" advice to someone without being a board-certified materialist (one whose review stats can be looked up on WebMD). And yet "doctors" as such are precisely those people who turned me into a lifetime patient 40 years ago. Why should I be consulting them now to GET off their go-to drugs? Nor has their materialist mindset changed much, given my disappointing chat with my latest counselor, who, in fact, responded to my desire to quit Effexor by praising that dependence-causing drug through the roof, and this after I had clearly intimated my hatred for the nostrum in question. He then reminded me (unapologetically even) that he had nothing whatsoever to say about drugs like psilocybin since those are remedies for the future, not for saps like myself who still live in the present, in which materialist philosophy still rules.
I felt like being snarky and saying:
"Oh, so you don't make it a habit to keep up on trending healthcare patterns? Okay. Can you suggest a doctor who DOES keep up on his or her own field?"
In fact, almost everyone believes today that doctors are the experts on what psychoactive pills we should take -- and this includes many movers-and-shakers in the decriminalization business, including Rick Doblin, DJ Nutt and Carl Hart. These are the guys who frequently use the modern trope "treatment resistant depression," by which they hope to imply that materialist science has "cinched" depression, thank you very much, and that if your particular mental state "missed the memo," so much the worse for you. (The best we can hope is that these guys are not being entirely sincere when they praise the money-driven monolith known as Big Pharma. They have surely all used the kinds of drugs that put antidepressants to shame when it comes to easing depression, so they must know, "in their heart of hearts," that materialists are not the good guys, at least in the long run, when it comes to the Drug War and the false psychosocial presumptions and lies upon which it is based.)
But to put materialists in charge of mind and mood is what philosophers call a "category error." For materialist doctors are not experts on human feelings and/or what causes or ameliorates those feelings in a given person over a given time. They can sound the gong about potential dangerous physical interactions, but even then, they are unqualified to say if those risks are worthwhile, since they do not know the nature and extent of the freedom for which the user in question is pining. For despite the modern drug-hating biases, it tells us nothing to say that "A" can cause downside "B" (especially when we fail to even specify particular dosage at which said downside obtains) unless we know the nature of the psychological state that one is attempting to stimulate with drug use and how strongly one insists on living in their own private Idaho, so to speak, psychologically speaking. Only then can we know if causing downside "B" is worth the risk involved in this particular case. Might the user even kill themselves if not given a chance to live large, i.e., if mother nature were not re-legalized in some way? The fact that the answer is often "yes" is implicit in America's high suicide rates.
Does heavy cocaine use make sense? To most people, probably not. To a stand-up comedian, perhaps so, given that his or her children could starve if the wiseacre were suddenly incapable of telling a convincing joke (especially after a long night of baby care or of working overtime at his or her second job, etc.) The materialist may give them a handout should they fail in their vocation, but they're certainly not going to pay anyone's bills -- even though their tacit support of prohibition has helped land such a problematic comedian in financial hell, at least for the nonce. Such sample cases happen every day in the real world, but modern psychology cannot acknowledge that fact. Why not? Because they would thereby depart from the true religion, the one that tells us that drugs themselves cause problems, drugs, as opposed to the complex and fraught psychosocial interaction of the drug users with the busy and complex world around them.. And so researchers must twist the story inside out. When they find a comedian using cocaine to good effect, they ignore that obvious beneficial use and view the drama as a morality play against the evil of drugs. It's now the story of a comedian whose life was ruined (eventually?) by cocaine -- rather than a comedian who was understandably seeking a way to use cocaine as safely as possible to leverage his or her comedic skills and so keep one's family fed.
The FDA and most doctors, on the other hand, have a very different and ridiculously simplified way of evaluating a psychotropic drug for approval. They simply say:
"Make sure that it does not cause any problems whatsoever (even in theory) for impressionable white suburban young people... and maybe then... after a long time... we will at least consider letting one single adult demographic partake (after filling out reams of paperwork, of course, for liability reasons) -- if only as part of some particular clinical trial sponsored by Big Pharma... especially if researchers can find a way to keep the drug from providing any unwanted ecstasy or obvious spiritual motivation, since there is no money in curing problems, only in treating them."
But right now I can just feel the disdain of the professional doctor and their ideological supporters:
"How dare you get off Effexor, Brian," they cry, "without the help of a board-certified doctor? Didn't you ever read the Harrison Narcotics Act? Mother Nature's healing godsends are not for you personally, Brian, unless your betters say so!"
The irony is that I really do have my materialist psychiatrists to thank for the fact that I am now off Effexor.
Why? Because the doctors pissed me off at long last and I finally became resentful of all the whole rigamarole, of the time and money that I was losing in my attempt to do things their way, the materialist way, as if I were a human widget susceptible to a one-size-fits-all cure for human sadness. Suddenly, I felt great getting off Effexor, because with every passing day, I felt those condescending doctors getting further and further away from both myself and my bank account. On a recent hour-long trip to Harrisonburg, Virginia, I actually felt a level of clear-headedness that I had not experienced since childhood. Talk about "so much gravy"! I was involved in life again, living it, not protected from it via a tranquilizer that has been misbilled as an anti-depressant. It's so ironic, since the party line of psychiatry had always been that it was treating "the real problems" of life and that "drugs" were just bandages. The quipster, however, seems to have gotten things entirely backwards. Psychiatry itself was treating my wounds with bandages all these years, whereas Mother Nature was sitting by in the prison cell that the materialists have fashioned for her, ready to help us with numerous holistic godsends - but only when we start thinking of her as Gaia again and not as the drug kingpin that appears to the eyes of the cynical but pharmacologically clueless Drug Warrior.
What really surprised me about the withdrawal process, though, was all the discouragement that I received -- not from Drug Warriors or even materialists, but from the powers-that-be in the withdrawal business1. The mod at Surviving Depression was terrified when I told her that I would be combining plant medicines with Effexor. She had no specific concerns, just the whole thing sounded sickly to her. The folks at Right to Heal were also nervous about me "combining drugs," though this was hypocritical insofar as they seem to make most of their money by selling "nutrients" to those seeking to withdraw from antidepressants. I thought to myself, "Fine, but at least Mad in America will respond favorably, given that Richard Whitaker's whole site is devoted to explaining the shortcomings of antidepressants." And yet guess what? The folks at Mad in America refused to publish my story telling how I got off antidepressants. That would be to glorify drug use, don't you see? To which I answer, "Yes, but why should we NOT glorify drugs that work for us?" Apparently for M.I.A., it is still the doctor who is the expert about my moods and my personal psychology, not myself. Drugs are still bad - though we're permitted brief infatuations with time-honored mood medicines after reading the disingenuous teaser books by underground prohibitionists like Michael Pollan and Rick Strassman.
Maybe this explains why getting off Effexor has seemed so much easier for myself than folks had claimed it would be for me. I guess everybody was assuming that I was not just quitting Effexor but that I was quitting everything else at the same time, that I was getting off all so-called drugs, that I was seeking to go all "Mary Baker Eddy" on them. No one realized that I would be so naughty and so anti-PC as to actually use drugs to fight drugs. And so far, I've received a great score card from that strategy. Marijuana (which I legally used in Maryland, of course) has completely trounced the insomnia that I noticed almost immediately during withdrawal. That's the only noticeable downside from Effexor thus far - insomnia -- and I've been off Effexor completely now for a month. Sure, there may be additional downsides coming my way, (I can hear the materialists now saying: "Just you wait and see!") But I am actually looking forward to any psychological setbacks to my withdrawal process insofar as I plan to combat them using mind-improving plant teachers, fungi and synthetics: you know, the same time-honored godsends that my paternalistic government has had the anti-historical gall to tell me could have no positive uses for anybody anywhere ever. Does my government really think that I'm looking to buy swampland in New Jersey, is that why they're pegging us citizens as such easy marks, as folks so ready and eager to be lied to today, and with whoppers too? The very idea that time-honored medicines have no positive uses is worse than wrong: it is a self-fulfilling prophecy: for when we outlaw a drug, we make sure that it will never be used for any purposes, positive or otherwise.
Now, I expect such a colonialist viewpoint from my federal government -- one which thrives, after all, on the lies that it creates about drugs -- but it was quite revealing to hear all this anti-drug skepticism from organizations whose raison d'etre is to combat the war on drugs and the limitations that it places on would-be healers. And so it irritated me to be reading lines from these websites that could have been written by any DEA agent, lines to convince me that I am not the expert when it comes to my own psychosocial health and that I should stand-down and let materialist doctors "cure me" -- as if they haven't already done more than enough for me by turning me into an eternal patient for the last 40 years. "Thanks, but I think I'll try to live the rest of my life without your assistance, thanks all the same. No, no, you're really TOO good to me, so thanks but no thanks."
My success thus far at quitting Effexor has been so thorough that I'm getting paranoid: maybe the infamous difficulties of withdrawal that I've always read about were actually being promoted by Big Pharma itself so that most people would not consider trying to get off these drugs in the first place. Then again, maybe psychosocial responses to drug withdrawal are always different. We ask "How is it to get off Effexor?" when the better question would be: "How will it be for this particular person to get off Effexor given his or her pharmaco-social history and his or her willingness or lack thereof to benefit from the many drugs that government has tried to make us fear rather than to understand and to use wisely?" But it's depressing that almost no one will be allowed to follow in my footsteps here and learn to use drugs to fight drugs, as for instance when withdrawing from Effexor. And why not? Because even the most tolerant Americans have gotten it into their bamboozled brains that Big Pharma materialists should be directing our plans for holistic healing and that our job is simply to "shut up and take our meds."
Paul Stamets hints that psychedelics are going to spell the end of Big Pharma as we know it. But the Drug War will still be around in our hearts and minds as long as we use phrases like that, to "shut up and take your pills." The very idea of a patient will disappear, insofar as folks will seek psychedelics and related drugs for a long list of reasons, many of which have not yet even been pathologized by the drug-mongering Diagnostic Statistic Manual.
Author's Follow-up: October 7, 2024
It took me ten years to get off of Valium, on the other hand -- but as sure as I breathe, that could have happened far more quickly too had I had alternatives to use. But that makes only psychological sense, which is the kind that materialists do not generally understand.
1 I say my success was thorough, but if I had not had the option of legal marijuana use in nearby Maryland, I would definitely still be on Effexor today. (up)
I personally hate beets and I could make a health argument against their legality. Beets can kill for those allergic to them. Sure, it's a rare condition, but since when has that stopped a prohibitionist from screaming bloody murder?
The DEA has done everything it can to keep Americans clueless about opium and poppies. The agency is a disgrace to a country that claims to value knowledge and freedom of information.
A Pennsylvanian politician now wants the US Army to "fight fentanyl." The guy is anthropomorphizing a damn drug! No wonder pols don't want to spend money on education, because any educated country would laugh a superstitious guy like that right out of public office.
The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.
When folks banned opium, they did not just ban a drug: they banned the philosophical and artistic insights that the drug has been known to inspire in writers like Poe, Lovecraft and De Quincey.
Clearly a millennia's worth of positive use of coca by the Peruvian Indians means nothing to the FDA. Proof must show up under a microscope.
Science knows nothing of the human spirit and of the hopes and dreams of humankind. Science cannot tell us whether a given drug risk is worthwhile given the human need for creativity and passion in their life. Science has no expertise in making such philosophical judgements.
To understand why the western world is blind to the benefits of "drugs," read "The Concept of Nature" by Whitehead. He unveils the scientific schizophrenia of the west, according to which the "real" world is invisible to us while our perceptions are mere "secondary" qualities.
"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.
Now drug warriors have nitrous oxide in their sights, the substance that inspired the philosophy of William James. They're using the same tired MO: focusing exclusively on potential downsides and never mentioning the benefits of use, and/or denying that any exist.
Listen to the Drug War Philosopher as he tells you how you can support his work to end the hateful drug war -- and, ideally, put the DEA on trial for willfully lying about godsend medicines! (How? By advertising on this page right c'here!)
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, Getting Off Effexor in 80 Days: with the help of naughty plant medicines and fungi!, published on October 7, 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)
used drugs to get off drugs!!!
You have been reading an article entitled, Getting Off Effexor in 80 Days: with the help of naughty plant medicines and fungi!, published on October 7, 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)