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.
Now the folks who helped Matthew get Ketamine must be sacrificed on the altar of the Drug War, lest people start thinking that the Drug War itself was at fault.y
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.
If we encourage folks to use antidepressants daily, there is nothing wrong with them using heroin daily. A founder of Johns Hopkins used morphine daily and he not only survived, but he thrived.
The drug war is a scare campaign to teach us to distrust mother nature and to rely on pharmaceuticals instead.
If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.
The drug war is is a multi-billion-dollar campaign to enforce the attitude of the Francisco Pizarro's of the world when it comes to non-western medicine. It is the apotheosis of the colonialism that most Americans claim to hate.
Rick Strassman reportedly stopped his DMT trials because some folks had bad experiences at high doses. That is like giving up on aspirin because high doses of NSAIDs can kill.
Drug War censorship is supported by our "science" magazines, which pretend that outlawed drugs do not exist, and so write what amount to lies about the supposed intransigence of things like depression and anxiety.
The Drug War has turned America into the world's first "Indignocracy," where our most basic rights can be vetoed by a misinformed public. That's how scheming racist politicians put an end to the 4th amendment to the US Constitution.
Why don't those politicians understand what hateful colonialism they are practicing? Psychedelics have been used for millennia by the tribes that the west has conquered -- now we won't even let folks talk honestly about such indigenous medicines.
(up)