Getting Off of Big Pharma Meds Using Teacher Plants
or Why I'm Moving to Peru
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 1, 2024
n order to understand the reasons for my upcoming trip (and eventual move) to the Sacred Valley of Peru1, the reader has to know my psychological backstory, especially the fact that I have been a chronic depressive from my teens and that I can say definitively after 50 years of therapeutic failures that the western "meds" provided for my "condition" have proven useless - or rather worse than useless insofar as they have turned me into a ward of the healthcare state thanks to the dependence-causing nature of the drugs in question. It's possible that such legal medicines that I have been prescribed over the years have kept me from committing suicide at several crisis points in my life, but that is scarcely a ringing endorsement for meds that were touted as cures for depression. And even that one benefit of pills like SSRIs and SNRIs - that they keep me from committing suicide - comes with a high price, since these medications numb my reactions to the world at large and keep me from fully experiencing both the joys and the tragedies of life. That's why the practical goal of my upcoming move is to get off of antidepressants entirely.
You might say that I could do that just as well in the United States, but the western protocol for withdrawing from a drug is based on the Christian Science notion that the goal of the withdrawal process should be a drug-free life2, whereas my goal is to get off of "manmade" antidepressants while "getting onto" what I consider to be the far more sacred and valuable drugs of Mother Nature, probably starting with the empathogen huachuma3 and then the entheogen ayahuasca, to be followed by a list of other substances largely unknown to the west but which show great promise for changing mindsets while yet not establishing dependency, let alone addiction, in the user.
Such a cure is hard for materialist scientists to understand, because they are obsessed with finding biochemical proof of a drug's efficacy. That's why they have remained largely silent about the patently obvious benefits of the coca leaf, or MDMA, or laughing gas, or opium: because they are not interested in making the depressed laugh and be happy: they want to make the depressed REALLY happy, which means that they are happy thanks to some biochemical cause and effect that can be clearly depicted and analyzed in PowerPoint presentations for organizations like NIDA and the FDA.
Basically, then, I'm going to Peru in order to perform the sort of clinical trials that materialists4 refuse to perform, trials in which I investigate the power of sacred medicines to help end pharmaceutical addictions, not by changing one's biochemistry but rather by changing their attitude toward life and hence toward the withdrawal process itself. In other words, I will be using myself as a guinea pig, or rather as a participant, in a clinical trial of my own creation. (I will, however, be employing local guides with knowledge of plant medicines, the kind of guides whose help is rarely solicited in stateside lab settings.)
This is all the more necessary since anti-depressant junkies like myself are ineligible for participation in psychedelic drugs trials in the states thanks to liability concerns related to so-called "serotonin toxicity syndrome,5" which is a very rare syndrome indeed, to the extent that it actually exists. My experience with SSRIs is that they dull the experience of other drugs rather than exacerbating them. Besides, I am more than willing to take risks in my search for a better life: indeed, who isn't, with the exception of the incorrigible couch potato, of course? But the research community will say that they are protecting folks like myself by disqualifying us for drug trials; but let's be honest: what they are really doing is protecting themselves. They know that statistics mean nothing to the Drug Warrior. For them, one swallow makes a summer. They will parley a single participant death into a big deal in the age of the Drug War, even if the death only seemed to be drug-related.
And so it is that stateside clinical trials place an absurd focus on safety, to the point where they prevent the most deserving recipients of psychedelic medicines -- those whom the Drug War has turned into eternal patients - from participating in psychedelic trials. And yet the NIH itself reports that "most cases of serotonin syndrome are mild and will resolve with the removal of the offending drug alone." It is thus clearly a prejudicial and cowardly overreaction to use the syndrome as an excuse to ignore the needs of the millions of depressed Americans whom the Drug War has turned into wards of the healthcare state.
By the way, the foregoing quotation about serotonin toxicity appears on a web page from the "NIH: National Library of Medicine, National Center for Biotechnology Information," and this is part of the problem. Psychoactive drugs are about psychology and religion, not just biology, let alone biotechnology. What needs to change inside me are my goals in life, and those are unique to myself and are derived from a wide variety of forces, both from nature and from nurture. The biotechnologist, on the other hand, posits the human being as an interchangeable biological unit, one that is subject to one-size-fits-all cures for emotional shortcomings. That's why the FDA recently fast-tracked the therapeutic use of LSD: because the drug makers have turned it into a one-size-fits-all treatment, one for which visions and euphoria are considered to be unwanted side effects (in other words by removing everything for which the drug had been rightly revered: namely, its power to inspire new ways of thinking about the world)6.
And so I am moving to Peru, not just to escape drug laws, but to escape the materialist assumptions about how drugs should work, those assumptions which would wrongly give medical doctors the right to decide how and how much I should be allowed to think and feel in my life, those flawed assumptions according to which the goal of safety is valued more than the goal of self-knowledge and of living a full spiritual and emotional life.
My interest is not so much in drugs, however, as it is in the power of the human mind when empowered by drugs. This is a power that has been left largely untapped and uninvestigated by human beings, partly because of the west's intoxiphobia7 and partly because of hierarchical tribal limits on who could use psychoactive drugs and in what circumstances. Yet it is astonishing to me that the consumption of a mere plant or fungus should have anything at all to do with our outlook on life, let alone the ability to transform it profoundly. Moreover, such medicines seem to have been made with ourselves in mind insofar as we human beings possess precisely the kind of neural mechanisms which are necessary to benefit from them. Certainly, the idea that we should refrain from using them is a mere religious idea, not a logical conclusion. To be specific, it is the religious idea of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the drug-hating religion of Christian Science.
This is why I say that I am moving to Peru for religious freedom, just like my forebears who came to North America for that purpose. The irony, of course, is that those same champions of religious liberty are now the ones who are preventing me from enjoying religious liberty in the USA.
Stay tuned for updates on my investigations of plant teachers in Peru and how they might be used for fighting addictions and dependencies!
They still don't seem to get it. The drug war is a whole wrong way of looking at the world. It tells us that substances can be judged "up" or "down," which is anti-scientific and blinds us to endless beneficial uses.
I'd like to become a guinea pig for researchers to test the ability of psychoactive drugs to make aging as psychologically healthy as possible. If such drugs cannot completely ward off decrepitude, they can surely make it more palatable. The catch? Researchers have to be free.
Imagine if there were drugs for which dependency was a feature, not a bug. People would stop peddling that junk, right? Wrong. Just ask your psychiatrist.
The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe at the same time as they tell us that "shock therapy" IS safe. What?! Shock therapy "works" by damaging the brain.
Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.
We've all been taught since grade school that human beings cannot use psychoactive medicines wisely. That is just a big fat lie. It's criminal to keep substances illegal that can awaken the mind and remind us of our full potential in life.
I'm told that science is completely unbiased today. I guess I'll have to go back and reassess my doubts about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
We live in a make-believe world in the US. We created it by outlawing all potentially helpful psychological meds, after which the number-one cause of arrest soon became "drugs." We then made movies to enjoy our crackdown on TV... after a tough day of being drug tested at work.
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 of Big Pharma Meds Using Teacher Plants: or Why I'm Moving to Peru, published on April 1, 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)
n order to understand the reasons for my upcoming trip (and eventual move) to the Sacred Valley of Peru1, the reader has to know my psychological backstory, especially the fact that I have been a chronic depressive from my teens and that I can say definitively after 50 years of therapeutic failures that the western "meds" provided for my "condition" have proven useless - or rather worse than useless insofar as they have turned me into a ward of the healthcare state thanks to the dependence-causing nature of the drugs in question. It's possible that such legal medicines that I have been prescribed over the years have kept me from committing suicide at several crisis points in my life, but that is scarcely a ringing endorsement for meds that were touted as cures for depression. And even that one benefit of pills like SSRIs and SNRIs - that they keep me from committing suicide - comes with a high price, since these medications numb my reactions to the world at large and keep me from fully experiencing both the joys and the tragedies of life. That's why the practical goal of my upcoming move is to get off of antidepressants entirely. 
You have been reading an article entitled, Getting Off of Big Pharma Meds Using Teacher Plants: or Why I'm Moving to Peru, published on April 1, 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)