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 2 with the motivating help of entheogens3. 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 4 ? 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 5 help those with treatment-resistant depression?'6 Surely this is a laughable title. Everyone knows that laughing can help the depressed - and not just the laughing itself but the anticipation of laughing7. 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 huachuma8.
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 heroin
If drug war logic made sense, we would outlaw endless things in addition to drugs. Because the drug war says that it's all worth it if we can save just one life -- which is generally the life of a white suburban young person, btw.
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.
If opium were legal, then much of the nostrums peddled by drug stores today would be irrelevant. (No wonder the drug war has staying power!)
The sad fact is that America regularly arrests people whose only crime is that they are keeping performance anxiety at bay... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
In a sane world, we'd package laughing gas for safe use and give it to the suicidal -- saying, "Use before attempting to kill yourself." But drug warriors would rather have suicide than drug use.
Politicians protect a drug that kills 178,000 a year via a constitutional amendment, and then they outlaw all less lethal alternatives. To enforce the ban, they abrogate the 4th amendment and encourage drug testing to ensure that drug war heretics starve.
Oregon has decided to go back to the braindead plan of treating substance use as a police matter. Might as well arrest people at home since America has already spread their drug-hating Christian Science religion all over the world.
If politicians wanted to outlaw coffee, a bunch of Kevin Sabets would come forward and start writing books designed to scare us off the drink by cherry-picking negative facts from scientific studies.
To oppose the Drug War philosophically, one has to highlight its connections to both materialism and the psychiatric pill mill. And that's a problem, because almost everyone is either a Drug Warrior or a materialist these days and has a vested interest in the continuation of the psychiatric pill mill.
Someday the world will realize that Freud's real achievement was his discovery of the depression-busting power of cocaine.
If drug war logic made sense, we would outlaw endless things in addition to drugs. Because the drug war says that it's all worth it if we can save just one life -- which is generally the life of a white suburban young person, btw.