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Getting Off of Big Pharma Meds Using Teacher Plants

or Why I'm Moving to Peru

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 1, 2024



In 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 2 - 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 3 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 life4, 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 huachuma5 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 6 , or laughing gas 7 , or opium 8 : 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 9 and the FDA.

Basically, then, I'm going to Peru in order to perform the sort of clinical trials that materialists10 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,11" 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)12.

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 intoxiphobia13 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!









Notes for essay entitled Getting Off of Big Pharma Meds Using Teacher Plants: or Why I'm Moving to Peru:

1: The Sacred Valley: Peru, South America Lonely Planet (up)
2: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
3: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
4: Christian Science Rehab DWP (up)
5: The Beginner’s Guide to Healing with Huachuma (San Pedro) Seer, Balam, 2019 (up)
6: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
7: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
8: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
9: Blocks, NIDA. 2016. “How the NIDA Blocks Marijuana Research over and Over.” Cannabis.net. 2016. https://cannabis.net/blog/opinion/how-the-nida-blocks-marijuana-research-over-and-over. (up)
10: How Scientific Materialism Keeps Godsend Medicines from the Depressed DWP (up)
11: Serotonin Syndrome Simon, Leslie V., NIH National Library of Medicine: National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2023 (up)
12: LSD for puritans DWP (up)
13: 'Intoxiphobia' by Russell Newcombe DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




There's more than set and setting: there's fundamental beliefs about the meaning of life and about why mother nature herself is full of psychoactive substances. Tribal peoples associate some drugs with actual sentient entities -- that is far beyond "set and setting."

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.

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

All drugs have positive uses at some dose, for some reason, at some time -- but prohibitionists have the absurd idea that drugs can be voted up or down. This anti-scientific notion deprives the modern world of countless godsends.

I wonder if Nixon knew what a favor he was doing medical capitalism when he outlawed psychedelics. Those drugs can actually cure things, and there's no money in that.

Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice.

The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe. This is the same FDA that signs off on Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself.

Capitalism naturally results in disease-mongering by a self-interested medically establishment -- and disease-mongering requires the suppression of medicines that work holistically.

If I want to use the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions, fight depression, or follow up on the research of William James into altered states, I should not have to live in fear of the DEA crashing down my door and shouting: "GO! GO! GO!"

Materialists are always trying to outdo each other in describing the insignificance of humankind. Crick at least said we were "a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Musk downsizes us further to one single microbe. He wins!


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