Just to update you: Now that I have retired at age 65, I am planning to "get off" SNRIs in the course of one year. It is my hope that during that time, I will be able to incrementally replace SNRIs with the occasional use of the Huachuma cactus23, in order to inspire me to stay the course. Unfortunately, I cannot expect help from retreat centers because of the rare side effect called "serotonin syndrome,4" but my understanding is that the condition is usually mild and can be easily treated. But since I can't expect retreat centers to assume the liability and PR concerns, it looks like I'll be on my own in this trial of mine.
I have, I should add, also written to psychedelic researchers in the States and in Canada5, trying to encourage them to perform trials to see how psychedelics, properly monitored, can help antidepressant "addicts" get off their "meds." No one seems interested, so it looks like I'm going to have to be a pioneer in this area. That said, I wish I could get help from some Peruvian shamans, because I just cannot believe that a dependence on Big Pharma meds is the one problem in the world that plant medicine cannot treat. Sure, there are risks, but no one seems to be balancing these risks against the potential benefits, nor looking at the downsides of doing nothing, starting with the utterly demoralizing knowledge that antidepressants 6 make the user a ward of the healthcare state and an eternal patient.
Besides, the key ingredient to a good huachuma experience seems to be motivation, and I cannot imagine someone more motivated to change than myself, or the millions like me who have been demoralized by their dependence on Big Pharma meds7.
For now, I'm working on my Spanish, in preparation for another trip to Cusco8 in a month or two. While there, I will seek out long-term housing, practice my Spanish, and make preparations of huachuma cactus (starting with smaller doses) to see if and how they might help me cope with the psychological downsides of antidepressant withdrawal. Thanks for your interest in my situation, and I wish you luck in your adventures as a western shaman. Your journeys look very interesting to me. Hopefully I can take advantage of them in a year or so when I've gotten off of Big Pharma 910 meds entirely.
The front page of every mycology club page should feature a protest of drug laws that make the study of mycology illegal in the case of certain shrooms. But no one protests. Their silence makes them drug war collaborators because it serves to normalize prohibition.
Q: Where can you find almost-verbatim copies of the descriptions of religious experiences described by William James? A: In descriptions of user reports of "trips" on drugs ranging from coca to opium, from MDMA to laughing gas.
Typical materialist protocol. Take all the "wonder" out of the drug and sell it as a one-size-fits all "reductionist" cure for anxiety. Notice that they refer to hallucinations and euphoria as "adverse effects." What next? Communion wine with the religion taken out of it?
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.
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.
In the age of the Drug War, the Hippocratic Oath has become "First, do no good."
If there is an epidemic of "self-harm," prohibitionists never think of outlawing razor blades. They ask: "Why the self-harm?" But if there is an epidemic of drug use which they CLAIM is self-harm, they never ask "Why the self-harm?" They say: "Let's prohibit and punish!"
I have dissed MindMed's new LSD "breakthrough drug" for philosophical reasons. But we can at least hope that the approval of such a "de-fanged" LSD will prove to be a step in the slow, zigzag path toward re-legalization.
Scientists are censored as to what they can study thanks to drug law. Instead of protesting that outrage, they lend a false scientific veneer to those laws via their materialist obsession with reductionism, which blinds them to the obvious godsend effects of outlawed substances.
There is more hope in dope than there is in the psychiatric pill mill.
(up)