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My New Clinical Trial in the Sacred Valley of Peru

on replacing antidepressants with plant medicines

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 4, 2024



Latest update

I will be traveling to Peru next Monday for a weeklong stay in the Sacred Valley1. My goal is to use plant medicines there for personal healing and for philosophical exploration. That's right: philosophical exploration, bearing in mind that William James himself told us that we must explore altered states in order to fully understand the nature of consciousness and ultimate reality2. I also want to try out a sort of "dieta" of my own designed to free me from my dependence on Big Pharma meds: not by becoming a drug-free Christian Scientist (which is the stealth goal of western therapy), but with a view toward replacing said pharmaceuticals with the strategic use of various plant medicines, including San Pedro cactus, ayahuasca, and a variety of lesser known plant guides3. This will be my own clinical trial, since I have yet to hear of either shaman or doctor who specializes in working with SSRI and SNRI addicts. Such "addicts," in my view, are the most deserving of psychedelic therapy insofar as they were shunted off onto dependence-causing drugs thanks to America's disgraceful Drug War. And yet they are precisely the ones who are ineligible for psychedelic clinical trials in the west due to liability concerns over a poorly understood, rare but typically mild side effect known as "serotonin syndrome"4.

That's why I have decided to take matters into my own laboratory, so to speak, and do the clinical trials on my own, using myself as "guinea pig," while methodically documenting my attempts at slowly-but-surely replacing Big Pharma 5 6 drugs with the help of plant guides. This may seem highly risky behavior from the point of view of a westerner, who values safety above all things, but I have always agreed with Socrates, that the unexamined life is not worth living. Besides, I'm 65 years old, and if I'm not going to take risks now, I'm never going to take them. Of course, this first trip to Peru is just my trial run, to verify that I will be able to follow through on this plan, both from a psychological and practical point of view. I certainly have the money for it, seeing that life in Peru is dirt cheap compared to the US. But I am so used to modern comforts that the westerner in me might rebel at the last moment and beat an ignominious retreat to all things holy in the west: such as Netflix and Starbucks - which, I fear, however, are all too eager to follow me to the Sacred Valley, assuming that they are not there already.

Stay tuned to this page for more on my psycho-philosophical quest in Peru and the outcome of my experiments with plant medicine. I have much to learn from actual pedigreed plant healers, of course, but my research so far indicates that the San Pedro cactus should serve as my introduction to this new world7. I also believe that the regular chewing of coca leaves might provide the boost that an introspective procrastinator like myself needs in order to get things done in life, and on a timely basis at that8! One finally realizes at age 65 that they do not have time to dally. So stay tuned for all the details on this new clinical trial, one that you will never see on the NIH website, but one which, if successful, should give new hope to the drug-dependent depressed around the world - whom the psychedelic researchers of today are shamelessly ignoring, at least when they're not telling them to "keep taking your meds!"




Author's Follow-up: April 6, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




When I first dreamed of traveling to Peru, I envisioned working with all sorts of plant medicine to get my head straight. I thought the shaman would have access to all sorts of psychoactive medicines, and not just the top three trending substances in the world today. This was quite naive of me, as it turns out. Peru is not some haven from idiotic and counterproductive drug law. They have simply made exceptions for Peruvian drugs that have a well-documented history of use in Peru. Yes, coca leaves (as opposed to cocaine ) are legal in Peru, as are ayahuasca and San Pedro cactus, but MDMA 9 can get you thrown in jail, as can LSD and psilocybin. I even read somewhere that it is criminal to have more than one of the legal substances on hand at a time -- but do not quote me on that. These anti-nature laws disgust me so much that I don't yet have the stomach to research this fully. Fortunately, however, San Pedro cactus sounds like it has a great potential benefit for me. As for coca leaves, I still have the theory that the continuous chewing of the same will give me just the motivation that I need to prevent the evaporation of initiative that too often afflicts a depressive of my stamp, one who so often ALMOST does things that are necessary and productive in life, but who often procrastinates and/or stops halfway.

I am very happy that Peru was so magnanimous as to permit the use of the cactus known to the locals as huachuma10 -- especially since I understand that there may be liver-related concerns with excessive use of certain formulations of ayahuasca, about which I hope to learn more during my upcoming trip. But if the accounts of the huachuma experience are true and I find that I can duplicate them for myself in a meaningful way, then I believe that my goal can be achieved, which, to repeat, is to "get off" of antidepressants 11 with the moral and biochemical help of plant medicines: the approved list of which, for the nonce, consists of only coca and huachuma, for the reasons noted above.

I will be departing the United States of Fearmongering on Monday, which means that my clinical trials will begin in the latter half of the coming week, with results to be published on this page. Of course, I'm no doubt flattering myself to think that anybody cares about such deets (or this entire website, for that matter), but if the protocol that I envision works for me, there seems no reason that it could not work for the millions who find themselves dependent on antidepressants that are not doing the job. True, many think they're doing the job, but I maintain that no one would think that if they had experienced the transcendence provided by the godsend medicines that governments have outlawed following the hateful example of the Christian Science Republic known as the United States of America. Then they will be like myself as a young man, when I had my first psychedelic experience: amazed by the world of possibility that they suddenly see thanks to the lifting of a veil of gloom of which they were hitherto consciously unaware and realizing how hateful it is that a government should declare such experiences to be illegal.


Author's Follow-up: December 22, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




This is a very difficult subject to write about because one risks criminal charges to the extent that one is successful in improving their life.

It takes time and money to live cheaply in places like Peru and thus to avail oneself of the benefits of their particular set of drug laws.

I see great benefit in psychedelic medicines and will have to leave it at that for now because of drug-war censorship and the ever-implicit threat of arrest. But I am beginning to think that psychedelics are a bit of a sideshow when it comes to substance prohibition in general. While they have great potential, we must remember that there are drugs that have far more obvious potential that we have all agreed to forget about: opium 12 and cocaine , for instance -- under the absurd idea that a substance that might be misused by the uneducated (the people whom we refuse to educate about drugs) must not be used by anyone for any reason, ever.

Opium and cocaine 13 14 have a vast host of potential rational uses -- yet we all have to pretend otherwise in the age of the Drug War. We are all living one big lie, a lie that has blinded us to common sense psychology -- that drugs that elate do indeed elate -- and that the creative mind of humanity can find safe and positive ways to use them. (Just one example out of an endless stream of such that we are all too brainwashed to even imagine: the use of morphine 15 by the properly educated and disposed person can lead to a much, much greater appreciation of the intricacies of Mother Nature. See Poe's story "Tale of the Ragged Mountains." Or do you want to get off a given drug? Drugs can help you there as well. When you have that awful feeling at 2 a.m. that is the bane of the recidivist, you can get through that troublesome hour with the help of another drug -- that is just common sense psychology. But modern healthcare is based on heartless behaviorism and reductive materialism 16 and ignores common sense17.)

Will some misuse once drugs are RE-legalized? Of course they will. But their missteps should mean more and better education, not arrest.

We should no more arrest drug users than we arrest people for climbing sheer rock faces or for driving a car for that matter.

Will people fall off mountains? Will they have accidents? Of course they will. But that is no reason to outlaw mountain climbing or driving a car.

The only remaining argument for prohibition would be that drugs have no positive uses -- which is ahistorical and demonstrably false. However, when we make that assumption, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy by discouraging all efforts to come up with creative strategies for safe use.

The Drug War is thus the legally enforced triumph of human idiocy. We have rigged the deck so that our dunces can be right. The Drug War is a superstition. Indeed, it is THE modern superstition.

February 10, 2025




Click here for info on my first psychedelic breakthrough experience.









Notes for essay entitled My New Clinical Trial in the Sacred Valley of Peru: on replacing antidepressants with plant medicines:

1: The Sacred Valley: Peru, South America Lonely Planet (up)
2: The Varieties of Religious Experience James, William, Goodreads, New York, 1902 (up)
3: Ayahuasca Foundation Blog Tanner, Carlos, Ayahuasca Foundation (up)
4: Serotonin Syndrome Simon, Leslie V., NIH National Library of Medicine: National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2023 (up)
5: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
6: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
7: The Beginner’s Guide to Healing with Huachuma (San Pedro) Seer, Balam, 2019 (up)
8: Coca: Divine Plant of the Incas Mortimer, W. Golden, Ronin Publishing, 1909 (up)
9: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
10: Though I am galled whenever I think about the presumption and the tyranny of governments that claim control over Mother Nature's botany, as if it were some private stash and not the birthright of every human being by virtue of their having been born on Planet Earth.
(up)
11: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
12: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
13: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
14: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
15: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
16: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
17: Behaviorism and the War on Drugs DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




People magazine should be fighting for justice on behalf of the thousands of American young people who are dying on the streets because of the drug war.

That's so "drug war" of Rick: If a psychoactive substance has a bad use at some dose, for somebody, then it must not be used at any dose by anybody. It's hard to imagine a less scientific proposition, or one more likely to lead to unnecessary suffering.

I knew democracy was in trouble when most Americans in the '80s saw no problem with allowing drug testers to go on a fishing expedition in their bodily fluids for substances of which politicians disapprove.

If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol massacres. The problem is drug prohibition, not drugs.

If we can go overseas to burn poppy plants, then Islamic countries should be free to come to the United States to burn our grape vines.

The FDA approves of shock therapy and the psychiatric pill mill, but they cannot see the benefits in MDMA, a drug that brought peace, love and understanding to the dance floor in 1990s Britain.

There will always be people who don't use drugs wisely, just as there are car drivers who don't drive wisely, and rock climbers who fall to their death. America needs to grow up and accept this, while ending prohibition and teaching safe use.

I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.

And we should not insist it's a problem if someone decides to use opium, for instance, daily. We certainly don't blame "patients" for using antidepressants daily. And getting off opium is easier than getting off many antidepressants -- see Julia Holland.

Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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