introduction to the Drug War Philosopher website at abolishthedea.com
orange rss icon with stylized radio waves orange rss icon with stylized radio waves bird icon for twitter bird icon for twitter


back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow


Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants

an open letter to the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 19, 2024



Dear Chacruna Institute1:

I wanted to give you a heads-up on a completely forgotten demographic in the psychedelic renaissance: people like myself who are stuck on antidepressants 2 that turn out to be extremely difficult to quit. According to Julie Holland, 1 in 4 American women are dependent on antidepressants for life3. And the worst thing is, these people are all INELIGIBLE for help from psychedelics. This is supposedly because of a fear of a very rare issue called "serotonin syndrome,4" however, in my view, it is really because of a fear of lawsuits and bad publicity. So-called serotonin syndrome is easily detectable and treatable and is very rare, at least as a life-threatening condition.

April 2025 Update

I have just retired and want to use myself as a guinea pig to document how I can get off of Effexor using plant medicines and fungi, particularly huachuma5, peyote6 and psilocybin7. I will be documenting my efforts so that my ultimate success can help others, or at very least suggest new lines of research. Although I am not a doctor, I have some common psychological sense8, which is something that modern materialist doctors tend to lack9. (Materialist doctors still are not even sure that laughing gas 10 could help the depressed!) I have read endless stories of how entheogens can inspire one in pursuing a goal, and I believe that this will apply to antidepressant withdrawal as much as to anything else.

I am telling you all this in case you can recommend some practical ways in which I can undertake this study. It looks like I would have to move to Canada to get legal access to peyote and huachuma, although the latter cactus can supposedly be grown legally in the States. Perhaps you have some ideas on how I can turn this into an "official" study and so get approval to use the necessary substances in the States.

There are many millions of antidepressant users who have been turned into eternal patients by the War on Drugs, which outlawed everything but dependence-causing medicines for depression11. When doctors learned that these drugs caused dependence, they did not apologize. Instead, they flipped the script and told me that I had a medical duty to take these drugs every day of my life. I think it's a shame that this misused demographic that I am part of is the only demographic that no one is helping during the psychedelic renaissance. I hope to set an example that can start to change that.

If you have any suggestions, practical or otherwise, please let me know!

Author's Follow-up: June 19, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


Frankly, these are the kinds of letters that are usually ignored, or at best "sloughed off," but check back here in a week or so in case I am pleasantly surprised.



Author's Follow-up:

April 20, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




How charmingly naive of me, huh? To think that the Chacruna Institute would actually get back to me at all, let alone chew the cud with me on such issues. Ha! Oh, I am precious!

Since inditing this amusingly disingenuous missive, I have created an Effexor withdrawal program of my own, with the help of a pharmacist who is now compounding the drug for me into the low doses that the manufacturer refuses to provide. Speaking of that refusal, I had also naively assumed that my psychiatrist would help me find such low-dose tablets, but that does not seem to be his job either. In fact, he looked at me like I was a Martian when I made it clear that I was determined to get off of Effexor.

Of course, I cannot even tell you about any substances that I might be using to make Effexor withdrawal possible -- since drug prohibition effectively frightens people into silence about discussing any benefits that they may achieve with the godsend medicines that grow at our feet. This is why the Drug War is so outrageous: it is predicated on the idea that godsend medicines have no positive uses -- and the very drug laws serve to reinforce that warped idea by making it dangerous to discuss any safe and valid uses.

For this and many more reasons, I am constantly saying that society can have drug prohibition or freedom -- but it cannot have both. Our mistaken belief that we could has led to inner-city shootings, the end of the rule of law in Latin America, the censorship of academia12... and now the end of democracy itself, thanks to the removal of millions of minorities from the voting rolls. Yet progressives and neoliberals continue to sign-off on the superstitious ideology of prohibition -- even after America's new monarch as moved into the Oval Office.






















Notes:

1: Chacruna Insititute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines chacruna.net, 2024 (up)
2: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
3: Good Chemistry: The Science of Connection, from Soul to Psychedelics Holland, Julie, HarperWave, New York, 2020 (up)
4: Serotonin Syndrome Simon, Leslie V., NIH National Library of Medicine: National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2023 (up)
5: The Sacred Cactus of the Andes — “San Pedro” / “Huachuma” Lite, Scott, 2021 (up)
6: Peyote Way Church of God, Inc., Plaintiff-appellant, v. William F. Smith, Attorney General of the United States JUSTIA US LAW (up)
7: Scribd.com: Psilocybin: a trip into the world of Magic Mushrooms Griffiths, William, William Griffiths, Annapolis, 2021 (up)
8: Common Sense Drug Withdrawal DWP (up)
9: Getting Off of Big Pharma Meds Using Teacher Plants DWP (up)
10: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
11: How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient DWP (up)
12: Coverup on Campus DWP (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




There are no merely recreational drugs. All drugs that elate have obvious potential uses for the depressed.

People say shrooms should not be used by those with a history of "mental illness." But that's one of the greatest potential benefits of shrooms! (They cured Stamets' teenage stuttering.) Some folks place safety first, but if I did that, I'd die long before using mother nature.

Now the US is bashing the Honduran president for working with "drug cartels." Why don't we just be honest and say why we're REALLY upset with the guy? Drugs is just the excuse, as always, now what's the real reason? Stop using the drug war to disguise American foreign policy.

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.

Today's war against drug users is like Elizabeth I's war against Catholics. Both are religious crackdowns. For today's oppressors, the true faith (i.e., the moral way to live) is according to the drug-hating religion of Christian Science.

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

In the age of the Drug War, the Hippocratic Oath has become "First, do no good."

It's amazing. Drug law is outlawing science -- and yet so few complain. Drug law tells us what mushrooms we can collect, for God's sake. Is that not straight-up insane? Or are Americans so used to being treated as children that they accept this corrupt status quo?

Being less than a month away from an election that, in my view, could end American democracy, I don't like to credit Musk for much. But I absolutely love it every time he does or says something that pushes back against the drug-war narrative.

"If England [were to] revert to pre-war conditions, when any responsible person, by signing his name in a book, could buy drugs at a fair profit on cost price... the whole underground traffic would disappear like a bad dream." -- Aleister Crowley


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






back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow


No cookies, no ads.


Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

The Partnership for a Death Free America is a proud sponsor of The Drug War Philosopher website @ abolishthedea.com.


Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP (up)