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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)




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"Like Christians burning mosques and temples to spread the word of Jesus, modem drugabuseologists burn crops to spread the use of alcohol." -- Ceremonial Chemistry, p. 48

Judging from research articles, they do not even teach the many obvious benefits of drugs in med school.

Psst! Drug use has benefits too. Pass it on!

The war on drugs has destroyed America's faith in the power of education. In fact, it has made us think of education as WRONG in and of itself. It has made us prefer censorship and fear-filled ignorance to education!

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.

Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.

Drug War propaganda is all about convincing us that we will never be able to use drugs wisely. But the drug warriors are not taking any chances: they're doing all they can to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Many psychonauts (like Terence McKenna) praise psychedelics while demonizing other psychoactive substances. No substance is bad in itself. All substances have some use at some dose for some reason for some people in some circumstance.

If I have no right to mother nature's bounty, then I surely have no right to manmade guns. If hysterical fearmongering justifies the eradication of the Fourth Amendment, then the Second Amendment should go as well.

When we outlaw drugs, we are outlawing far more than drugs. We are suppressing freedom of religion and academic research.


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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.

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

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