escaping - How to remove magic quotes if php.ini/.htaccess are not editable?

For some reason, all my quotes are being escaped and displayed as \". Previously, it was okay. Then I looked at phpinfo() and saw that my magic_quotes_gpc is turned on. However, I cannot find the directory /usr/local/lib/ where php.ini file is and I cannot edit my .htaccess file (gets 500 Internal Server Error).

I tried putting this instead on top of my scripts file (which is included in all pages):

if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
    $process = array(&$_GET, &$_POST, &$_COOKIE, &$_REQUEST);
    while (list($key, $val) = each($process)) {
        foreach ($val as $k => $v) {
            unset($process[$key][$k]);

            if (is_array($v)) {
                $process[$key][stripslashes($k)] = $v;
                $process[] = &$process[$key][stripslashes($k)];
            } else {
                $process[$key][stripslashes($k)] = stripslashes($v);
            }
        }
    }
    unset($process);
}

But still, the " and ' on my pages still have the backslashes in them.

What am I doing wrong?