stripping slashes before insert behaving badly

Hi all, I am inserting data from a form into a mySQL database. I am using addslashes to escape things like ' in the data input (this is actually being done in PEAR (HTML_QuickForm). The weird thing is that the data gets written into the table like: what\'s your problem? WITH the slash. I am not sure what to modify to fix this so the literal slash is not written. Thanks, Charles