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Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war

an open letter to Charley Wininger, author of 'Listening to Ecstasy'

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 21, 2024



The following was inspired in equal parts by Charley Wininger's book, "Listening to Ecstasy,"1 and by my so-far frustrating attempts to get off of the SNRI antidepressant called Effexor.

Hey, Charles.

As an amateur philosopher, I have written extensively on the subject of outlawed medicines and the role that they can play in combatting my dependence on antidepressants. This topic is foremost in my mind at this time of my life because I have just retired at age 65 and am now determined to get off Effexor, not just because I do not like the drug but because I am tired of being a ward of the healthcare state.

Update: May 30, 2025

I have been on these expensive and under-performing meds for 40 years now and I finally have time to do something about it. I am finding this transition to be extremely difficult, however, because of drug law restrictions, combined with the fact that psychiatrists are generally materialists (at least the ones that I know) and so they believe that efficacy of drugs must be determined under a microscope and not by the laughter of a depressed patient (let alone by the millennia's worth of unabashed and joyful usage documented via Mesoamerican statuary). I think in this regard of the article by Dr. Robert Glatter in Forbes Magazine (June 9, 2021) entitled "Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment-Resistant Depression?"2 The fact that a doctor has to even ask this question shows how modern science has lost track of common sense. Scientists today seem to be making a virtue of the necessity of modern prohibition: instead of protesting drug laws, they are pretending that those laws only ban substances that would be useless to human beings in any case.

I also take issue with the term "treatment-resistant depression": it implies that we have drugs that treat depression just fine, thanks, but that some few patients cannot benefit from them because of their own quirky biochemistry. My cousin has been on these wonder meds for years and even swears by them (she even has an alarm to signal her daily "pill time"), and yet she spends most of her free time in her gloomy bedroom moping and seldom attends family get-togethers or responds to requests for weekend outings. Yet she herself is convinced that she just has to find the right combination of "meds" in order to be cured. Surely, no kinds of drugs have received more "Mulligans" for poor performance than have SSRIs and SNRIs.

One of the main problems that I've encountered in attempting to get off Effexor creatively is the fact that everybody wants to bar me from cutting-edge treatment for safety sake - as if it's safe to be chronically depressed, as if I myself place safety above every other goal in my life. In reality, however, safety has never been my main goal in life. The only people I know who place safety first in practice are hypochondriacs, who counterproductively seek to stave off every single potential threat to life and limb. The emphasis America places on safety when it comes to the use of psychoactive drugs is way out of line with the way we evaluate risk for any other activity. Free climbing would not exist if we demanded the kind of statistical safety that we demand of psychoactive medicines.

In specific, the fear of so-called serotonin-syndrome seems to be way overblown3. I have tried to follow up on the few cases highlighted in research and had little luck getting details. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would think that Big Pharma was sponsoring scare studies about "drug mixing" in order to keep their captive audience from using alternatives to SSRIs and SNRIs. (Thousands die from aspirin every year, and yet no one's telling me there's a huge danger in taking aspirin, even though I am approaching the age at which I might be prone to such fears.4) Paranoia aside, I have used both peyote and psilocybin while taking Effexor, and there were no health problems at all. The only problem for me was that the Effexor clearly dampened the vividness of the visual impressions when using those natural substances. This, in turn, increased my resolve to get off Effexor, since I felt almost like that drug was "polluting" my body, biochemically speaking, by making me irresponsive to natural godsends that have been used for millennia for the benefit of human beings. It's as if a Big Pharma drug had made me incapable of appreciating a sunset.

Here's another area in which modern scientists have lost track of common sense: they refuse to acknowledge the role of anticipation and happiness in making withdrawal palatable. When I say that MDMA and psilocybin would help me, it means little to my psychiatrists, mainly because the efficacy of MDMA and shrooms has not yet been proven to the satisfaction of reductive science. And yet to some extent, I HAVE TO BE RIGHT about this: it IS what I feel and believe about those substances! I can't be wrong about that. And my belief matters. For when it comes to psychoactive drugs, expectations count, as they are a big part of the "set and setting" for use. Even most materialists today agree that attitude matters.

Here's an example.

Let's say I was feeling "down" on a week during which I was getting off of Effexor. I would feel horrible if I had nothing to look forward to: i.e., nothing except more of the same old "down" days. I may finally decide that I am going to admit defeat, give up on the withdrawal process and go back to using Effexor at the regular old daily doses. But if I knew that I was going to be using MDMA or shrooms on the upcoming weekend, much of that negativity on my part would be counteracted. There would be light at the end of the tunnel. This is all mere psychological common sense, but it is a benefit of drug use that modern science completely ignores. They have to: because once they admit the power of anticipation and expectation, they would be forced to acknowledge that almost any psychoactive substance could be used as an antidepressant (in some dose, in some dosing schedule, for some person, in some situation, etc.). This is why and how De Quincey originally used opium: not just to enjoy the weekend at the opera, but to enjoy LOOKING FORWARD to that weekend at the opera! The whole drug-use SITUATION improved his mood, not just the opium use per se. Again, this is a benefit of drug use that materialist science ignores, thereby helping them to toe the line with the Drug War orthodoxy that tells us that "drugs" can have no positive uses for anybody, anywhere, ever.

Granted, a given drug may not work as I personally expect. In that case a reasonably educated person will say, "I stand corrected, let's try a new dose, or a new dosing schedule." Or, "Let's try some other potential helpful substances instead." But I do not like the idea of rejecting any specific psychoactive medicine a priori merely because of risk, especially when that risk is statistically miniscule compared to the risk that we freely allow for other activities in life. To put it another way: Yes, science has a role in telling us the known risks, but science itself cannot do a cost/benefit analysis for a given psychoactive substance because all they know are the costs of use - and even this is only a partial knowledge since they do not know the costs to the user of NOT using the drug. Nor do they know the benefits that the user expects to receive from the drug, nor how much the user values those benefits -- or even demands them in his or her life, feeling, perhaps, that life is not even worth living without them.

After reading accounts of user experiences on drugs like huachuma cactus, MDMA and psilocybin, it is clear to me that they all have what philosophers call a "prima facie" potential for helping one cope psychologically (perhaps even spiritually) with the doubtful and fearful emotions of antidepressant withdrawal, thereby helping to make withdrawal succeed. I cannot help but feel, therefore, that much of the pushback against using them in conjunction with antidepressants (at least in some doses and in some situations, etc.) comes from the prescriber's desire to be in control, both thanks to materialist ideology which wants to literally "chart" all progress with times and numbers, and to an all-too-justified fear of litigation in this intoxiphobic age of ours5. Because let's be honest: any drug dealer would immediately recognize the simple psychological truth that drugs can be used to fight drugs, especially if said drugs make one feel good and look forward to their use. The scientists strain credulity when they tell us otherwise, but when we complain, we are given the metaphysical retort that the drugs we're talking about do not "really" help us, which, frankly, sounds more to me like a religious complaint than a scientifically derived conclusion. Does coffee really help us? Does alcohol?6

Personally, I think it's no surprise that drugs like Effexor have such high recidivism rates. What can we expect in a country that has outlawed all drugs that could help with the withdrawal process, psychologically speaking?

If psychiatrists would ever ask me as a user what I thought would help me get off Effexor7, I would answer as follows: give me access to all psychoactive meds and let me decide, based on user accounts, which are most likely to buoy my mood such that I can, indeed, endure (or even transcend) the side effects of antidepressant withdrawal. Of course, here is where our childhood indoctrination about drugs comes into play, causing us to feel in our bones that such protocols must lead to addiction and that human beings will never be able to use psychoactive medicines wisely. And indeed they are right, there will be victims of freedom: but they will be far less in number than the victims that are dying thanks to Drug War prohibitions: in inner cities8, in civil wars overseas9 - not to mention the millions who go without godsend medicines worldwide because of our disproportionate and selfish fear for the safety of white youngsters in suburban America. Only by rejecting this prohibition mentality can we re-establish the fourth amendment to the US Constitution, end the militarization of local police forces, and stop Drug Warriors from stacking the courts in their favor by throwing minorities in jail with drug laws written specifically for that purpose.



Author's Follow-up:

May 30, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




Here is where I am supposed to insert the groveling disclaimer that I am not giving medical advice. I do so, however, under protest. Jim Beam whisky gives "medical advice" every day of the year in its prime-time television ads targeted at young people10. They tell the kids that sociability and relaxation can be obtained by drinking whisky. Meanwhile, Red Bull tells kids what to do if they wish to be accepted by their fellows: namely, to drink Red Bull. As for Starbucks Coffee... well, you get the idea. Besides, the idea that we should leave the discussion of "drugs" to medical doctors is wrong. Medical doctors are behaviorists11 when it comes to human psychology and so are dogmatically obliged to ignore the obvious benefits of psychoactive medicines -- as well as the obvious downsides of outlawing them: the violence that we thereby create out of whole cloth, the deaths that we create by refusing to teach safe use, the gangs and cartels that we create by drug prohibition in the exact same way as liquor prohibition created the American Mafia and first brought machine-gun fire to American streets.

Moreover, since drug use has inspired new musical genres and new religions, doctors are clearly unqualified to perform a risk/benefit analysis of drug use. To do so, they would have to be experts not simply on the purely physical risks of drug use, but also on the relative value of music and religion in an ostensibly free world. For the question is not simply, does drug use have risks? All activities have risks. The question is rather: are those risks worth it given the enormous potential benefits of things like musical and religious freedom? That is not a question that our doctors have been trained to answer. If there are any experts on such topics, they are philosophers and theologians, not medical doctors. Fortunately for those doctors, however, our government is interested only in the potential downsides of drug use (as is clear from the fact that we have a National Institute on Drug Abuse rather than a National Institute on Drug Use). And so physicians feel free to judge drug use in a way that we judge no other risky activity on the planet: that is, by looking at only the downsides of the activity and never looking at the benefits (and never looking at the endless downsides of outlawing drug use).

So rather than apologize for writing honestly about drugs, I would prefer to remind the reader of what they ideally would have learned in school: namely, that they have to do their own research on the probable utility of any particular substance when it comes to obtaining various desired results. It is all about details, folks -- your goals in life, your general disposition, your biochemistry, your risk tolerance, your education level, your choice of specific substances, your choice of dosage, etc.: you know, all the details that Drug Warriors ignore. Why? Because they have childishly decided to judge drugs "up" or "down," as "good" or "bad," without regard for the vast array of variables that affect the outcome of use. And so they say things like, "Crack kills!" and "Fentanyl steals loved ones!"12, failing to realize that such statements are philosophically equivalent to the paleolithic cry of "Fire bad!" Such statements serve to make us fear and demonize substances rather than to learn how to use them as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity. The braindead take-home message is that one victim of misuse is one too many when it comes to drug use, a standard that we hold for no other activity in the world, not for mountain climbing, not for parachuting, and certainly not for car driving or alcohol consumption.

This prohibitionist mindset makes drug research problematic for those seeking honest information. This is because the conglomerate-owned media censors all reports of beneficial drug use, thereby consigning most honest talk about drugs to the Dark Web, where the honest bits are buried amidst hype and spam and sales pitches disguised as educational content. It is interesting to note how this censorship forces honest articles about drugs into bad online neighborhoods, thereby causing most Americans to ignore them. In my non-digital youth, all merely honest talk about drug effects was shunted off onto fringe publications from seemingly shady companies like Loompanics. This had the no-doubt desired effect for the government of discouraging drug research by suggesting that the pursuit of honesty about drugs was a seedy business associated with call girls and pornography and the other dubious services that are advertised on such fringe outlets. As one scoured the profit-driven fringe mags looking for the truth about individual drugs, you could almost hear Uncle Sam in the background saying: "Come home, sinner, come home." After all, our drug-demonizing censorship had cast truth seekers as perverts and heretics, and all free thinkers were invited by the government to feel guilt by association.

To summarize then, I make no claims as to the power of any particular drug to help get any particular person off of any particular dependence-causing meds like Effexor. Nevertheless, there are plenty of drugs whose usage reports make it absolutely clear that they have a huge potential to help one "steer the course" in withdrawing from an unwanted substance. What is recidivism after all? It is merely the result of a couple of hours of extreme angst, generally experienced in the wee hours of the morning, in which bad psychological vibes persuade the withdrawing individual to relapse. Now, I maintain that it is mere psychological common sense that the effects of these relatively short periods of angst on the part of withdrawing individuals could be obfuscated and defanged with the help of a wide variety of drugs, used alone or in combination, especially when that use is inspired by actual experiences of others in similar situations, with similar goals, and similar risk tolerances, and similar biochemistry, etc. The Drug Warrior keeps us from thinking this way by insisting that human beings will always be irresponsible children when it comes to psychoactive drugs. And yet in the absence of such anti-scientific fearmongering, folks like myself could survive recidivist angst by using cocaine for the first instance, laughing gas second, a mood-boosting phenethylamine after that, and so forth. The idea that drug use has to be drug abuse is a warped idea of modern times, one that promotes a dark ages when it comes to mind and mood medicine.

To put this another way, I am the expert, to the extent that there is one, in deciding what makes sense for ME given a true risk/benefit analysis of drugs, one that considers ALL the benefits of drug use AND all of the downsides of NOT using a particular drug. Would I commit suicide without it? Would I require brain-damaging shock therapy without it? I alone am in a position to know what drug use makes sense for me in light of my own circumstances: including my own psychological, vocational, philosophical, musical, and religious proclivities and goals in life. Materialist doctors can tell me about physical risks, but that is all. They cannot tell me whether that risk makes sense for me since they cannot see the world through my eyes -- despite their mendacious claims to be able to judge drug use "up" or "down" without regard to context.

For those who see no benefits in drug use, let me end with a list of drug user reports from "Pihkal.13" Just read the following reports of the effects of various phenethylamines and then try to tell me that such substances could have no positive uses for anybody, anywhere, ever.

"More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place."

"A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like... The entire experience
was exquisite. Next day, same sense of serene, quiet joy/beauty persisted for most of the day. A true healing potential."

"It had the most profound impact on me. It was at the time of the death of my wife's mother, and I found that I could look directly towards death and its ramifications."

"Somehow my personality was divided and exposed, and this allowed me to understand my psychic structure more clearly."

"A wonderful feeling of converting energy into action."

"This is total energy, and I am aware of my every membrane. This has been a marvelous experience, very beautiful, joyous, and sensuous."


Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths




In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.

This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just their way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.

This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.

How do I know this?

Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.

More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of Drug War propaganda to the true evil that it causes?

This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."

  • America's Blind Spot
  • Canadian Drug Warrior, I said Get Away
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Drug War Murderers
  • Drugs are not the problem
  • End the Drug War Now
  • Feedback on my first legal psilocybin session in Oregon
  • Finally, a Drug War opponent who checks all my boxes
  • Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • God and Drugs
  • Hello? MDMA works, already!
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War
  • How National Geographic slanders the Inca people and their use of coca
  • How Scientific American reckons without the Drug War
  • How the Drug War is Threatening Intellectual Freedom in England
  • How the Drug War Outlaws Criticism of Immanuel Kant
  • How the Monticello Foundation betrayed Jefferson's Legacy in 1987
  • How the US Preventive Services Task Force Drums Up Business for Big Pharma
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • Ignorance is the enemy, not Fentanyl
  • Illusions with Professor Arthur Shapiro
  • In Defense of Religious Drug Use
  • Keep Laughing Gas Legal
  • MDMA for Psychotherapy
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • No drugs are bad in and of themselves
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Anthony Gottlieb
  • Open Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEA
  • Open Letter to Diane O'Leary
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama
  • Open letter to Kenneth Sewell
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Open letter to Professor Troy Glover at Waterloo University
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley
  • Open Letter to Rick Doblin and Roland Griffiths
  • Open Letter to Roy Benaroch MD
  • Open Letter to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
  • Open Letter to the Virginia Legislature
  • Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman
  • Open Letter to Vincent Hurley, Lecturer
  • Open Letter to Vincent Rado
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
  • Predictive Policing in the Age of the Drug War
  • Prohibitionists Never Learn
  • Regulate and Educate
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Review of When Plants Dream
  • Science News Continues to Ignore the Drug War
  • Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no War on Drugs
  • Solquinox sounded great, until I found out I wasn't invited
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Teenagers and Cannabis
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Invisible Mass Shootings
  • The Menace of the Drug War
  • The problem with Modern Drug Reform Efforts
  • The Pseudoscience of Mental Health Treatment
  • There is nothing to debate: the Drug War is wrong, root and branch
  • Time for News Outlets to stop promoting Drug War lies
  • Top 10 Problems with the Drug War
  • Unscientific American
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • Vancouver Police Seek to Eradicate Safe Use
  • Weed Bashing at WTOP.COM
  • Whitehead and Psychedelics
  • Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no
  • Why Rick Doblin is Ghosting Me
  • Why the Drug War is Worse than you can Imagine
  • Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine
  • America's biggest drug pusher: The American Psychiatric Association:
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Christian Science Rehab
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Fighting Drugs with Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • Getting off Effexor MY WAY
  • How materialists turned me into a patient for life
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality Tale
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors
  • Mad at Mad in America
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Psychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize Antidepressants
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Sending Out an SOS
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Surviving the Surviving Antidepressants website
  • Taper Talk
  • Tapering for Jesus
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on Drugs
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Mental Health Survey that psychiatrists don't want you to take
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • The War on Drugs and the Psychiatric Pill Mill
  • This is your brain on Effexor
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • What the psychiatrist said when I told him I wanted to get off Effexor
  • Why SSRIs are Crap
  • Another Academic Toes the Drug Warrior Line
  • Constructive criticism of the MAPS strategy for re-legalizing MDMA
  • Even Terence McKenna Was Wrong About MDMA
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • Hello? MDMA works, already!
  • How Ecstasy could end mass shootings
  • How Logic-Challenged Journalists Support the Drug War
  • How the Drug War killed Leah Betts
  • MDMA and Depression
  • MDMA for Psychotherapy
  • Using Ecstasy in Church
  • Addicted to Addiction
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  • Addiction
  • After the Drug War
  • After the Drug War part 2
  • Another Cry in the Wilderness
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
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  • Case Studies in Wise Drug Use
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Declaration of Independence from the War on Drugs
  • Drug Use as Self-Medication
  • Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy
  • Ego Transcendence Made Easy
  • Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • Goodbye Patient, Hello Client
  • Harold & Kumar Support the Drug War
  • Heroin versus Alcohol
  • How Cocaine could have helped me
  • How drug prohibition destroys the lives of the depressed
  • How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War Blinds us to Godsend Medicine
  • How the Drug War is a War on Creativity
  • How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse
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  • How the Drug War Punishes the Elderly
  • How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the War on Drugs
  • How to Unite Drug War Opponents of all Ethnicities
  • Hypocritical America Embraces Drug War Fascism
  • In Praise of Doctor Feelgood
  • In Praise of Drug Dealers
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy
  • Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion
  • Notes about the Madness of Drug Prohibition
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart
  • Open Letter to Erowid
  • Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Pihkal 2.0
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism
  • Science is not free in the age of the Drug War
  • Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms
  • Someone you love is suffering unnecessarily because of the War on Drugs
  • Thank God for Erowid
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  • THE ANTI DRUG WAR BLOG
  • The Drug War and Armageddon
  • The Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time
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  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
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  • The real reason for depression in America
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression
  • What Jim Hogshire Got Wrong about Drugs
  • Why America's Mental Healthcare System is Insane
  • Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs

    • *fent*

    Antidepressants




    WARNING: Don't bother trying to get off antidepressants unless you are truly committed to the idea in the name of healthcare liberty. You have to be committed to such a goal heart and soul, merely to have a chance at success. For long-term users, it can be a real challenge. It is interesting how psychiatrists flip the script on this subject, by the way: they claim that the hideous withdrawal symptoms somehow prove that the user needed the drug all along. But this is obvious nonsense. This can be seen in the fact that these same psychiatrists would never say such a thing about heroin users: that their angst upon quitting the drug is a sign that the drug was actually working for them.

    Note that I am not saying that antidepressants are drugs from hell -- but rather that they BECOME drugs from hell thanks to drug prohibition. Drug prohibition outlaws all drugs that could help you get off of antidepressants and so live a fulfilled life without becoming a ward of the healthcare state. We need merely to re-legalize Mother Nature's medicines. Why do we fail to do so? Because we judge drugs based on the following silly and inhumane algorithm: namely, that a substance that can be misused, even in theory, by a white American young person at one dose when used for one reason in one circumstance must not be used by anybody at any dose in any circumstances...

    Suppose you lived in the Punjab in 1500 BCE and were told that Soma was illegal but that the mental health establishment had medicines which you could take every day of your life for your depression. Would it not be an enormous violation of your liberty to be told that you could not worship Soma and its attendant gods and incarnations? Would it not be an enormous violation of your liberty to be told that you cannot partake of the drink of the Gods themselves, the Soma juice?

    Well, guess what? Your liberty is suppressed in that very fashion by modern drug prohibition: you are denied access to all medicines that inspire and elate. Seen in this light, antidepressants are a slap in the face to a freedom-loving people. They are a prohibitionist replacement for a host of obvious treatments, none of which need turn the user into a patient for life, and some of which could even inspire new religions.

    The Hindu religion would not exist today had the DEA been active in the Punjab in 1500 BCE.

    So do antidepressants make sense?

    This question has two very different answers, depending on whether you recognize that prohibition exists or not. Of course, most Americans pretend that Drug War prohibition does not exist, or at least that it has no effect on their lives -- and so they happily become Big Pharma patients for life. They flatter themselves that they are thereby treating their problems "scientifically." What they fail to realize, of course, is that it is a category error for materialist scientists to treat mind and mood conditions in the first place.

    Why? Because scientists are behaviorists when it comes to drugs, which means that they ignore all obvious positive effects of drugs: all anecdote, all history and all psychological common sense -- and instead try to cure you biochemically. And what has been the result of this purblind approach to mind and moods, this search for the Holy Grail of materialist cures for depression? The result has been the greatest mass pharmacological dystopia of all time, thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma pills for life.



  • America's Blind Spot
  • Canadian Drug Warrior, I said Get Away
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Drug War Murderers
  • Drugs are not the problem
  • End the Drug War Now
  • Feedback on my first legal psilocybin session in Oregon
  • Finally, a Drug War opponent who checks all my boxes
  • Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • God and Drugs
  • Hello? MDMA works, already!
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War
  • How National Geographic slanders the Inca people and their use of coca
  • How Scientific American reckons without the Drug War
  • How the Drug War is Threatening Intellectual Freedom in England
  • How the Drug War Outlaws Criticism of Immanuel Kant
  • How the Monticello Foundation betrayed Jefferson's Legacy in 1987
  • How the US Preventive Services Task Force Drums Up Business for Big Pharma
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • Ignorance is the enemy, not Fentanyl
  • Illusions with Professor Arthur Shapiro
  • In Defense of Religious Drug Use
  • Keep Laughing Gas Legal
  • MDMA for Psychotherapy
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • No drugs are bad in and of themselves
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Anthony Gottlieb
  • Open Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEA
  • Open Letter to Diane O'Leary
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama
  • Open letter to Kenneth Sewell
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Open letter to Professor Troy Glover at Waterloo University
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley
  • Open Letter to Rick Doblin and Roland Griffiths
  • Open Letter to Roy Benaroch MD
  • Open Letter to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
  • Open Letter to the Virginia Legislature
  • Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman
  • Open Letter to Vincent Hurley, Lecturer
  • Open Letter to Vincent Rado
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
  • Predictive Policing in the Age of the Drug War
  • Prohibitionists Never Learn
  • Regulate and Educate
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Review of When Plants Dream
  • Science News Continues to Ignore the Drug War
  • Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no War on Drugs
  • Solquinox sounded great, until I found out I wasn't invited
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Teenagers and Cannabis
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Invisible Mass Shootings
  • The Menace of the Drug War
  • The problem with Modern Drug Reform Efforts
  • The Pseudoscience of Mental Health Treatment
  • There is nothing to debate: the Drug War is wrong, root and branch
  • Time for News Outlets to stop promoting Drug War lies
  • Top 10 Problems with the Drug War
  • Unscientific American
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • Vancouver Police Seek to Eradicate Safe Use
  • Weed Bashing at WTOP.COM
  • Whitehead and Psychedelics
  • Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no
  • Why Rick Doblin is Ghosting Me
  • Why the Drug War is Worse than you can Imagine
  • Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine
  • America's biggest drug pusher: The American Psychiatric Association:
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Christian Science Rehab
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Fighting Drugs with Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • Getting off Effexor MY WAY
  • How materialists turned me into a patient for life
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality Tale
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors
  • Mad at Mad in America
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Psychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize Antidepressants
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Sending Out an SOS
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Surviving the Surviving Antidepressants website
  • Taper Talk
  • Tapering for Jesus
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on Drugs
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Mental Health Survey that psychiatrists don't want you to take
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • The War on Drugs and the Psychiatric Pill Mill
  • This is your brain on Effexor
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • What the psychiatrist said when I told him I wanted to get off Effexor
  • Why SSRIs are Crap
  • Another Academic Toes the Drug Warrior Line
  • Constructive criticism of the MAPS strategy for re-legalizing MDMA
  • Even Terence McKenna Was Wrong About MDMA
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • Hello? MDMA works, already!
  • How Ecstasy could end mass shootings
  • How Logic-Challenged Journalists Support the Drug War
  • How the Drug War killed Leah Betts
  • MDMA and Depression
  • MDMA for Psychotherapy
  • Using Ecstasy in Church
  • Addicted to Addiction
  • Addicted to Ignorance
  • Addiction
  • After the Drug War
  • After the Drug War part 2
  • Another Cry in the Wilderness
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant
  • Case Studies in Wise Drug Use
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Declaration of Independence from the War on Drugs
  • Drug Use as Self-Medication
  • Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy
  • Ego Transcendence Made Easy
  • Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • Goodbye Patient, Hello Client
  • Harold & Kumar Support the Drug War
  • Heroin versus Alcohol
  • How Cocaine could have helped me
  • How drug prohibition destroys the lives of the depressed
  • How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War Blinds us to Godsend Medicine
  • How the Drug War is a War on Creativity
  • How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse
  • How The Drug War Killed Andy Gibb
  • How the Drug War Punishes the Elderly
  • How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the War on Drugs
  • How to Unite Drug War Opponents of all Ethnicities
  • Hypocritical America Embraces Drug War Fascism
  • In Praise of Doctor Feelgood
  • In Praise of Drug Dealers
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy
  • Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion
  • Notes about the Madness of Drug Prohibition
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart
  • Open Letter to Erowid
  • Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Pihkal 2.0
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism
  • Science is not free in the age of the Drug War
  • Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms
  • Someone you love is suffering unnecessarily because of the War on Drugs
  • Thank God for Erowid
  • Thank God for Soul Quest
  • THE ANTI DRUG WAR BLOG
  • The Drug War and Armageddon
  • The Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time
  • The Mother of all Western Biases
  • The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War
  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
  • The New Age of Pharmacological Serfdom
  • The Origins of Modern Psychiatry
  • The Philosophical Idiocy of the Drug War
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression
  • What Jim Hogshire Got Wrong about Drugs
  • Why America's Mental Healthcare System is Insane
  • Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs
  • America's Great Anti-Depressant Scam
  • And don't get me started on antidepressants!
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant
  • Depressed? Here's why you can't get the medicines that you need
  • Depressed? Here's why.
  • Depression is real, says the APA, and they should know: they cause it!
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • How the Drug War Screws the Depressed
  • How the Drug War Tramples on the Rights of the Depressed
  • How to end the war in Mexico, stop inner-city killings and cure depression in one easy step
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • Psychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize Antidepressants
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Surviving the Surviving Antidepressants website
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on Drugs
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Philosophical Significance of the Use of Antidepressants in the Age of Drug Prohibition
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • What Malcolm X got right about drugs
  • Why doctors should prescribe opium for depression
  • Why SSRIs are Crap

    • Getting Off Drugs




    NOVEMBER 2024

    I have written dozens of essays about antidepressants and the Drug War, but it is important to read this one first, for it contains the most up-to-date info on my battle to get off such drugs. This reading order is important because I declared premature victory against the SNRI called Effexor in recent essays, only to discover that the drug is far more insidious than I gave it credit for. It turns out withdrawing, at least for me, eventually led to deep feelings of abject despair, far greater than the depression for which I started taking the "med" in the first place.

    The frustrating thing is, these feelings could be combatted by a host of drugs that we have outlawed in the name of our anti-scientific and anti-patient War on Drugs. That much is just psychological common sense. But we have been taught to believe that there are no positive uses for opium, nor for cocaine, nor for coca, nor for MDMA, nor for laughing gas, nor for peyote, nor for the hundreds of inspiring phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, etc. etc. etc.

    The truth is, rather, that Drug Warriors (and the millions whom they have brainwashed) do not WANT there to be positive uses for such drugs. No, they want me to "keep taking my meds" instead and so to enrich their investment portfolios in the pharmaceutical sector. Meanwhile, those without a vested financial interest have been taught that antidepressants are "scientific" and so they cannot understand my desire to get off them. They cannot understand the hell of being turned into a patient for life and having to make regular expensive and humiliating pilgrimages to psychiatrists (who are half one's own age) to bare one's soul for the purpose of obtaining an expensive prescription for a drug that numbs one's brain rather than inspiring it - and a drug which seems to counteract, dampen and/or repress most of the positive effects that I might have otherwise obtained by the few semi-legal alternatives to antidepressants, such as psilocybin and ayahuasca.

    But it is just psychological common sense that I could withdraw successfully from Effexor with the advised use of a comprehensive pharmacy, including but not limited to the demonized substances listed above. But materialist science is not interested in common sense. And so they tell me that such drug use has not been proven to "work." But materialist doctors are not experts in what motivates me as a living, breathing, unique individual. The heart has its own reasons that reductionist science cannot understand. If I could look forward, at this moment, to relaxing with an opium pipe tonight, my mood would improve NOW, not just tonight. I would have something to look forward to. I would not feel the need to reach for that bottle full of Effexor pills that I was hoping to foreswear. Likewise, if I could use a drug to laugh and "touch the hand of God" (as with laughing gas and phenethylamines respectively), I could laugh at the pangs of despair that Effexor tries to throw my way.

    Science's eternal response to such ideas is: "There is no proof that such things work!"

    No, nor will there ever be in the age of the Drug War, in which such common sense use is punished by long jail terms and would never be favorably publicized, even if successful, since America's prime imperative in the age of the Drug War is to demonize psychoactive medicines, under the absurd assumption-laden idea that to talk honestly about drugs is to encourage their use.

    Well, we SHOULD be encouraging their use in cases where they actually work, in cases, for instance, when they prevent guys like myself from killing themselves thanks to the knowledge that they are a bounden slave to the combined forces of the Drug War and Big Pharma's pill mill.

    Besides, there is no proof that hugging works, but we do not need Dr. Spock of Star Trek to launch a study into that issue: we all know that hugging works by bringing two souls together both physically and spiritually. We do not need a map of brain chemistry to figure this out: the proof is extant, the proof is in the pudding.

    But I haven't given up yet despite the setback in my most recent plan. I'm going to search the world for a place where I can get off antidepressants in a way that makes some psychological common sense.

    Right now, all I see in terms of resources are a bunch of companies who, for large fees, will help me go cold turkey on antidepressants., or companies that claim to have found the right combination of legal herbal formulas that should make withdrawal easier. But to me, these are all what Percy Shelley would call "frail spells," concocted under the watchful eye of the Drug Warrior to make sure that nothing potent and obviously effective will get added to the mix. In fact, if a space alien came to earth and asked what sort of psychoactive drugs were outlawed, one could honestly answer: "Anything that obviously works."

    Meanwhile, drug laws make it impossible for me to visit psychiatrists remotely online, requiring me instead to physically visit my doctors, thereby limiting rural residents like myself to accessing hayseed psychiatrists whose one area of expertise seems to be the writing of prescriptions for antidepressants. Talk to them about anything else, and their eyes glaze over. "That's all unproven," they'll say, "Or, no, we have yet to fully study such things." As if we have to study in order to realize that feeling good helps and can have positive psychological effects.

    I'm sure that part of the problem with my withdrawal scheme is that I tried to get off the drug too quickly. But I only tried that because I can find no doctor who will compound the drug for me in a way that makes psychological common sense, namely, with daily miniscule reductions in dosage. My current psychiatrist told me that such compounding was unheard of and that I should drop doses by 37.5 mg at a time, since that is the lowest dose that the pharmaceutical companies create. He said I could start "counting pill beads" once I am down to a 37.5 mg daily dose if I wanted to taper still further.

    Count pill beads? Surely that's why compounding pharmacists exist: to count pill beads. (UPDATE: I was wrong about this. See my article on "Tapering for Jesus.")

    I did find a compounding company that said it could compound Effexor in the way that I desire. But there's a big catch: they have to receive a prescription for that purpose. And I can find no doctor in the world who is willing to write me one. Even those who sympathize with my plight want me to become their full-time patient before they will even consider writing such a prescription.

    So those who warned me against trying to get off Effexor were right in a way: it is extraordinarily difficult. But they feel to realize WHY this is so. It is not just because Effexor is a toxic drug, but also because the Drug War has outlawed everything that could help me get off it.

    This is why those pundits who sign off on the psychiatric pill mill are clueless about the huge problem with the War on Drugs: the way it humiliates and disempowers millions. For it turns out that the phrase "No hope in dope" is true after all, but only when the dope in question is modern antidepressants.



    OCTOBER 2024

    Here are some of the many articles I have written about the philosophy of getting off drugs. Bear in mind that I am in the process of getting off Effexor myself and am exploring the power of "drugs to fight drugs" in so doing. And this is not a straightforward path given the sweeping limits that are imposed by drug law. So the question of exactly what might work (and how and when, etc.) is still wide open and I am advocating nothing, except the common sense notion that we can benefit from euphoria and mood boosts, yes, and that "drugs can be used to fight drugs," and in a safe way too -- a way that will prove far safer than prohibition, which continues to bring about daily deaths from drive-by shootings and unregulated product while causing civil wars overseas.

    I guess what I am saying here is, this site is not purporting to offer medical advice. I avoid using such wording, however, because so many authors refuse to talk honestly about drugs, especially about positive drug use, for fear of being seen as giving medical advice, and this, of course, is just how Drug Warriors want matters to remain. It lets them shut down free speech about drugs.

    Besides, I reject the idea that materialist doctors are the experts when it comes to how we think and feel about life. The best they can do as materialist is to tell us the potential physical risks of using holistically-operating drugs, but individuals are the experts on what motivates them in life, on their own particular hopes and dreams and on what risks they deem necessary to obtain them, to pursue happiness, that is, which objective our legislators outlawed when they outlawed all substances that can help facilitate happiness in the properly motivated and educated individual.

    The real answer is not for authors to give groveling apologies for being honest, however: the real answer is for kids to be educated about the basics of wise substance use -- and for America to come to grips with the fact that we will always be surrounded by "drugs" -- and that the goal should be to ensure safe use, not to keep endlessly arresting minorities and removing them from the voting rolls on behalf of the clinically insane idea that we should outlaw Mother Nature to protect our kids -- and this in a purportedly Christian country whose very deity told us that his creation was good.

  • America's Blind Spot
  • Canadian Drug Warrior, I said Get Away
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Drug War Murderers
  • Drugs are not the problem
  • End the Drug War Now
  • Feedback on my first legal psilocybin session in Oregon
  • Finally, a Drug War opponent who checks all my boxes
  • Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • God and Drugs
  • Hello? MDMA works, already!
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War
  • How National Geographic slanders the Inca people and their use of coca
  • How Scientific American reckons without the Drug War
  • How the Drug War is Threatening Intellectual Freedom in England
  • How the Drug War Outlaws Criticism of Immanuel Kant
  • How the Monticello Foundation betrayed Jefferson's Legacy in 1987
  • How the US Preventive Services Task Force Drums Up Business for Big Pharma
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • Ignorance is the enemy, not Fentanyl
  • Illusions with Professor Arthur Shapiro
  • In Defense of Religious Drug Use
  • Keep Laughing Gas Legal
  • MDMA for Psychotherapy
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • No drugs are bad in and of themselves
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Anthony Gottlieb
  • Open Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEA
  • Open Letter to Diane O'Leary
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama
  • Open letter to Kenneth Sewell
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Open letter to Professor Troy Glover at Waterloo University
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley
  • Open Letter to Rick Doblin and Roland Griffiths
  • Open Letter to Roy Benaroch MD
  • Open Letter to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
  • Open Letter to the Virginia Legislature
  • Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman
  • Open Letter to Vincent Hurley, Lecturer
  • Open Letter to Vincent Rado
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
  • Predictive Policing in the Age of the Drug War
  • Prohibitionists Never Learn
  • Regulate and Educate
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Review of When Plants Dream
  • Science News Continues to Ignore the Drug War
  • Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no War on Drugs
  • Solquinox sounded great, until I found out I wasn't invited
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Teenagers and Cannabis
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Invisible Mass Shootings
  • The Menace of the Drug War
  • The problem with Modern Drug Reform Efforts
  • The Pseudoscience of Mental Health Treatment
  • There is nothing to debate: the Drug War is wrong, root and branch
  • Time for News Outlets to stop promoting Drug War lies
  • Top 10 Problems with the Drug War
  • Unscientific American
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • Vancouver Police Seek to Eradicate Safe Use
  • Weed Bashing at WTOP.COM
  • Whitehead and Psychedelics
  • Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no
  • Why Rick Doblin is Ghosting Me
  • Why the Drug War is Worse than you can Imagine
  • Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine
  • America's biggest drug pusher: The American Psychiatric Association:
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Christian Science Rehab
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Fighting Drugs with Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • Getting off Effexor MY WAY
  • How materialists turned me into a patient for life
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality Tale
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors
  • Mad at Mad in America
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Psychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize Antidepressants
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Sending Out an SOS
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Surviving the Surviving Antidepressants website
  • Taper Talk
  • Tapering for Jesus
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on Drugs
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Mental Health Survey that psychiatrists don't want you to take
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • The War on Drugs and the Psychiatric Pill Mill
  • This is your brain on Effexor
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • What the psychiatrist said when I told him I wanted to get off Effexor
  • Why SSRIs are Crap

    • MDMA/Ecstasy




    The FDA approves of brain-damaging shock therapy but will not approve MDMA for soldiers with PTSD. This is the same FDA that signs off on the psychiatric pill mill upon which 1 in 4 American women are dependent for life. This is the same FDA that approves Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself! (Can somebody say "follow the money"?)

  • America's Blind Spot
  • Canadian Drug Warrior, I said Get Away
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Drug War Murderers
  • Drugs are not the problem
  • End the Drug War Now
  • Feedback on my first legal psilocybin session in Oregon
  • Finally, a Drug War opponent who checks all my boxes
  • Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • God and Drugs
  • Hello? MDMA works, already!
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War
  • How National Geographic slanders the Inca people and their use of coca
  • How Scientific American reckons without the Drug War
  • How the Drug War is Threatening Intellectual Freedom in England
  • How the Drug War Outlaws Criticism of Immanuel Kant
  • How the Monticello Foundation betrayed Jefferson's Legacy in 1987
  • How the US Preventive Services Task Force Drums Up Business for Big Pharma
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • Ignorance is the enemy, not Fentanyl
  • Illusions with Professor Arthur Shapiro
  • In Defense of Religious Drug Use
  • Keep Laughing Gas Legal
  • MDMA for Psychotherapy
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • No drugs are bad in and of themselves
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Anthony Gottlieb
  • Open Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEA
  • Open Letter to Diane O'Leary
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama
  • Open letter to Kenneth Sewell
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Open letter to Professor Troy Glover at Waterloo University
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley
  • Open Letter to Rick Doblin and Roland Griffiths
  • Open Letter to Roy Benaroch MD
  • Open Letter to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
  • Open Letter to the Virginia Legislature
  • Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman
  • Open Letter to Vincent Hurley, Lecturer
  • Open Letter to Vincent Rado
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
  • Predictive Policing in the Age of the Drug War
  • Prohibitionists Never Learn
  • Regulate and Educate
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Review of When Plants Dream
  • Science News Continues to Ignore the Drug War
  • Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no War on Drugs
  • Solquinox sounded great, until I found out I wasn't invited
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Teenagers and Cannabis
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Invisible Mass Shootings
  • The Menace of the Drug War
  • The problem with Modern Drug Reform Efforts
  • The Pseudoscience of Mental Health Treatment
  • There is nothing to debate: the Drug War is wrong, root and branch
  • Time for News Outlets to stop promoting Drug War lies
  • Top 10 Problems with the Drug War
  • Unscientific American
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • Vancouver Police Seek to Eradicate Safe Use
  • Weed Bashing at WTOP.COM
  • Whitehead and Psychedelics
  • Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no
  • Why Rick Doblin is Ghosting Me
  • Why the Drug War is Worse than you can Imagine
  • Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine
  • America's biggest drug pusher: The American Psychiatric Association:
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Christian Science Rehab
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Fighting Drugs with Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • Getting off Effexor MY WAY
  • How materialists turned me into a patient for life
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient
  • How the Drug War Turns the Withdrawal Process into a Morality Tale
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • In the Realm of Hungry Drug Warriors
  • Mad at Mad in America
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Psychiatrists Tell Me That It's Wrong to Criticize Antidepressants
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Sending Out an SOS
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Surviving the Surviving Antidepressants website
  • Taper Talk
  • Tapering for Jesus
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Crucial Connection Between Antidepressants and the War on Drugs
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Mental Health Survey that psychiatrists don't want you to take
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • The War on Drugs and the Psychiatric Pill Mill
  • This is your brain on Effexor
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • What the psychiatrist said when I told him I wanted to get off Effexor
  • Why SSRIs are Crap
  • Another Academic Toes the Drug Warrior Line
  • Constructive criticism of the MAPS strategy for re-legalizing MDMA
  • Even Terence McKenna Was Wrong About MDMA
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • Hello? MDMA works, already!
  • How Ecstasy could end mass shootings
  • How Logic-Challenged Journalists Support the Drug War
  • How the Drug War killed Leah Betts
  • MDMA and Depression
  • MDMA for Psychotherapy
  • Using Ecstasy in Church

    • Open Letters




    Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.

    I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.

    Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the Drug War ideology of substance demonization.



  • America's Blind Spot
  • Canadian Drug Warrior, I said Get Away
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal
  • Drug War Murderers
  • Drugs are not the problem
  • End the Drug War Now
  • Feedback on my first legal psilocybin session in Oregon
  • Finally, a Drug War opponent who checks all my boxes
  • Freedom of Religion and the War on Drugs
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the Drug War
  • God and Drugs
  • Hello? MDMA works, already!
  • How Addiction Scientists Reckon without the Drug War
  • How National Geographic slanders the Inca people and their use of coca
  • How Scientific American reckons without the Drug War
  • How the Drug War is Threatening Intellectual Freedom in England
  • How the Drug War Outlaws Criticism of Immanuel Kant
  • How the Monticello Foundation betrayed Jefferson's Legacy in 1987
  • How the US Preventive Services Task Force Drums Up Business for Big Pharma
  • I'll See Your Antidepressants and Raise You One Huachuma Cactus
  • Ignorance is the enemy, not Fentanyl
  • Illusions with Professor Arthur Shapiro
  • In Defense of Religious Drug Use
  • Keep Laughing Gas Legal
  • MDMA for Psychotherapy
  • My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
  • No drugs are bad in and of themselves
  • Open Letter to Addiction Specialist Gabor Mate
  • Open Letter to Anthony Gottlieb
  • Open Letter to Congressman Ben Cline, asking him to abolish the criminal DEA
  • Open Letter to Diane O'Leary
  • Open Letter to Erica Zelfand
  • Open Letter to Francis Fukuyama
  • Open letter to Kenneth Sewell
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling
  • Open letter to Professor Troy Glover at Waterloo University
  • Open Letter to Richard Hammersley
  • Open Letter to Rick Doblin and Roland Griffiths
  • Open Letter to Roy Benaroch MD
  • Open Letter to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
  • Open Letter to the Virginia Legislature
  • Open Letter to Variety Critic Owen Glieberman
  • Open Letter to Vincent Hurley, Lecturer
  • Open Letter to Vincent Rado
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith
  • Predictive Policing in the Age of the Drug War
  • Prohibitionists Never Learn
  • Regulate and Educate
  • Replacing antidepressants with entheogens
  • Review of When Plants Dream
  • Science News Continues to Ignore the Drug War
  • Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no War on Drugs
  • Solquinox sounded great, until I found out I wasn't invited
  • Speaking Truth to Big Pharma
  • Teenagers and Cannabis
  • The common sense way to get off of antidepressants
  • The Criminalization of Nitrous Oxide is No Laughing Matter
  • The Depressing Truth About SSRIs
  • The Invisible Mass Shootings
  • The Menace of the Drug War
  • The problem with Modern Drug Reform Efforts
  • The Pseudoscience of Mental Health Treatment
  • There is nothing to debate: the Drug War is wrong, root and branch
  • Time for News Outlets to stop promoting Drug War lies
  • Top 10 Problems with the Drug War
  • Unscientific American
  • Using plants and fungi to get off of antidepressants
  • Vancouver Police Seek to Eradicate Safe Use
  • Weed Bashing at WTOP.COM
  • Whitehead and Psychedelics
  • Why DARE should stop telling kids to say no
  • Why Rick Doblin is Ghosting Me
  • Why the Drug War is Worse than you can Imagine
  • Why the FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive medicine


    • Notes:

    1: Listening to Ecstasy: The Transformative Power of MDMA (up)
    2: Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment Resistant Depression? (up)
    3: Serotonin Syndrome (up)
    4: Daily Aspirin Linked To More Than 3,000 Deaths Per Year, Scientists Warn (up)
    5: Intoxiphobia: discrimination toward people who use drugs (up)
    6: The Naive Psychology of the Drug War (up)
    7: And trust me, there's no fear of THAT. As Professor Lilloman said to Mel Brooks in "High Anxiety": "Don't tell me what's nece-- I tell YOU what's nece!" (up)
    8: The Runner: Racist Drug War Agitprop (up)
    9: Drug War Capitalism (up)
    10: Jim Beam and Drugs (up)
    11: Behaviorism and the War on Drugs (up)
    12: Fentanyl does not kill! Prohibition does! (up)
    13: Scribd.com: PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (up)







    Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    Yeah. That's why it's so pretentious and presumptuous of People magazine to "fight for justice" on behalf of Matthew Perry, as if Perry would have wanted that.

    What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.

    Drug-designing chemists have no expertise in deciding what constitutes a cure for depression. As Schopenhauer wrote: "The mere study of chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher."

    Materialist scientists are drug war collaborators. They are more than happy to have their fight against idealism rigged by drug law, which outlaws precisely those substances whose use serves to cast their materialism into question.

    A pharmacologically savvy drug dealer would have no problem getting someone off one drug because they would use the common sense practice of fighting drugs with drugs. But materialist doctors would rather that the patient suffer than to use such psychologically obvious methods.

    This pretend concern for the safety of young drug users is bizarre in a country that does not even criminalize bump stocks for automatic weapons.

    Freud had the right idea: He noticed that cocaine use actually ended depression in his patients. Unfortunately, he was ambitious and was more interested in making a name for himself than in pushing back against the statistically challenged fear mongering of prohibitionists.

    Scientists are censored as to what they can study thanks to drug law. Instead of protesting that outrage, they lend a false scientific veneer to those laws via their materialist obsession with reductionism, which blinds them to the obvious godsend effects of outlawed substances.

    Countless millions suffer needlessly in silence because of America's fearmongering about drugs.

    What are drug dealers doing, after all? They are merely selling substances that people want and have always had a right to, until racist politicians came along and decided government had the right to ration out pain relief and mystical experience.


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






    My Realistic Plan for Getting off of Big Pharma Drugs and why it's so hard to implement
    My First Journey on Psilocybin


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