How Effexor made it impossible for me to think straight
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 30, 2025
I thought I was going mad. Over the last few months, I was finding it very hard to develop code for my web pages. I was making all sorts of little errors that I had never made before. Worst of all, I was finding it harder than ever to debug those errors. It was often taking me hours to create pages that I had created in a matter of minutes in the past, since I now was constantly trying to track down seemingly petty errors. I originally put this down to the fact that I had changed Web hosts and was therefore required to update my PHP code to conform with the stricter requirements of an updated version of that programming language -- but I soon realized that these changes were actually minor and could by no means account for my newfound difficulties. I was really beginning to think that something was seriously wrong with me, although I dared not even formulate this fear in words.
I finally figured out what the problem was, however. This mental fog was a direct result of attempting to get off the antidepressant known as Effexor 1 . You remember Effexor: that's the antidepressant that has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users. And now I see why. Not only does one's depression return with unprecedented vengeance upon quitting the drug, but one's mind becomes scrambled as well!
I only discovered this fact a week ago when I returned to using the drug after having seemingly "kicked" the habit over the course of the last year and a half. I gave up on my withdrawal scheme because the depression that this withdrawal was causing was far worse than any I had ever experienced in my life! But I noticed something interesting after resuming the drug, however: I noticed that my programming skills were returning to normal. I could THINK again. It seemed that I now needed Effexor in order to think straight, although my thought processes had never been clouded prior to my first use of the drug 30 years ago now.
This is truly a drug that CANNOT be kicked. Perhaps there are 5% who can manage to do so for longer than three years -- but they are surely paying a high price in mental deficits for having achieved that goal.
Now, I ask any clear thinking reader: what would be the world's response had these outcomes been associated with a "drug," in the prohibitionist's political acceptation of that term. Why, such a substance would have been demonized to the ends of the earth! It would be called the drug from hell! Even Effexor proponents have already admitted that the drug, like most antidepressants 2, leads to weight gain and loss of libido, but, of course, science-happy drug pundits were more than happy to give antidepressants a big Mulligan for such apparently "minor" drawbacks. Now it is clear that attempts to withdraw from the drug are productive of severe brain fog as well! The supporters of the psychiatric pill mill cannot give Effexor a Mulligan for this one, of course, so they simply ignore such outcomes. They are just anecdotal after all (and no one is going to provide any money to "prove" that such stories are true). No wonder psychiatrists do not want people to stop using these drugs -- for then they would have to explain why they were prescribing a substance whose long-term use destroyed the brain!
As always with the Drug War, the hypocrisy here is breathtaking.
Cocaine SHARPENS the mental processes and the vast majority of cocaine 34 users are NOT addicts -- and even the vast minority who do have trouble with such substances can get off them without discovering in doing so that their brains have been scrambled by drug use. In the 1980s, the criminally mendacious "Partnership for a Drug Free America 5" told us that "drugs fry the brain," but surely it is "meds" that really fry the brain. Even heroin6 is lamb's milk compared to Effexor. Only 5% of the soldiers who used the drug regularly in Vietnam needed help in kicking the drug after returning to the States, and even the latter did not suffer from scrambled brain syndrome. And yet here is Effexor, a drug that literally cannot be kicked -- except at the expense of one's power to think straight -- actively being promoted to this day like apple pie as a cure for depression on the Mayo Clinic website!
This is why I call drug prohibition a crime against humanity -- a crime in which medical science, corporate America, and Wall Street are all complicit. For it was drug prohibition which gave Big Pharma a monopoly on mind and mood medicine, a monopoly that it has used to literally enslave Americans in the worst possible way: by rendering them chemically dependent and thereby forcing them to become patients for life, on penalty of no longer being able to think straight! This is a horror story, albeit one that brainwashed Americans have been taught not to see thanks to conglomerate media which drives the narrative on such issues with the help of pharma-paid talking heads on prime-time television.
Wouldn't it break a heart of stone?! And yet this is the world we live in today thanks to drug prohibition -- a world in which 'patients' are not only disempowered, but they are knowingly shunted off onto drugs that damage the brain and turn them into wards of the healthcare state. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that Big Pharma 78 has been given a license to destroy the freedom of the depressed and to turn them into customers for life. This is a sinister status quo, one that reflects badly on capitalism 9 itself, for what is this but an immoral attempt to earn money at any price whatsoever, even by stealing the very soul of one's customer -- and it is a status quo that is tacitly supported by all champions of substance prohibition: all those who believe that white American young people are the only stakeholders in the drugs debate. These are the white American young people whom the Drug Warrior refuses "on principle" to educate about safe drug use, under the weird and antidemocratic theory that matters of mind and mood should be dealt with by police and the military rather than by pharmacologically savvy empaths and shaman.
Of course, the most depressing fact of all is that I am the only philosopher in the world who is holding the Drug War responsible for these enormous evils. The fact that my arguments resonate so poorly can only be a sign that Americans have surrendered to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization and that they no longer even dare to question the lies upon which they have been raised since childhood: the two Big Lies of the War on Drugs: namely, that there are no upsides to drug use and that there are no downsides to drug prohibition.
That's how antidepressants came about: the idea that sadness was a simple problem that science could solve. Instead of being caused by a myriad of interrelated issues, we decided it was all brain chemistry that could be treated with precision. Result? Mass chemical dependency.
The drug war is the defeatist doctrine that we will never be able to use psychoactive drugs wisely. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the government does everything it can to make drug use dangerous.
We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.
The media called out Trump for fearmongering about immigrants, but the media engages in fearmongering when it comes to drugs. The latest TV plot line: "white teenage girl forced to use fentanyl!" America loves to feel morally superior about "drugs."
Someday the world will realize that Freud's real achievement was his discovery of the depression-busting power of cocaine.
"The Harrison [Narcotics] Act made the drug peddler, and the drug peddler makes drug addicts.” --Robert A. Schless, 1925.
If I beat my depression by smoking opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag subject to immediate arrest. But if I do NOT "take my meds" every day of my life, I am a bad patient.
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.
There's a run of addiction movies out there, like "Craving!" wherein they actually personify addiction as a screaming skeleton. Funny, drug warriors never call for a Manhattan Project to end addiction. Addiction is their golden goose.
Drug War censorship is supported by our "science" magazines, which pretend that outlawed drugs do not exist, and so write what amount to lies about the supposed intransigence of things like depression and anxiety.
That's how antidepressants came about: the idea that sadness was a simple problem that science could solve. Instead of being caused by a myriad of interrelated issues, we decided it was all brain chemistry that could be treated with precision. Result? Mass chemical dependency.
