Is there any way that I can communicate with Erica Zelfand1? I'm a 65-year-old veteran user of antidepressants 2 and I am going to get off during a year with the help of psilocybin, San Pedro cactus, and other drugs, including, eventually ayahuasca.
I have written hundreds of essays on this topic and would really like to share my feelings as someone who has been on the receiving end of psychiatry's nostrums for 40 years.
To me, the common sense way to get off Effexor 3 in a year would be to get the "meds" compounded such that each successive pill contains 364/365th dose of the previous pill.
This is common sense, but my latest psychiatrist wants to do 37.5 at a time and then make me count pilules!
Where can I find someone who will compound the drug for me? Why do psychiatrists insist that I do what's best and easiest for THEM, not for myself?
Also, it makes psychological common sense that I can get off Effexor by using psilocybin, not just once, but in the microdosing recommended by Paul Stamets4.
This makes perfect psychological common sense and yet my psychiatrist is less than interested in it.
As you can tell, I have issues with psychiatry because of its focus on what's easiest for the psychiatrist.
But no one I write to on this subject responds to me, so I'm not sure why I'm trying.
Hope to hear from Erica, though.
Thanks,
An eternal patient thanks to the psychiatric pill mill.
PS Also, I'm tired of the talk about mushrooms not being "proven" yet. They have been proven for THOUSANDS OF YEARS. I should not have to wait for materialist science to catch up with common sense.
Author's Follow-up: June 29, 2024
I fear this letter is a little terse, but that's what happens when you're ignored long enough: your frustration starts to seep into your prose. It's partly because I composed this letter while thinking about the way that I was basically blown off by my new psychiatrist.5
Author's Follow-up: October 31, 2024
When am I going to learn that the movers-and-shakers in the psychedelic game do not want to discuss issues: they want to sell stuff! Quite the change from 25 years ago, when you merely had to post some thought-provoking content on a topic and relevant parties would be emailing you that very day with feedback.
Author's Follow-up:
May 20, 2025
This was really a pointless letter, as it turns out. I failed to realize that Erica has obvious financial motivations and is in no hurry to discuss the problems of drug criminalization in the abstract. This is not to criticize Erica for making a living, merely to suggest that I mistook her prime directive in life. I have always been a philosopher at heart, and so I just naturally assume that others will be interested in discussing the why's and wherefores of human folly with me.
I should mention, however, that I have made enormous progress in getting off Effexor -- albeit with the help of a limited handful of psychoactive medicines -- used legally, of course, in places like Oregon and Mexico. (Oh, I am such a good boy!)
But I refuse to be gaslighted6. No one is going to convince me that getting off even Effexor has to be such a huge "ask." The fact that getting off any drug (even alcohol) is hard is only because Americans refuse to study and use psychoactive medicine for human benefit. They prefer to superstitiously condemn such substances instead.
Once we re-legalize drugs, once we study them for common-sense positive uses, teach safe use, and admit the possibility of fighting drugs with drugs, then addiction and unwanted dependence will be limited only to obvious exceptions (like "Howard the Drunkard" from the old Andy Griffith Show). For the inconvenient truth is that all drugs that inspire and elate have prima facie uses to fight depression and anxiety and addiction, either alone or in combinations: uses that we know, moreover, by deductive reasoning about basic psychology and for which we need no proof from lab scientists. What is recidivism after all but the result of a temporary but overwhelming feeling of existential angst -- and nothing is more obvious than that such moments could be "gotten through" -- if not even enjoyed -- with the help of substances that inspire and elate. I once relapsed on Effexor withdrawal after making overly ambitious reductions -- but it is crystal-clear to me that this relapse would not have happened had I been able to use laughing gas 7 or opium 8 or coca or a wide variety of phenethylamines to live through those few hours in which the existential angst seemed overwhelming for me.
This is why there is a symbiosis today between addiction "experts" and drug prohibition. We need these so-called "experts" precisely because we have outlawed everything that could work for the "addict." Drug prohibition has created a world full of addicts -- and a whole new specialty field purporting to "treat" them. It is as if we had outlawed all food except for gruel and then we looked to experts to treat people for malnutrition. "Of course you are undernourished," says the expert, "but that's only because you are not eating the right kind of gruel!" Whereas a real "expert" on malnutrition would be the one who is pointing out loudly and clearly that the government has outlawed everything that would work for the malnourished: namely, a vast variety of healthy and nutritious foods.
Even prohibition haters have their own list of drugs that they feel should be outlawed. They're missing the point. We should not drugs "up or down" any more than we should judge penicillin or aspirin in that way.
Prohibitionists will me that we're all children when it comes to drugs, and can never -- but never -- use them wisely. That's like saying that we could never ride horses wisely. Or mountain climb. Or skateboard.
We give kids drugs to improve their concentration -- but if adults use drugs to concentrate, we call them names and throw them in jail.
I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.
The drug war is a way for conservatives to keep America's eyes OFF the prize. The right-wing motto is, "Billions for law enforcement, but not one cent for social programs."
When folks banned opium, they did not just ban a drug: they banned the philosophical and artistic insights that the drug has been known to inspire in writers like Poe, Lovecraft and De Quincey.
Drug prohibition fails even on its own terms. Instead of protecting white American young people, it has exiled them to the city streets where they are sacrificed on the altar of the American religion of substance demonization.
We might as well fight for justice for Christopher Reeves: he was killed because someone was peddling that junk that we call horses. The question is: who sold Christopher that horse?! Who encouraged him to ride it?!
In his treatise on laws, Cicero reported that the psychedelic-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries gave the participants "not only the art of living agreeably, but of dying with a better hope."
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.
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