I wanted to give you a heads-up on a completely forgotten demographic in the psychedelic renaissance: people like myself who are stuck on antidepressants 2 that turn out to be extremely difficult to quit. According to Julie Holland, 1 in 4 American women are dependent on antidepressants for life3. And the worst thing is, these people are all INELIGIBLE for help from psychedelics. This is supposedly because of a fear of a very rare issue called "serotonin syndrome,4" however, in my view, it is really because of a fear of lawsuits and bad publicity. So-called serotonin syndrome is easily detectable and treatable and is very rare, at least as a life-threatening condition.
I have just retired and want to use myself as a guinea pig to document how I can get off of Effexor using plant medicines and fungi, particularly huachuma5, peyote6 and psilocybin7. I will be documenting my efforts so that my ultimate success can help others, or at very least suggest new lines of research. Although I am not a doctor, I have some common psychological sense8, which is something that modern materialist doctors tend to lack9. (Materialist doctors still are not even sure that laughing gas 10 could help the depressed!) I have read endless stories of how entheogens can inspire one in pursuing a goal, and I believe that this will apply to antidepressant withdrawal as much as to anything else.
I am telling you all this in case you can recommend some practical ways in which I can undertake this study. It looks like I would have to move to Canada to get legal access to peyote and huachuma, although the latter cactus can supposedly be grown legally in the States. Perhaps you have some ideas on how I can turn this into an "official" study and so get approval to use the necessary substances in the States.
There are many millions of antidepressant users who have been turned into eternal patients by the War on Drugs, which outlawed everything but dependence-causing medicines for depression11. When doctors learned that these drugs caused dependence, they did not apologize. Instead, they flipped the script and told me that I had a medical duty to take these drugs every day of my life. I think it's a shame that this misused demographic that I am part of is the only demographic that no one is helping during the psychedelic renaissance. I hope to set an example that can start to change that.
If you have any suggestions, practical or otherwise, please let me know!
Author's Follow-up: June 19, 2024
Frankly, these are the kinds of letters that are usually ignored, or at best "sloughed off," but check back here in a week or so in case I am pleasantly surprised.
Author's Follow-up:
April 20, 2025
How charmingly naive of me, huh? To think that the Chacruna Institute would actually get back to me at all, let alone chew the cud with me on such issues. Ha! Oh, I am precious!
Since inditing this amusingly disingenuous missive, I have created an Effexor withdrawal program of my own, with the help of a pharmacist who is now compounding the drug for me into the low doses that the manufacturer refuses to provide. Speaking of that refusal, I had also naively assumed that my psychiatrist would help me find such low-dose tablets, but that does not seem to be his job either. In fact, he looked at me like I was a Martian when I made it clear that I was determined to get off of Effexor.
Of course, I cannot even tell you about any substances that I might be using to make Effexor withdrawal possible -- since drug prohibition effectively frightens people into silence about discussing any benefits that they may achieve with the godsend medicines that grow at our feet. This is why the Drug War is so outrageous: it is predicated on the idea that godsend medicines have no positive uses -- and the very drug laws serve to reinforce that warped idea by making it dangerous to discuss any safe and valid uses.
For this and many more reasons, I am constantly saying that society can have drug prohibition or freedom -- but it cannot have both. Our mistaken belief that we could has led to inner-city shootings, the end of the rule of law in Latin America, the censorship of academia12... and now the end of democracy itself, thanks to the removal of millions of minorities from the voting rolls. Yet progressives and neoliberals continue to sign-off on the superstitious ideology of prohibition -- even after America's new monarch as moved into the Oval Office.
Just think how many ayahuasca-like godsends that we are going without because we dogmatically refuse to even look for them, out of our materialist disdain for mixing drugs with drugs.
The Drug War is a crime against humanity.
It is folly to put bureaucrats in charge of second-guessing drug prescriptions: what such bureaucrats are really doing is second-guessing the various philosophies of life which are presupposed by the way we use psychoactive drugs.
Drugs like opium and cocaine should come with the following warning: "Outlawing of this product may result in inner-city gunfire, civil wars overseas, and rigged elections in which drug warriors win office by throwing minorities in jail."
The Petpedia website says that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?
The term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they connote.
Opium could be a godsend for talk therapy. It can help the user step outside themselves and view their problems from novel viewpoints.
William James claimed that his constitution prevented him from having mystical experiences. The fact is that no one is prevented from having mystical experiences provided that they are willing to use psychoactive substances wisely to attain that end.
In a sane world, we would learn to strategically fight drugs with drugs.
Drug testing labs should give high marks for those who manage to use drugs responsibly, notwithstanding the efforts of law enforcement to ruin their lives. The lab guy would be like: "Wow, you are using opium wisely, my friend! Congratulations! Your boss is lucky to have you!"
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