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. (The NIMH says that the Effexor 34 that I am on has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users who try to quit.) According to Julie Holland, 1 in 4 American women are dependent on antidepressants for life5. 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,6" 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 huachuma7, peyote8 and psilocybin9. 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 sense10, which is something that modern materialist doctors tend to lack11. (Materialist doctors still are not even sure that laughing gas 12 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 depression13. 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. I guess no one ever tries -- which is understandable, given that the drug has a 95% recidivism rate for long-term users who attempt to get off it, a fact which my previous psychiatrist appears to have been fired for letting out of the bag in a counseling session. Needless to say, that 95% recidivism rate only exists because we have outlawed all the drugs that would help make withdrawal possible. What is recidivism after all but the yielding to a momentary intense desire to "use," a desire that could be easily obfuscated and overcome by the symptomatic use of other drugs -- but then that is just common sense, and behaviorist science does not believe in common sense. Their answers all have to come from looking under a microscope.
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 academia14... 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.
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.
NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition. We need a National Institute on Drug Use, not a National Institute on Drug Abuse.
David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.
Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing. They don't blame such deaths on horses and mountains; neither should they blame drug-related deaths on drugs.
ME: "What are you gonna give me for my depression, doc? MDMA? Laughing gas? Occasional opium smoking? Chewing of the coca leaf?" DOC: "No, I thought we'd fry your brain with shock therapy instead."
"Abuse" is a funny term because it implies that there's a right way to use "drugs," which is something that the drug warriors deny. To the contrary, they make the anti-scientific claim that "drugs" are not good for anybody for any reason at any dose.
Being a lifetime patient is not the issue: that could make perfect sense in certain cases. But if I am to be "using" for life, I demand the drug of MY CHOICE, not that of Big Pharma and mainstream psychiatry, who are dogmatically deaf to the benefits of hated substances.
I've been told by many that I should have seen "my doctor" before withdrawing from Effexor. But, A) My doctor got me hooked on the junk in the first place, and, B) That doctor completely ignores the OBVIOUS benefits of indigenous meds and focuses only on theoretical downsides.
After over a hundred years of prohibition, America has developed a kind of faux science in which despised substances are completely ignored. This is why Sci Am is making a new argument for shock therapy in 2023, because they ignore all the stuff that OBVIOUSLY cheers one up.
We need a Controlled Prohibitionists Act, to get psychiatric help for the losers who think that prohibition makes sense despite its appalling record of causing civil wars overseas and devastating inner cities.
The best harm reduction strategy would be to re-legalize opium and cocaine. We would thereby end depression in America and free Americans from their abject reliance on the healthcare industry.
NIDA is just a propaganda arm of the U.S. government -- and will remain so until it recognizes the glaringly obvious benefits of drugs -- as well as the glaringly obvious downsides of prohibition. We need a National Institute on Drug Use, not a National Institute on Drug Abuse.
