Confessions of an Effexor Junkie

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Confessions of an Effexor Junkie

how prohibition causes drug problems

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 22, 2025

I am still trying to unravel the philosophical reasons why psychiatrists continue to believe in the efficacy and benignity of drugs like Effexor ¹ .

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I insist that they can only hold such positions by assuming that Drug War prohibition makes sense. Otherwise, they would have to admit that SNRIs are just one of thousands of potential drug-aided treatments for depression and that they are to be avoided at all costs in a free world insofar as they turn users into patients for life. Surely, that is a disempowering and humiliating outcome: to turn the depressed into a ward of the healthcare state, to require them to sail into HealthCare Harbor every three months of their lives, like the Ancient Mariner, and to tell their life story to strangers half their age, all for the privilege of being allowed to buy expensive and underperforming medicines for depression. One of the questions they ask me on these visits is: "Have you contemplated suicide ² over the last three months?" ...to which I always want to reply: "Only when I consider how drug prohibition has turned me into a child with respect to godsend medicines, Daddy!" (or Mommy, as the case may be).

I fear that drugs like Effexor were created with the express purpose of turning me into a patient for life. It is not as if the drug researchers had no alternatives, after all. They could have come up with non-dependence-causing protocols. User reports like those in "Pihkal ³ ⁴" have made it clear for decades now that drugs can be used in a wise way to inspire and elate without causing unwanted dependency, and yet the penny never seemed to drop for drug researchers. It is easy to guess why, however. There are at least three reasons why chemists would be ready to ignore the evidence of their own eyes (and their own hearts) on this subject. First, like all of us, they have been indoctrinated since grade-school in the drug-hating ideology of the War on Drugs, thanks to which they never see the depiction of positive drug use in movies ⁵ ⁶ , magazines or other media. Second, they have been educated in modern academia, where the doctrine of behaviorism reigns supreme in matters of mind and mood. Behaviorism holds that the only thing that counts when it comes to human psychology is quantifiable data, from which it follows that one can completely ignore all glaringly obvious benefits of drug use. That's not scientific, after all. One has to look under a microscope instead to see what's "really" going on. Finally, there is an implicit pressure in the field of drug research for chemists to discover and create drugs that will require a lifetime's worth of use by the patient, drugs that will thereby boost the bottom line for the chemists' drug company paymasters. That criterion may never be concretely spelled out, but it is obvious all the same.

As the reader may already know, I have skin in this game. I myself am attempting to "get off" of Effexor after 30-plus years of use, and it is not easy. It is not easy in part because the pharmaceutical companies refuse to manufacture small doses of the drug, and so any user wishing to renounce the substance entirely must become a compounding pharmacist in petto and count ridiculously tiny pill beads in order to withdraw from the "med" gradually. I found this irritating and time-consuming requirement to be a non-starter, so I enlisted the help of a compounding pharmacy to provide me with a number of low-dose pills of Effexor so that I could withdraw gradually. Even this arrangement is not ideal, however, since Pfizer, Effexor's owner, does not permit the compounding of their proprietary extended-release Effexor, and so any reduction must be done without the help of such formulations. In short, Pfizer makes it clear by both their actions and their inactions that they have no interest whatsoever in helping users get off of their cash-cow medicine - a fact which, in itself, is one of my biggest motivations to do just that. I am tired of helping to buy Maseratis for Big Pharma shareholders.

So far, this essay is covering all-too-familiar ground: one can find many critiques of the dependence-causing nature of Big Pharma drugs. Indeed, there are entire websites and organizations devoted to this topic, such as Mad in America ⁷ and Surviving Antidepressants ⁸. But here is where I part ways with the other critics by pointing out an inconvenient truth: namely, the fact that this dependency, as real and frustrating as it is, could be easily overcome were I free to use any psychoactive medicine that I felt that I needed to accomplish that goal! That simple fact bears repeating: this dependency, as real and frustrating as it is, could be easily overcome were I free to use any psychoactive medicine that I felt that I needed to accomplish that goal! Or, to put this another way, "It's the prohibition, stupid!" It is psychological common sense that I could both obfuscate and transcend the downsides of Effexor withdrawal with the use of substances that elate and inspire, as for instance the phenethylamines whose beneficial use has been documented in Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin ⁹. It is therefore America's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine that is the true villain of this piece - whereas Big Pharma ¹⁰ ¹¹ 's sin is merely that they do not stint to profit to the maximum extent possible from this manifestly unjust arrangement that has been brought about by drug prohibition.

My former psychiatrist let the cat out of the bag in our final office visit several years ago when he told me that Effexor had been found to have a 95% recidivism rate ¹² for long-term users after three years (for which moment of candor, by the way, I have always suspected that he lost his job). But what exactly is recidivism? It is merely the frustrated return to an unwanted drug during a time of particular sensitivity to the downsides of withdrawal, a sensitivity that often occurs in the wee hours of the morning when one cannot sleep because of the angst in question. The remarkable thing is that an easy answer to the problem of this recidivism immediately suggests itself to anyone who has not been dogmatically blinded to it, either by the drug-war ideology of substance demonization or by the inhumane principles of behaviorism, or by both. The answer is simply to use drugs to fight drugs. If I wake at 2:00 in the morning and find my self-depressed, it does not follow that I need to go back to using high doses of Effexor: I can instead combat these temporary negative feelings with the use of a wide variety of elating substances, as for instance laughing gas ¹³ , and so get through that rough patch. This is common sense. It is the Drug War which stops me from using this latter common-sense option and so gives me absolutely no choice but to return to using the only thing that I am allowed to use for such deeply negative feelings: namely, the government-approved treatment of Effexor. In other words, recidivism is a problem only because of drug-war prohibition.

One may debate how far this psychologically obvious tactic of fighting drugs with drugs can go in dealing with dependencies on various substances, but we must first recognize how far we are from having the sorts of facts and usage reports that we would need to discuss that topic advisedly. The fact is, no one has ever set out to methodically document the beneficial effects of all psychoactive drugs in the world, including synthetic drugs and drug combinations. (I refer here to the common-sense, glaringly obvious benefits of drugs and not to those benefits that the dogmatically-blind behaviorist can only see through a microscope.) No one has ever had the inclination, the resources and the legal permission to perform such a task. To begin assessing the common-sense potential of such medicines (for preventing recidivism and other purposes), we would need to create teams of researchers to run usage tests like those conducted by Alexander Shulgin, to see what psychological effects and predispositions are created and/or potentiated by which substances and in which circumstances, etc. Nevertheless, it is common sense that much could be accomplished in this way. Given the ecstatic states that phenethylamines alone have been shown to bring about, it is obvious that there is enormous potential for their use in keeping a user's mind off of the temptations of recidivism.

QUOTES FROM DRUG USERS IN "PIHKAL ¹⁴":

"I felt that the experience continued for many days, and I feel that it is one of the most profound and deep learning experiences I have had."

"An energetic feeling began to take over me. It continued to grow. The feeling was one of great camaraderie, and it was very easy to talk to people."

"This feels marvelous, and a whole new way to be much more relaxed, accepting, being in the moment. No more axes to grind. I can be free."

Of course, in some cases, we have to concern ourselves with physical manifestations of addictions, but as regards opiates, there are chemically-aided sleep cures for that problem ¹⁵ - cures that could be perfected and enhanced to combat dependency by leveraging common-sense psychology in obvious ways: i.e., by giving individuals ecstatic rest breaks from their obsessions over the withdrawal process and by giving them something to look forward to in the way of such breaks - for everyone knows that there is therapeutic value to anticipation -- or at least everyone used to know that until behaviorism blinded us to common-sense psychology.

My point here is that Effexor is not bad in and of itself - no drug is. It is bad as used today because Drug War prohibition makes it impossible to quit the drug for any better option.

This is why the debate about the efficacy of such drugs is so often fruitless. The defenders of psychiatry's dependence-causing nostrums are always reckoning without the Drug War, and yet they always fail to even notice or admit that fact. And so when they say that Effexor is a good option, they are clearly assuming the propriety of drug prohibition - or else taking it for granted as a natural baseline in American society. This is the same unspoken assumption that prompts magazines like Science News to pretend that depression is a tough problem to beat ¹⁶. That assumption would be demonstrably false in a world in which all psychoactive medicines were re-legalized and we promulgated knowledge about safe use, rather than targeting young people with blatant lies on television in the guise of public service announcements, like the highly mendacious 1980s bromide that "drugs fry the brain."¹⁷ When Effexor champions fail to state their assumptions about drug prohibition and instead champion their drug in the abstract, as if it is good in and of itself, they are helping to support and promote this prohibitionist attitude by refusing to hold it responsible for the dystopia that it has created for the depressed. They may be right, of course, when they tell us in effect that Effexor is better than nothing: but surely that is to condemn the drug with faint praise.

Let me end with an update on my personal attempts to "get off" of Effexor, not because I enjoy sharing the intimate details of my life with strangers, but because I have to share in order to make the point of this essay as emphatically as possible. I need to show that these matters are relevant to real people in the real world and not merely curiosities for the contemplation of philosophers with a little time on their hands. And my point is the following: that I am as sure as I am living that I could get off of Effexor successfully and forever if only all psychoactive drugs were re-legalized and I could use them as needed, in a strategic way based on actual user reports about the substances in question. This much is common sense. In the absence of that liberty, however, I remain uncertain as to whether my withdrawal scheme is going to succeed. To use an analogy, I am like a swimmer in a pool of unknown depth who is having his official lifesaver buoy slowly taken away from him without having it replaced by anything else. Will I be able to survive once the buoy is entirely removed? Maybe. Maybe not. But one thing is certain: I could guarantee my success had the powers-that-be not outlawed every other kind of flotation device in the world!

AFTERWORD:

I have called this essay "Confessions of an Effexor Junkie" for several reasons. First, I wished to evoke the title of De Quincey's musings about opium use ("Confessions of an English Opium Eater ¹⁸"), and thereby implicitly ask the question: "Why do we view De Quincey's fate so censoriously while the fate of the lifetime Effexor user receives neither censure nor pity, nor, indeed, publicity of any kind?" Second, I wish to highlight the political nature of the word "junkie," by using it in a context wherein it is not typically applied. The word "junkie" in the mouth of a westerner has always sounded suspicious to me, in light of the dim view that western culture takes of the historic use of holistic plant medicine in Latin America. It seems like a gratuitous linguistic attempt to denigrate such substances a priori in the very language that we use, by referring to them as "junk," thereby rendering logical argument unnecessary when it comes to our ongoing campaign to vaunt the superiority of our materialist approach to psychoactive medicine over that of the holism of the indigenous people whom we have conquered. But in reality, the term "junkie" is no more neutral and objective than the term "scab." Both terms not only denote a noun but they cast judgment upon that noun in so doing. And so I adopt the identity of "junkie" in this essay by way of protest, as who should say: "Two can play at THAT game. If you wish to slander the unwilling drug user with the epithet of 'junkie,' then I demand the right to be called a 'junkie' as well, even if that designation in my case appears to you to constitute an implicit rebuke to your materialistic project of treating mental health according to the inhumane dictates of behaviorism."

Finally, I wish to highlight the fact that, in a sane world, my fate would be just as important to the world as that of a problematic opium user -- assuming that outsiders had to poke their puritanical noses into our drug-using business in the first place and could not just re-legalize the drug choices of adults and be done with it. But no one is fretting about the fact that Effexor users like myself have been turned into wards of the healthcare state by drug prohibition. They see no problem in forcing the depressed to rely for life on a drug which neither inspires nor elates, and which, indeed, appears to do the exact opposite of both, if truth be told. They wish to whitewash and ignore any such problems created by their own approach to drug use. Hence the political nature of my claim to "junkie" status, for I am thereby serving notice that I consider their materialist nostrums for depression to be "junk" and I refuse to be silenced by their condescending advice for me to "shut up and take your meds."

NOTE: There is a disturbing trend on the part of some psychiatrists and their supporters in the publishing industry to insist that it is wrong to talk honestly about antidepressants ¹⁹ because it may encourage users to stop using -- which decision, absent alternatives, could be anywhere from problematic to deadly. This attitude is so loaded with false and anti-scientific assumptions that one scarcely knows where to begin in unpacking it. Such a belief in the evils of honesty, however, is clearly related to the equally troubling and prevalent belief that it is wrong to talk honestly about drugs, such as opium ²⁰ and coca. Why? Because it might encourage people to use them. Surely we can see, however, that such ground rules serve only to safeguard a problematic status quo from criticism and so force us to live forever with attitudes and customs that are suboptimal at best and which kill hundreds of thousands at worst, as in the case of the War on Drugs.

This chilling new idea, that honesty is wrong, is based on a variety of fallacies: First and foremost, those who argue in this way are never recognizing all the stakeholders in the topic under discussion. When I call for the re-legalization ²¹ of drugs in order to abolish the need for Effexor, I am considering the benefits to be derived from a vast number of stakeholders: not just those who, like myself, are dissatisfied with the drug, but also those who are being killed and displaced by the very drug prohibition which gave pharmaceutical companies a monopoly on such mind and mood medicine in the first place! I am fighting on behalf of those who have lost their right to due process and to the observance of their own religion thanks to the War on Drugs. I am fighting for the academics who have lost their right to free inquiry thanks to the Drug War. I am fighting on behalf of those who no longer have the right to control how and how much they think and feel in life.

Meanwhile, the psychiatrist wants to deny me my free speech because of the potential effects that it may have on one very specific demographic that he or she has focused on and highlighted to the exclusion of every other conceivable class of stakeholder in the world. He or she may even hit below the belt and focus on an actual case of a suicide, speculating that it was "caused" by free speech. But this is just silly. It is a childish idea to assume that behavior can be caused by one factor alone. Behavior, like health, is determined by a balance of a wide variety of factors -- some of which we are completely unaware -- and not by any single input. If a person quits an antidepressant after reading an essay and then commits suicide, it is crazy to claim that the essay caused it. The question then becomes, why did so many other antidepressant users fail to kill themselves after reading the essay? Behavior is not such a simple phenomenon as that. If someone behaves suicidally after reading an essay, there are a host of reasons for that immaturity.

Even if free speech did lead to suicides -- which, by the way, is something that will never be susceptible to proof given the multiform and variegated inputs that cause people to act or to refrain from acting in the ways that they do -- it does not follow that free speech should be outlawed. We should first have to ask ourselves, how many people would we have to kill -- or to saddle with lives not worth living -- in order to outlaw freedom of speech ²²? How many people would be killed by the subsequent suppression of good ideas and of new ways of seeing the world?

In other words, it would be all too easy to knock these psychiatrists off of their high horses when they start badmouthing free speech in the name of their pet demographic. Moreover, we might reply to them in the words of King Lear, by saying, "That way madness lies." For if their principles were turned into a universal law, a la Immanuel Kant ²³ ²⁴, then no one would be allowed to criticize a corrupt status quo in writing. Why? Because the writer's society will have, by definition, been founded on principles at odds with said utopia, from which it follows that any attempts on the part of a gullible reader to realize the ideal in the here-and-now will be met with pushback, violence and perhaps even death.

This topic is even more fraught than this analysis might have so far suggested, for this desire to protect Americans from honesty is one of the reasons why we see almost no talk about positive drug use on the Web. Publishers just will not post such things. I know that from experience, believe me. And why not? Because they adopt the same attitude as the enemy of free speech noted above: they selectively fret about the effect of truth on potentially gullible readers, while they fail to care one iota for the millions who live unhappy and unfulfilled lives thanks to the hateful prohibitionist status quo against which the truth which they are censoring was directed.

Discussion Topics

May 23, 2025

Attention Teachers and Professors: Brian is not writing these essays for his health. (Well, in a way he is, actually, but that's not important now.) His goal is to get the world thinking about the anti-democratic and anti-scientific idiocy of the War on Drugs. You can stimulate your students' brainwashed grey matter on this topic by having them read the above essay and then discuss the following questions as a group!

How do the passion-scorning tenets of behaviorism blind materialists to common sense when it comes to drugs?

How could dependency on drugs like Effexor be easily overcome, according to Brian?

What is the obvious answer to recidivism, about which literally nobody talks these days except for Brian himself, God bless him?

Why does Brian say that drugs like Effexor are not bad 'in and of themselves'?

Why did Brian title his essay 'Confessions of an Effexor Junkie'?

Brian says that the term "junkie" is philosophically equivalent to the term "scab." Explain.

What are the fallacies behind the 'chilling' new belief that honesty is a bad thing when it comes to drugs?

Notes for essay entitled Confessions of an Effexor Junkie: how prohibition causes drug problems:

1: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
2: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
3: Pihkal 2.0: Finding drugs that work for users rather than for pharmaceutical companies DWP (up)
4: Ancient History of Psilocybin Mushroom Use MycoMeditations, 2020 (up)
5: Glenn Close but no cigar DWP (up)
6: Running with the torture loving DEA DWP (up)
7: “Mad in America - Science, Psychiatry and Social Justice.” 2016. Mad in America. October 2, 2016. https://www.madinamerica.com/. (up)
8: Surviving the Surviving Antidepressants website DWP (up)
9: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
10: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
11: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
12: I have been unable to confirm this stat. But the WHO notes clinical recidivism rates for depression ranging from 50% to 85%. Do we count that as a recidivism rate of Effexor? Not when Biopharma is paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget, as reported by John LaMattina in the Sep 22, 2022 edition of Forbes magazine. (up)
13: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
14: Pihkal 2.0: Finding drugs that work for users rather than for pharmaceutical companies DWP (up)
15: Opium for the Masses: Harvesting Nature’s Best Pain Medication Hogshire, Jim (up)
16: Science News magazine continues to pretend that there is no war on drugs DWP (up)
17: Meds fry the brain, not drugs DWP (up)
18: “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.” 2019. Gutenberg.org. 2019. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2040/2040-h/2040-h.htm. (up)
19: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
20: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
21: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
22: Speak now or forever hold your peace about drug prohibition DWP (up)
23: What drug use could tell us about the rationalist triumphalism of Immanuel Kant DWP (up)
24: A Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason Smith, Norman Kemp (up)

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Orchestras will eventually use psychedelics to train conductors. When the successful candidate directs mood-fests like Mahler's 2nd, THEY will be the stars, channeling every known -- and some unknown -- human emotions. Think Simon Rattle on... well, on psychedelics.

Prohibitionists have nothing to say about all other dangerous activities: nothing about hunting, free climbing, hang-gliding, sword swallowing, free diving, skateboarding, sky-diving, chug-a-lug competitions, chain-smoking. Their "logic" is incoherent.

Classic prohibitionist gaslighting, telling me that "drugs" is a neutral term. What planet are they living on?

Self-medication is not a dirty word. It has always been a fundamental right to take care of one's own health -- until the medical establishment demonized the practice for obvious financial reasons.

The UN of today is in an odd position regarding drugs: they want to praise indigenous societies while yet outlawing the drugs that helped create them.

Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It forces us to use shock therapy on the severely depressed since we've outlawed all viable alternatives. It denies medicines that could combat Alzheimer's and/or render it psychologically bearable.

The American Philosophy Association should make itself useful and release a statement saying that the drug war is based on fallacious reasoning, namely, the idea that substances can be bad in themselves, without regard for why, when, where and/or how they are used.

John Halpern wrote a book about opium, subtitled "the ancient flower that poisoned our world." What nonsense! Bad laws and ignorance poison our world, NOT FLOWERS!

Until we legalize ALL psychoactive drugs, there will be no such thing as an addiction expert. In the meantime, it's insulting to be told by neuroscience that I'm an addictive type. It's pathologizing my just indignation at psychiatry's niggardly pharmacopoeia.

One merely has to look at any issue of Psychology Today to see articles in which the author reckons without the Drug War, in which they pretend that banned substances do not exist and so fail to incorporate any topic-related insights that might otherwise come from user reports.

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Confessions of an Effexor Junkie

how prohibition causes drug problems

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May 23, 2025

Ten Tweets

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Diary of a Drug Fiend