am still trying to unravel the philosophical reasons why psychiatrists continue to believe in the efficacy and benignity of drugs like Effexor. 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 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 "Pihkal1" 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 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, 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 America2 and Surviving Antidepressants3. 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 Shulgin4. It is therefore America's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine that is the true villain of this piece - whereas Big Pharma'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 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, 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.
"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 problem6 - 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 beat7. 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." 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 Eater8"), 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 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 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 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? 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, 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.
Anytime you hear that a psychoactive drug has not been proven to be effective, it's a lie. People can make such claims only by dogmatically ignoring all the glaringly obvious signs of efficacy.
I have dissed MindMed's new LSD "breakthrough drug" for philosophical reasons. But we can at least hope that the approval of such a "de-fanged" LSD will prove to be a step in the slow, zigzag path toward re-legalization.
If there is an epidemic of "self-harm," prohibitionists never think of outlawing razor blades. They ask: "Why the self-harm?" But if there is an epidemic of drug use which they CLAIM is self-harm, they never ask "Why the self-harm?" They say: "Let's prohibit and punish!"
Prohibitionists are also responsible for the 100,000-plus killed in the US-inspired Mexican drug war
Prohibition is wrong root and branch. It seeks to justify the colonial disdain for indigenous healing practices through fearmongering.
The whole drug war is based on the anti-American idea that the way to avoid problems is to lie and prevaricate and persuade people not to ask questions.
The 2024 Colorado bill was withdrawn -- but only when pols realized that they had been caught in the act of outlawing free speech. They did not let opponents speak, however, because they knew the speeches would make the pols look like the anti-democratic jerks that they were.
Musk and co. want to make us more robot-like with AI, when they should be trying to make us more human-like with sacred medicine. Only humans can gain creativity from plant medicine. All AI can do is harvest the knowledge that eventually results from that creativity.
Health is not a quality, it's a balance. To decide drug legality based on 'health' grounds thus opens a Pandora's box of different points of view.
In Mexico, the same substance can be considered a "drug" or a "med," depending on where you are in the country. It's just another absurd result of the absurd policy of drug prohibition.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Confessions of an Effexor Junkie: how prohibition causes drug problems, published on March 22, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
am still trying to unravel the philosophical reasons why psychiatrists continue to believe in the efficacy and benignity of drugs like Effexor. 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 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).
You have been reading an article entitled, Confessions of an Effexor Junkie: how prohibition causes drug problems, published on March 22, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
