How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
September 11, 2025
I am finding it impossible to get off of Effexor, this despite the fact that I even hired a compounding pharmacist to provide me with incremental doses of the drug. The withdrawal process proceeded smoothly for the first six months, but eventually the depression returned in a form far worse than it ever existed before I began using the drug. Jim Hogshire writes how an opium habit can be kicked in a week with the help of chemicals. A week. It turns out that Effexor takes YEARS to "kick" -- and, in fact, can NEVER be "kicked" by most users. NEVER!
The U.S. FDA approves of drugs whose published side effects include death itself, yet they will not approve of substances that grow at our very feet and which have been considered divine by other cultures!
Why is the medical field taking this in stride -- and even praising Effexor and still prescribing it? The Mayo Clinic, for instance, still gives Venlafaxine (the generic equivalent of Effexor) pride of place on its website.
At very least, all new prescriptions for such drugs should come with the following alert: WARNING: THIS DRUG WILL TURN YOU INTO A WARD OF THE HEALTHCARE STATE.
And yet I refrain from calling Effexor a drug from hell. It is actually drug prohibition which is keeping me from getting off this hated substance. The Drug Warriors have outlawed every single drug that could get me through the downsides of the withdrawal process: every single one of them. They have, in other words, criminalized any attempts on my part to take care of my own health. This is nothing less than a crime against humanity1. This is why I have no patience with utilitarian 234 analyses of drug prohibition. Those who argue along those lines have conceded enormous ground to the Drug Warrior by supposing with them that the only stakeholders in the drugs debate are white American youngsters. All we need to know about drug prohibition is that it outlaws two precious and time-honored rights of the citizen: first, our right to Mother Nature's bounty, and second, our right to take care of our own health as we see fit. As Thomas Szasz points out, our right to the medicinal bounty of Mother Nature is anterior to all other rights.
One in four American women are patients for life thanks to drug prohibition. In order to keep them safe from drugs, America has shunted them off on 'meds' that are almost impossible to kick -- far, far harder than heroin!
This insane status quo demonstrates how thoroughly brainwashed the medical field has become. Psychiatrists still consider Effexor to be a wonder drug! Apparently, they find nothing demoralizing in the fact that the drug turns the user into an eternal patient. They find nothing wrong with the fact that attempts to get off the drug put the long-term user through the depths of hell itself.
This is how far we have come in disempowering Americans with respect to their healthcare: the medical establishment exercises its monopoly on mind and mood medicine to turn their clients into customers for life -- and then insists that they LIKE it! The motto of our times is: "Don't Worry, Be Satisfied," with the half-baked, dependence-causing meds of Big Pharma . Be satisfied, that is, but not inspired or self-fulfilled!
Author's Follow-up:
September 12, 2025
This is not my imagination by the way. Several years ago, my own psychiatrist told me that the NIMH had performed a study showing that Effexor had a 95% recidivism rate 5 for long-term users after three years of renouncing the drug. 95%. That is far worse than the recidivism rate for heroin. According to the famous Robins study, 34% of Nam vets used heroin and at least 20% were addicted to the drug. And yet when all those soldiers returned to the States, only 5% had trouble kicking that addiction6.
Such results are only surprising because we forget that the government is in the business of censorship, lying and mischaracterizing the facts when it comes to
drug use.
Compare that to Effexor, which almost no one is able to get off: EVER! What a bad joke! Our government protects us from time-honored opium by prohibition, thereby shunting off illegal users onto versions of opiates that are harder to quit -- and yet even those alternatives are a cinch to kick compared to Big Pharma drugs, about which the DEA says nothing. But then I lie. The DEA actually makes sure that I have to jump through expensive and time-consuming hoops, merely for the privilege of using this dependence-causing drug called Effexor! The DEA is evil. The DEA is all about denying me time-honored medicine and making me dependent for life. They have no interest in my health and safety: they have an interest in the billions of dollars with which they terrorize Americans in order to keep them from taking care of their own health!
Finally, a reminder that I think it is usually bad form to state one's griefs in life in an open forum such as this. I only do so because it is germane to the topic at hand, for my life story is a case in point for why America's attitudes about drugs is completely antithetical to common sense, democratic values, and freedom itself. Someone has got to start speaking passionately about the evils of the Drug War, and if that means waxing autobiographical, so be it. Indeed, the whole problem with the drug narrative is that most pundits have no skin in the game. This is why they are blind to the full injustice of the Drug War. It is not they or their relatives who are being gunned down in the streets -- it is not they or their relatives who are going through hell because of their attempts to stop being a patient for life.
And so they engage in irrelevant discussions about the supposed dangers of drug legalization 7 while ignoring all other dangers -- like the dangers of unnecessary suicides, the dangers of outlawing healthcare, the dangers of destroying inner cities, the dangers of militarizing police forces, the dangers of outlawing the religious impulse itself, the dangers of outlawing drugs that everyone knows are tantamount to panaceas when used wisely. Depression is only a "thing" in the United States today because we have outlawed all drugs whose intermittent use could keep that monster at bay!
But then what can we expect, for the Drug War also outlaws common sense, as purblind reductive materialists lend a veneer of "science" to the outrageous claim by the DEA and the FDA that drugs that were considered panaceas in the past -- above all opium 8 -- actually have no positive uses whatsoever. Galen knew better. Paracelsus knew better. Avicenna knew better.
It is no wonder that so few professionals speak up on this matter. I am convinced that the psychiatrist who warned me of the dependence-causing nature of Effexor lost his job for so doing. I complained to the "higher ups" after learning this factoid, that I had been placed on such an "unkickable" drug, and I believe that my protests sealed the guy's fate. At any rate, I found that the guy was no longer at the clinic on my subsequent visit. And this psychiatrist was not even complaining about drug prohibition, he was simply giving me a bare fact about research studies. Even being honest about Big Pharma 910 drugs is now grounds for dismissal.
Kids should be taught beginning in grade school that drug prohibition is wrong.
It's disgusting that folks like Paul Stamets need a DEA license to work with mushrooms.
Two weeks ago, a guy told me that most psychiatrists believe ECT is great. I thought he was joking! I've since come to realize that he was telling the truth: that is just how screwed up the healthcare system is today thanks to drug war ideology and purblind materialism.
Another problem with MindMed's LSD: every time I look it up on Google, I get a mess of links about the stock market. The drug is apparently a godsend for investors. They want to profit from LSD by neutering it and making it politically correct: no inspiration, no euphoria.
The best harm-reduction strategy is to re-legalize drugs.
When Rick Strassman and Michael Pollan call for continued prohibition to protect young people, they ignore the ENORMOUS fact that prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the world. Wake up, guys! Prohibition is evil, not drugs! Ignorance is evil, not education!
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.
William James knew that there were substances that could elate. However, it never occurred to him that we should use such substances to prevent suicide. It seems James was blinded to this possibility by his puritanical assumptions.
Many psychonauts (like Terence McKenna) praise psychedelics while demonizing other psychoactive substances. No substance is bad in itself. All substances have some use at some dose for some reason for some people in some circumstance.
I'm looking for a United Healthcare doctor now that I'm 66 years old. When I searched my zip code and typed "alternative medicine," I got one single solitary return... for a chiropractor, no less. Some choice. Guess everyone else wants me to "keep taking my meds."
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