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!
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 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.
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 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 addiction2.
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 3 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 4 -- 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 56 drugs is now grounds for dismissal.
The drug war is is a multi-billion-dollar campaign to enforce the attitude of the Francisco Pizarro's of the world when it comes to non-western medicine. It is the apotheosis of the colonialism that most Americans claim to hate.
If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol massacres. The problem is drug prohibition, not drugs.
If America cannot exist without outlawing drugs, then there is something wrong with America, not with drugs.
Drug War propaganda is all about convincing us that we will never be able to use drugs wisely. But the drug warriors are not taking any chances: they're doing all they can to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I'm interested in CBD myself, because I want to gain benefits at times without experiencing intoxication. So I think it's great. But I like it as part of an overall strategy toward mental health. I do not think of CBD, as some do, as a way to avoid using naughty drugs.
In "Four Good Days" the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of mother nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.
In response to a tweet that "some drugs cannot be used wisely for recreational purposes": The problem is, most people draw such conclusions based on general impressions inspired by a media that demonizes drugs. In reality, it's hard to imagine a drug that cannot theoretically be used wisely for recreation at some dose, in some context.
DEA Stormtroopers should be held responsible for destroying American Democracy. Abolish the American Gestapo.
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.
Now the US is bashing the Honduran president for working with "drug cartels." Why don't we just be honest and say why we're REALLY upset with the guy? Drugs is just the excuse, as always, now what's the real reason? Stop using the drug war to disguise American foreign policy.
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.
The drug war is is a multi-billion-dollar campaign to enforce the attitude of the Francisco Pizarro's of the world when it comes to non-western medicine. It is the apotheosis of the colonialism that most Americans claim to hate.
