Is there any way that I can communicate with Erica Zelfand1? I'm a 65-year-old veteran user of antidepressants 2 and I am going to get off during a year with the help of psilocybin, San Pedro cactus, and other drugs, including, eventually ayahuasca.
I have written hundreds of essays on this topic and would really like to share my feelings as someone who has been on the receiving end of psychiatry's nostrums for 40 years.
To me, the common sense way to get off Effexor 3 in a year would be to get the "meds" compounded such that each successive pill contains 364/365th dose of the previous pill.
This is common sense, but my latest psychiatrist wants to do 37.5 at a time and then make me count pilules!
Where can I find someone who will compound the drug for me? Why do psychiatrists insist that I do what's best and easiest for THEM, not for myself?
Also, it makes psychological common sense that I can get off Effexor by using psilocybin, not just once, but in the microdosing recommended by Paul Stamets4.
This makes perfect psychological common sense and yet my psychiatrist is less than interested in it.
As you can tell, I have issues with psychiatry because of its focus on what's easiest for the psychiatrist.
But no one I write to on this subject responds to me, so I'm not sure why I'm trying.
Hope to hear from Erica, though.
Thanks,
An eternal patient thanks to the psychiatric pill mill.
PS Also, I'm tired of the talk about mushrooms not being "proven" yet. They have been proven for THOUSANDS OF YEARS. I should not have to wait for materialist science to catch up with common sense.
Author's Follow-up: June 29, 2024
I fear this letter is a little terse, but that's what happens when you're ignored long enough: your frustration starts to seep into your prose. It's partly because I composed this letter while thinking about the way that I was basically blown off by my new psychiatrist.5
Author's Follow-up: October 31, 2024
When am I going to learn that the movers-and-shakers in the psychedelic game do not want to discuss issues: they want to sell stuff! Quite the change from 25 years ago, when you merely had to post some thought-provoking content on a topic and relevant parties would be emailing you that very day with feedback.
Author's Follow-up:
May 20, 2025
This was really a pointless letter, as it turns out. I failed to realize that Erica has obvious financial motivations and is in no hurry to discuss the problems of drug criminalization in the abstract. This is not to criticize Erica for making a living, merely to suggest that I mistook her prime directive in life. I have always been a philosopher at heart, and so I just naturally assume that others will be interested in discussing the why's and wherefores of human folly with me.
I should mention, however, that I have made enormous progress in getting off Effexor -- albeit with the help of a limited handful of psychoactive medicines -- used legally, of course, in places like Oregon and Mexico. (Oh, I am such a good boy!)
But I refuse to be gaslighted6. No one is going to convince me that getting off even Effexor has to be such a huge "ask." The fact that getting off any drug (even alcohol) is hard is only because Americans refuse to study and use psychoactive medicine for human benefit. They prefer to superstitiously condemn such substances instead.
Once we re-legalize drugs, once we study them for common-sense positive uses, teach safe use, and admit the possibility of fighting drugs with drugs, then addiction and unwanted dependence will be limited only to obvious exceptions (like "Howard the Drunkard" from the old Andy Griffith Show). For the inconvenient truth is that all drugs that inspire and elate have prima facie uses to fight depression and anxiety and addiction, either alone or in combinations: uses that we know, moreover, by deductive reasoning about basic psychology and for which we need no proof from lab scientists. What is recidivism after all but the result of a temporary but overwhelming feeling of existential angst -- and nothing is more obvious than that such moments could be "gotten through" -- if not even enjoyed -- with the help of substances that inspire and elate. I once relapsed on Effexor withdrawal after making overly ambitious reductions -- but it is crystal-clear to me that this relapse would not have happened had I been able to use laughing gas 7 or opium 8 or coca or a wide variety of phenethylamines to live through those few hours in which the existential angst seemed overwhelming for me.
This is why there is a symbiosis today between addiction "experts" and drug prohibition. We need these so-called "experts" precisely because we have outlawed everything that could work for the "addict." Drug prohibition has created a world full of addicts -- and a whole new specialty field purporting to "treat" them. It is as if we had outlawed all food except for gruel and then we looked to experts to treat people for malnutrition. "Of course you are undernourished," says the expert, "but that's only because you are not eating the right kind of gruel!" Whereas a real "expert" on malnutrition would be the one who is pointing out loudly and clearly that the government has outlawed everything that would work for the malnourished: namely, a vast variety of healthy and nutritious foods.
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."
Wade Davis wrote in Rolling Stone that cocaine was outlawed because 400 people consumed toxic doses worldwide. SO WHAT?! 178,000 people die from alcohol every year in America alone.
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.
If anyone manages to die during an ayahuasca ceremony, it is considered a knockdown argument against "drugs." If anyone dies during a hunting club get-together, it is considered the victim's own damn fault.
When psychiatrists write about heroin, they characterize dependency as enslavement. When they write about antidepressants, they characterize dependency as a medical duty.
So he writes about the mindset of the deeply depressed, reifying the condition as if it were some great "type" inevitably to be encountered in humanity. No. It's the "type" to be found in a post-Christian society that has turned up its scientific nose at psychoactive medicine.
Drug use is judged by different standards than any other risky activity in the western world. One death can lead to outrage, even though that death might be statistically insignificant.
The Drug War shows us that American democracy is fundamentally flawed. Propaganda and fearmongering has persuaded Americans to give up freedoms that are clearly enunciated in the U.S. Constitution. We need a new democracy in which a Constitution actually matters.
It is a violation of religious liberty to outlaw substances that inspire and elate. The Hindu religion was inspired by just such a drug.
(up)