n the book Psychedelic Medicine, Dr. Richard Louis Miller refers to a lack of support for psychedelic medicines, especially LSD, concluding that there are only a handful of specialists who are pursuing the work and that the public, especially in Britain, are largely indifferent to the whole topic.
In my opinion, this indifference exists only because no one has yet attempted to connect the dots between the outlawing of psychedelic therapy and the current sad state of depression therapy in America, namely that addictive and starkly inadequate solution of Big Pharma known as SSRIs and SNRIs. If this connection were understood by the depressed public, I imagine they would be plenty motivated to support change.
The dots may be connected as follows:
Psychedelic therapy showed great promise for the depressed and it's non-addictive.
The government banned that therapy half a century ago.
As a result, the depressed have been shunted off onto addictive medicines that simply do not work as claimed, drugs that actually create the chemical imbalance that they purport to fix. These ineffective medicines are expensive, must be taken daily and turn the pill-taker into an eternal patient, since they have to visit a psychiatrist every 3 months of their life in order to be catechized about their mental health. This is the exact opposite of an empowering therapy. Speaking personally, I consider it highly demoralizing (a fact that I've never heard psychiatrists recognize, let alone regret).
I personally have been a guinea pig for Big Pharma for the last 50 years, and their nostrums have not worked. Worse yet, they have conduced to anhedonia, a kind of emotional flat-lining - making life bearable, perhaps, but only by removing highs and lows. What's more, my particular "medicine," Effexor, is so addictive (productive of chemical dependence, if you prefer) that my own shrink tells me not to bother trying to get off it! He says that an NIH study shows a 95% recidivism rate for those who try.
I am plenty upset about this. That's why I'm dumbfounded and frustrated to read Miller's no-doubt-correct observation that there is little public interest in changing the status quo. Don't the depressed millions see what's going on? Apparently not. Not yet anyway. And this must change if organizations such as Heffter want to be in the mainstream and reap monetary donations accordingly.
The current tendency of psychedelic advocates (Like Lauren Slater in Blue Dreams) is to write as if psychedelics are just another way to approach the problem of depression and are in no way meant to take the place of Big Pharma's addictive meds. (Slater is so "soft" on psychiatry's failings that she even supports shock therapy - a vicious therapy that only becomes a default option thanks to America's anti-scientific outlawing of psychoactive plants.)
This failure to "take on" Big Pharma also results in the psychedelic movement "reckoning without its host," at least when it comes to depression therapy. Thus we see that many otherwise exciting clinical trials are completely off-limits to those taking SSRIs and SNRIs. This means that the victims of the Drug War—the vast majority of the depressed—are not even eligible for the cures being brought forward by the psychedelic movement. And yet this same movement wrings its hands about a lack of funding?
How can one expect funding from a demographic for whom one's research is essentially useless? More than 1 in 8 Americans are addicted to SSRIs and SNRIs (1 in 4 women, according to psychiatrist Julie Holland). They are the folks you need to reach, not the lucky few who so far have had little or no contact with such disempowering poisons.
If the psychedelic movement really wants to excite the depressed layperson, they will work to develop a therapy that simultaneously eases depression while weaning a patient off of their SSRI. This would involve, in broad strokes, a ratcheting up of psychedelic doses for the patient as SSRI intake is decreased in proportion. Your researchers already have one guinea pig for use in trialing such a therapy: namely myself.
Creating a successful movement for psychedelic therapy requires creating a movement for the overthrow of the addictive Big Pharma status quo. Until professionals, authors and organizations realize this and change their rhetoric accordingly, a truly motivated fan club of psychedelic therapy will remain limited to the handful of forward-thinking individuals who were cited by Miller in "Psychedelic Medicine."
PS This is essentially the reason why I started my website, AbolishTheDEA.com, to connect the dots between the Drug War and the depression crisis in America. Part of that task is to point out the inconvenient truth that Big Pharma's cures - made necessary only thanks to the existence of that Drug War -- are expensive, addictive - and bad for morale, since they turn the depressed into eternal patients.
Getting Off Drugs
NOVEMBER 2024
I have written dozens of essays about antidepressants and the Drug War, but it is important to read this one first, for it contains the most up-to-date info on my battle to get off such drugs. This reading order is important because I declared premature victory against the SNRI called Effexor in recent essays, only to discover that the drug is far more insidious than I gave it credit for. It turns out withdrawing, at least for me, eventually led to deep feelings of abject despair, far greater than the depression for which I started taking the "med" in the first place.
The frustrating thing is, these feelings could be combatted by a host of drugs that we have outlawed in the name of our anti-scientific and anti-patient war on drugs. That much is just psychological common sense. But we have been taught to believe that there are no positive uses for opium, nor for cocaine, nor for coca, nor for MDMA, nor for laughing gas, nor for peyote, nor for the hundreds of inspiring phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, etc. etc. etc.
The truth is, rather, that Drug Warriors (and the millions whom they have brainwashed) do not WANT there to be positive uses for such drugs. No, they want me to "keep taking my meds" instead and so to enrich their investment portfolios in the pharmaceutical sector. Meanwhile, those without a vested financial interest have been taught that antidepressants are "scientific" and so they cannot understand my desire to get off them. They cannot understand the hell of being turned into a patient for life and having to make regular expensive and humiliating pilgrimages to psychiatrists (who are half one's own age) to bare one's soul for the purpose of obtaining an expensive prescription for a drug that numbs one's brain rather than inspiring it - and a drug which seems to counteract, dampen and/or repress most of the positive effects that I might have otherwise obtained by the few semi-legal alternatives to antidepressants, such as psilocybin and ayahuasca.
But it is just psychological common sense that I could withdraw successfully from Effexor with the advised use of a comprehensive pharmacy, including but not limited to the demonized substances listed above. But materialist science is not interested in common sense. And so they tell me that such drug use has not been proven to "work." But materialist doctors are not experts in what motivates me as a living, breathing, unique individual. The heart has its own reasons that reductionist science cannot understand. If I could look forward, at this moment, to relaxing with an opium pipe tonight, my mood would improve NOW, not just tonight. I would have something to look forward to. I would not feel the need to reach for that bottle full of Effexor pills that I was hoping to foreswear. Likewise, if I could use a drug to laugh and "touch the hand of God" (as with laughing gas and phenethylamines respectively), I could laugh at the pangs of despair that Effexor tries to throw my way.
Science's eternal response to such ideas is: "There is no proof that such things work!"
No, nor will there ever be in the age of the Drug War, in which such common sense use is punished by long jail terms and would never be favorably publicized, even if successful, since America's prime imperative in the age of the Drug War is to demonize psychoactive medicines, under the absurd assumption-laden idea that to talk honestly about drugs is to encourage their use.
Well, we SHOULD be encouraging their use in cases where they actually work, in cases, for instance, when they prevent guys like myself from killing themselves thanks to the knowledge that they are a bounden slave to the combined forces of the Drug War and Big Pharma's pill mill.
Besides, there is no proof that hugging works, but we do not need Dr. Spock of Star Trek to launch a study into that issue: we all know that hugging works by bringing two souls together both physically and spiritually. We do not need a map of brain chemistry to figure this out: the proof is extant, the proof is in the pudding.
But I haven't given up yet despite the setback in my most recent plan. I'm going to search the world for a place where I can get off antidepressants in a way that makes some psychological common sense.
Right now, all I see in terms of resources are a bunch of companies who, for large fees, will help me go cold turkey on antidepressants., or companies that claim to have found the right combination of legal herbal formulas that should make withdrawal easier. But to me, these are all what Percy Shelley would call "frail spells," concocted under the watchful eye of the Drug Warrior to make sure that nothing potent and obviously effective will get added to the mix. In fact, if a space alien came to earth and asked what sort of psychoactive drugs were outlawed, one could honestly answer: "Anything that obviously works."
Meanwhile, drug laws make it impossible for me to visit psychiatrists remotely online, requiring me instead to physically visit my doctors, thereby limiting rural residents like myself to accessing hayseed psychiatrists whose one area of expertise seems to be the writing of prescriptions for antidepressants. Talk to them about anything else, and their eyes glaze over. "That's all unproven," they'll say, "Or, no, we have yet to fully study such things." As if we have to study in order to realize that feeling good helps and can have positive psychological effects.
I'm sure that part of the problem with my withdrawal scheme is that I tried to get off the drug too quickly. But I only tried that because I can find no doctor who will compound the drug for me in a way that makes psychological common sense, namely, with daily miniscule reductions in dosage. My current psychiatrist told me that such compounding was unheard of and that I should drop doses by 37.5 mg at a time, since that is the lowest dose that the pharmaceutical companies create. He said I could start "counting pill beads" once I am down to a 37.5 mg daily dose if I wanted to taper still further.
I did find a compounding company that said it could compound Effexor in the way that I desire. But there's a big catch: they have to receive a prescription for that purpose. And I can find no doctor in the world who is willing to write me one. Even those who sympathize with my plight want me to become their full-time patient before they will even consider writing such a prescription.
So those who warned me against trying to get off Effexor were right in a way: it is extraordinarily difficult. But they feel to realize WHY this is so. It is not just because Effexor is a toxic drug, but also because the drug war has outlawed everything that could help me get off it.
This is why those pundits who sign off on the psychiatric pill mill are clueless about the huge problem with the war on drugs: the way it humiliates and disempowers millions. For it turns out that the phrase "No hope in dope" is true after all, but only when the dope in question is modern antidepressants.
OCTOBER 2024
Here are some of the many articles I have written about the philosophy of getting off drugs. Bear in mind that I am in the process of getting off Effexor myself and am exploring the power of "drugs to fight drugs" in so doing. And this is not a straightforward path given the sweeping limits that are imposed by drug law. So the question of exactly what might work (and how and when, etc.) is still wide open and I am advocating nothing, except the common sense notion that we can benefit from euphoria and mood boosts, yes, and that "drugs can be used to fight drugs," and in a safe way too -- a way that will prove far safer than prohibition, which continues to bring about daily deaths from drive-by shootings and unregulated product while causing civil wars overseas.
I guess what I am saying here is, this site is not purporting to offer medical advice. I avoid using such wording, however, because so many authors refuse to talk honestly about drugs, especially about positive drug use, for fear of being seen as giving medical advice, and this, of course, is just how drug warriors want matters to remain. It lets them shut down free speech about drugs.
Besides, I reject the idea that materialist doctors are the experts when it comes to how we think and feel about life. The best they can do as materialist is to tell us the potential physical risks of using holistically-operating drugs, but individuals are the experts on what motivates them in life, on their own particular hopes and dreams and on what risks they deem necessary to obtain them, to pursue happiness, that is, which objective our legislators outlawed when they outlawed all substances that can help facilitate happiness in the properly motivated and educated individual.
The real answer is not for authors to give groveling apologies for being honest, however: the real answer is for kids to be educated about the basics of wise substance use -- and for America to come to grips with the fact that we will always be surrounded by "drugs" -- and that the goal should be to ensure safe use, not to keep endlessly arresting minorities and removing them from the voting rolls on behalf of the clinically insane idea that we should outlaw mother nature to protect our kids -- and this in a purportedly Christian country whose very deity told us that his creation was good.
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I don't know what's worse, being ignored entirely or being answered with a simple "Thank you" or "I'll think about it." One writes thousands of words to raise questions that no one else is discussing and they are received and dismissed with a "Thank you." So much for discussion, so much for give-and-take. It's just plain considered bad manners these days to talk honestly about drugs. Academia is living in a fantasy world in which drugs are ignored and/or demonized -- and they are in no hurry to face reality. And so I am considered a troublemaker. This is understandable, of course. One can support gay rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ today without raising collegiate hackles, but should one dare to talk honestly about drugs, they are exiled from the public commons.
Somebody needs to keep pointing out the sad truth about today's censored academia and how this self-censorship is but one of the many unacknowledged consequences of the drug war ideology of substance demonization.
In the Atomic Age Declassified, they tell us that we needed hundreds of thermonuclear tests so that scientists could understand the effects. That's science gone mad. Just like today's scientists who need more tests before they can say that laughing gas will help the depressed.
Science today is all about ignoring the obvious.
And THAT's why scientists are drug war collaborators, because they're not about to sign off on the use of substances until they've studied them "up the wazoo."
Using grants from an agency whose very name indicates their anti-drug bias: namely, the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.
The drug war encourages us to judge people based on what they use and in what context. Even if the couch potato had no conscious health goals, their use of MJ is very possibly shielding them from health problems, like headaches, sleeplessness, and overreliance on alcohol.
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 hope that scientists will eventually find the prohibition gene so that we can eradicate this superstitious way of thinking from humankind. "Ug! Drugs bad! Drugs not good for anyone, anywhere, at any dose, for any reason, ever! Ug!"
Imagine if there were drugs for which dependency was a feature, not a bug. People would stop peddling that junk, right? Wrong. Just ask your psychiatrist.
Now drug warriors have nitrous oxide in their sights, the substance that inspired the philosophy of William James. They're using the same tired MO: focusing exclusively on potential downsides and never mentioning the benefits of use, and/or denying that any exist.
My depression would disappear overnight if religiously intolerant America would just allow me to live as free as Benjamin Franklin.
The drug war follows me wherever I go. I was just researching "fun facts" about dogs, and http://petpedia.co told me that "German Shepherds need to have challenging jobs such as... searching for drugs." How about searching for prohibitionists instead?
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.
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, Speaking Truth to Big Pharma: an open letter to the Heffter Research Institute, published on December 25, 2019 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)
n the book Psychedelic Medicine, Dr. Richard Louis Miller refers to a lack of support for psychedelic medicines, especially LSD, concluding that there are only a handful of specialists who are pursuing the work and that the public, especially in Britain, are largely indifferent to the whole topic.
You have been reading an article entitled, Speaking Truth to Big Pharma: an open letter to the Heffter Research Institute, published on December 25, 2019 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)