This highly dystopian and anti-patient therapeutic paradigm would have been totally unnecessary had materialists not decided to ignore common sense psychology and to leverage dependency for profit instead. For common sense tells us that the wisely scheduled use of substances1 like coca, opium , phenethylamines and laughing gas , could help the depressed by getting them through tough times -- and this is only the low-hanging fruit gleaned from the few psychoactive substances that are on our radar today.
There are hundreds of psychoactive substances out there that could be helpful for the depressed based on mere common sense, as opposed to microscopic evidence and materialist theory that presupposes human beings to be replaceable biochemical widgets. See, for instance, Plants of the Gods by ethnobotanist Richard Schultes2 or the hundreds of non-addictive godsends synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, drugs which inspire and elate3. Unfortunately, however, common sense is in short supply in a world in which drug researchers search for efficacy under a microscope while ignoring all anecdotal and historical reports of use, especially of beneficial use, which they censor from their libraries and reading lists.
Drug warriors will scream, "There are insufficient studies,"4 but, of course, they are doing all they can to make sure that that will always be the case. They do this not just through prohibition, but by insisting that holistic-working drugs be studied using materialist tests for efficacy: which means that these drugs must be studied separately for treating any particular condition in the disease-mongering DSM, which, of course, keeps decriminalization moving glacially. Meanwhile, science supports this unjust procrastination by refusing to consider the blazingly obvious psychological benefits of outlawed drugs. Yes, cocaine has risks but it has also safely inspired massive achievements -- though few are ready to admit this. One of the few refreshing exceptions is British talk-show host Graham Norton, who freely says that cocaine is a wonderful drug. Opium has risks but it can bring about an almost surreal appreciation of the world around one, as it did for Lovecraft and Poe, especially as evinced in the latter author's "Tale of the Ragged Mountains."5
In short, euphoria has obvious and time-honored benefits -- and until puritanical Americans accept that fact, they will continue to cause millions to weep and cry unnecessarily in hopeless silence.
Opium in particular could be a godsend for those who do not want to take Big Pharma drugs every day of their lives, drugs that have been associated with a loss of creativity and which bring about a humiliating lifelong dependence on doctors, including irritatingly perky interns who are half one's age, if that. And yet Americans are brainwashed to think that a lifetime dependency on Big Pharma drugs is fine while a lifetime dependence on a drug like opium is horrible.
This is just Christian Science prejudice -- not a scientific truth, and shows the hideous anti-patient presumption of drug law -- laws that seek to make us fear one substance while considering a similar but approved substance to be so much lamb's milk.
But be warned, antidepressant users: some of these pills are harder to quit than heroin 6.
I have found it impossible to get off of Effexor 7 . I was off it for almost three months but then I became desperately depressed, just could scarcely move.
And this is a universal reaction to Effexor withdrawal, accounting for its 95% recidivism rate 8 for long-term users who wish to get off the drug.
Most long-term antidepressant use has negative withdrawal effects of this kind for long-term users.
Psychiatrists will turn around and say: "See, the drugs are working because you're depressed without it."
But is liquor working because alcoholics feel "better" while on the drug? And how are these miracle drugs resulting in states of depression that are far worse than the one with which one started before treatment? And if Effexor was working, then we could say the same of opium and coca and heroin in many cases. A founder of Johns Hopkins spent his entire working life on morphine 9 and no one even noticed the fact. After his death, his colleagues scratched their heads, asking, "How could he have been so professional and effective while on that drug?" As Thomas Szasz pointed out, they never stopped to consider that the morphine 10 use might have had a beneficial effect on the user's work habits. Why not? Because Drug War orthodoxy refuses to believe that "drugs" can have any benefits.
But the biggest problem with Big Pharma 1112 antidepressants 13 is that they turn patients into users for life. If I am to be dependent on a drug for life, I would far prefer to be dependent on the drug alone and not on the entire self-satisfied healthcare system and their expensive and lifelong prying into my moods.
DOCTOR: "Have you ever contemplated suicide 14 in the last 3 months?"
ME: "Only when I consider how psychiatry has turned me into a patient for life."
Despite the notorious downsides of Effexor withdrawal, it makes sense that I could get off the drug with the help of other drugs -- but we are so far from being able to work with a full pharmacopoeia to test this thesis that it will be ages before it can be fairly trialed in the light of day. It will first require a huge reset of American attitudes toward drugs before we can begin finding out what they can really do for us in specific situations, at specific doses, in specific combinations, in specific settings, with specific people, etc.
The Drug War preemptively rules out all creative uses and so the depressed are forced to shop at the only guy in town when it comes to mental and mood adjustment: their local materialist doctor, who will set them up with antidepressants which they will then be taking for a lifetime, with the doctor unable to see anything demoralizing about that arrangement.
Speaking of the hypocrisy about opium , my latest psychiatrist praised Effexor because its withdrawal symptoms do not include "craving" for the drug.
"The strong craving that characterizes opiate addiction has inspired many critics of the drugs to suggest that narcotics destroy the will and moral sense, turning normal people into fiends and degenerates. Actually, cravings for opiates are no different from cravings for alcohol among alcoholics, and they are less strong than cravings for cigarettes, a more addictive drug." --Andrew Weil, From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs15
But this is a hypocritical and value-laden presumption on his part. Why is it okay for me to feel like absolute hell and want to die (when coming off of Effexor) but it's horrible for me to have cravings for a drug? Hell is hell, doc, I mean, come on. I'd choose the hell that's easiest to end. Jim Hogshire wrote about "sleep cures" for unwanted opiate addictions that work in a week. It's still not clear to me that ANY treatment for unwanted Effexor dependency could work in a lifetime, let alone a week.
I'm still not back to zero, however. I find I can go for long swaths of time without using Effexor. But getting off it entirely is apparently a big ask. But again, the problem is not just Effexor -- it is the Drug War which keeps us from using all sorts of substances to help combat Effexor's seeming monopoly on one's mood and mentation. If I can take a drug made by Alexander Shulgin that makes me feel like I'm touching the hand of God, it is blazingly clear that it would have value in keeping me off of unwanted substances. If I can use laughing gas 16 on occasion, that would cheer me up, both while on nitrous oxide and while anticipating its use. Likewise, if i can use opium 17 once a week, say while visiting the theater, my mood would be buoyed, not just on the weekend but on the weekdays thanks to anticipation. This is all common sense, however, and materialists these days do not have common sense.
Of course, the question of how much any given drug could help in itself depends on a wide variety of factors: the specific nature of the drug, its dosage, its specific reason for use, etc. etc. But Drug Warriors do not consider details: they are all about promoting the anti-scientific narrative that drugs can be bad in themselves, without regard for details of use. That's why the Drug War is so maddeningly anti-scientific and, in fact, just plain superstitious. It locates evil in "things," not in the bad social policies of human beings which incentivize violence around the world and destroy American democratic liberties at home.
Give an educated person access to the medicines that we have outlawed over the past 100 years and let us profit from our own creative use patterns, the best of which can be shared as bio-hacks. That would be a welcome change after 100 years of insisting that the only things to be learned about drugs are their downsides.
Author's Follow-up: November 8, 2024
Another downside of antidepressants is that they seem to dampen the power of at least some psychedelic drugs to inspire. The interesting thing, however, is that my best experience on psilocybin to date was when I was still on Effexor. It was after cutting back that the positive effects seemed to lessen. My theory is that withdrawal makes one feel like crap and therefore it negatively affects the psychedelic experience. The problem is that many vendors for such drugs make a hard-and-fast rule about denying services to folks on antidepressants, and from what I've learned on this subject, this seems to be an overreaction to reports of a rare condition called "serotonin syndrome." As Paul Stamets points out, that syndrome is deadly only for those who use a wide variety of drugs of uncertain origin. But retreat operators know that it's "one strike, they're out" thanks to the absurdly high-strung sensitivities of Americans with respect to drugs and so they often refuse to seat those who are using modern antidepressants. I can understand this from a legal standpoint, perhaps, but it bothers me when they present this policy as a step toward client safety: I would prefer that they be honest and just tell us that they are barring my participation out of legal concerns.
It's sad however that the very people who need new medicinal approaches the most are precisely the ones who are being denied the benefits of the psychedelic renaissance.
Author's Follow-up:
In looking back at old essays of mine, I am sometimes bothered by how many words I am using to denounce an evil that should be destroyed at once by just one single consideration: that is, the fact that the Hindu religion was created thanks to the use of a drug that inspired and elated. From this it clearly follows that it is a violation of religious liberty to outlaw drugs that inspire and elate -- and such drugs are precisely what the DEA and government target. They would have no interest in outlawing drugs that fail to inspire and elate. They are going after precisely the kinds of drugs that can inspire new outlooks on life.
It is absolutely clear: drug prohibition is the outlawing of the religious impulse itself. Consider the many references to "Soma juice" in the Rig Veda alone:
"Flow on, Sage Soma, with thy stream to give us mental power and strength."
"The living drops of Soma juice pour, as they flow, the gladdening drink."
"Thou, Soma, 18 as Exhilarator wast the first to spread the sea abroad for Gods."
Had the DEA been active in the Punjab and 1500 BCE, there would be no Hindu religion today.
You may ask, "What does this have to do with antidepressants?"
The answer is, everything.
Suppose you lived in the Punjab in 1500 BCE and were told that Soma was illegal but that the mental health establishment had medicines which you could take every day of your life for your depression. Would it not be an enormous violation of your liberty to be told that you could not worship Soma and its attendant gods and incarnations? Would it not be an enormous violation of your liberty to be told that you cannot partake of the drink of the Gods themselves, the Soma 19 juice?
Well, guess what? Your liberty is suppressed in that very fashion by modern drug prohibition: you are denied access to all medicines that inspire and elate. In light of this backstory, prohibition is an intolerable outrage for any freedom-loving people.
Author's Follow-up:
April 20, 2025
It is maddening to think how marginalized the truth is in the time of the Drug War. I keep looking for the magic way of stating the problem that will finally make common sense go viral.
And even my difficulties in doing that are caused by the Drug War itself. The Drug War outlaws all the medicines that could help me go to the jugular in my arguments -- and to do so repeatedly by boosting my mood. It was not just a random whim on the part of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to make his mental giant, Sherlock Holmes, a user of cocaine . Cocaine shows immense power for focusing one's thoughts and helping one concentrate on the relevant. The question of whether use is worth the risk is not just a medical question -- it is a question about what one values in life.
You see the irony here? Even my difficulty in proving my point to the satisfaction of logic-challenged Drug Warriors is caused at least in part by Drug War prohibitions.
But surely this much should be clear even to the Drug Warrior with the biggest beer belly: namely, the fact that it is a crime against humanity to withhold cocaine 2021 from Alzheimer patients (to say nothing of everybody else). There is a prima facie case that it can help folks improve their thought processes: a blazingly obvious case. Will such use actually heal anybody as well as help them symptomatically? Answer: the Drug War keeps us from finding out. We simply do not know to what extent "use may change nature," as Hamlet might have phrased the problem. And why not? Because superstitious fearmongering drug laws keep us from finding out. These are laws based on the following absurd and inhumane premise championed by substance prohibitionists everywhere:
that a substance whose use may be problematic for white American young people when used in one dosage for one reason must not be used by anyone at any dosage for any reason.
Even if the FDA approved MDMA today, it would only be available for folks specifically pronounced to have PTSD by materialist doctors, as if all other emotional issues are different problems and have to be studied separately. That's just ideological foot-dragging.
To say that psilocybin has not been proven to work is like saying that a hammer has not yet been proven to smash glass. Why not? Because the process has not yet been studied under a microscope.
If I smoke opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag. If I use Big Pharma "meds" every day of my life, I am a good patient.
Classic prohibitionist gaslighting, telling me that "drugs" is a neutral term. What planet are they living on?
The drug war is a slow-motion coup against democracy.
When psychiatrists write about heroin, they characterize dependency as enslavement. When they write about antidepressants, they characterize dependency as a medical duty.
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.
Was looking for natural sleeping aids online. Everyone ignores the fact that all the stuff that REALLY works has been outlawed! We live in a pretend world wherein the outlawed stuff no longer even exists in our minds! We are blind to our lost legacy regarding plant medicines!
If any master's candidates are looking for a thesis topic, consider the following: "The Drug War versus Religion: how the policy of substance prohibition outlaws the attainment of spiritual states described by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'"
Today's drug laws tell us that we must respect the historical use of sacred medicines, while denying us our personal right to use them unless our ancestors did so. That's a meta-injustice! It negatively affects the way that we are allowed to experience our world!
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