Meds fry the brain, not drugs

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Meds fry the brain, not drugs

How Effexor made it impossible for me to think straight

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 30, 2025

I thought I was going mad. Over the last few months, I was finding it very hard to develop code for my web pages. I was making all sorts of little errors that I had never made before. Worst of all, I was finding it harder than ever to debug those errors. It was often taking me hours to create pages that I had created in a matter of minutes in the past, since I now was constantly trying to track down seemingly petty errors. I originally put this down to the fact that I had changed Web hosts and was therefore required to update my PHP code to conform with the stricter requirements of an updated version of that programming language -- but I soon realized that these changes were actually minor and could by no means account for my newfound difficulties. I was really beginning to think that something was seriously wrong with me, although I dared not even formulate this fear in words.

I finally figured out what the problem was, however. This mental fog was a direct result of attempting to get off the antidepressant known as Effexor ¹ . You remember Effexor: that's the antidepressant that has a 95% recidivism rate ² for long-term users. And now I see why. Not only does one's depression return with unprecedented vengeance upon quitting the drug, but one's mind becomes scrambled as well!

I only discovered this fact a week ago when I returned to using the drug after having seemingly "kicked" the habit over the course of the last year and a half. I gave up on my withdrawal scheme because the depression that this withdrawal was causing was far worse than any I had ever experienced in my life! But I noticed something interesting after resuming the drug, however: I noticed that my programming skills were returning to normal. I could THINK again. It seemed that I now needed Effexor in order to think straight, although my thought processes had never been clouded prior to my first use of the drug 30 years ago now.

This is truly a drug that CANNOT be kicked. Perhaps there are 5% who can manage to do so for longer than three years -- but they are surely paying a high price in mental deficits for having achieved that goal.

Now, I ask any clear thinking reader: what would be the world's response had these outcomes been associated with a "drug," in the prohibitionist's political acceptation of that term. Why, such a substance would have been demonized to the ends of the earth! It would be called the drug from hell! Even Effexor proponents have already admitted that the drug, like most antidepressants ³, leads to weight gain and loss of libido, but, of course, science-happy drug pundits were more than happy to give antidepressants a big Mulligan for such apparently "minor" drawbacks. Now it is clear that attempts to withdraw from the drug are productive of severe brain fog as well! The supporters of the psychiatric pill mill cannot give Effexor a Mulligan for this one, of course, so they simply ignore such outcomes. They are just anecdotal after all (and no one is going to provide any money to "prove" that such stories are true). No wonder psychiatrists do not want people to stop using these drugs -- for then they would have to explain why they were prescribing a substance whose long-term use destroyed the brain!

As always with the Drug War, the hypocrisy here is breathtaking.

Cocaine SHARPENS the mental processes and the vast majority of cocaine ⁴ ⁵ users are NOT addicts -- and even the vast minority who do have trouble with such substances can get off them without discovering in doing so that their brains have been scrambled by drug use. In the 1980s, the criminally mendacious "Partnership for a Drug Free America ⁶" told us that "drugs fry the brain," but surely it is "meds" that really fry the brain. Even heroin ⁷ is lamb's milk compared to Effexor. Only 5% of the soldiers who used the drug regularly in Vietnam needed help in kicking the drug after returning to the States, and even the latter did not suffer from scrambled brain syndrome. And yet here is Effexor, a drug that literally cannot be kicked -- except at the expense of one's power to think straight -- actively being promoted to this day like apple pie as a cure for depression on the Mayo Clinic website!

This is why I call drug prohibition a crime against humanity -- a crime in which medical science, corporate America, and Wall Street are all complicit. For it was drug prohibition which gave Big Pharma a monopoly on mind and mood medicine, a monopoly that it has used to literally enslave Americans in the worst possible way: by rendering them chemically dependent and thereby forcing them to become patients for life, on penalty of no longer being able to think straight! This is a horror story, albeit one that brainwashed Americans have been taught not to see thanks to conglomerate media which drives the narrative on such issues with the help of pharma-paid talking heads on prime-time television.

Wouldn't it break a heart of stone?! And yet this is the world we live in today thanks to drug prohibition -- a world in which 'patients' are not only disempowered, but they are knowingly shunted off onto drugs that damage the brain and turn them into wards of the healthcare state. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that Big Pharma ⁸ ⁹ has been given a license to destroy the freedom of the depressed and to turn them into customers for life. This is a sinister status quo, one that reflects badly on capitalism ¹⁰ itself, for what is this but an immoral attempt to earn money at any price whatsoever, even by stealing the very soul of one's customer -- and it is a status quo that is tacitly supported by all champions of substance prohibition: all those who believe that white American young people are the only stakeholders in the drugs debate. These are the white American young people whom the Drug Warrior refuses "on principle" to educate about safe drug use, under the weird and antidemocratic theory that matters of mind and mood should be dealt with by police and the military rather than by pharmacologically savvy empaths ¹¹ and shaman.

Of course, the most depressing fact of all is that I am the only philosopher in the world who is holding the Drug War responsible for these enormous evils. The fact that my arguments resonate so poorly can only be a sign that Americans have surrendered to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization and that they no longer even dare to question the lies upon which they have been raised since childhood: the two Big Lies of the War on Drugs: namely, that there are no upsides to drug use and that there are no downsides to drug prohibition.

Notes:

1: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
2: I have been unable to confirm this stat. But the WHO notes clinical recidivism rates for depression ranging from 50% to 85%. Do we count that as a recidivism rate of Effexor? Not when Biopharma is paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget, as reported by John LaMattina in the Sep 22, 2022 edition of Forbes magazine. (up)
3: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
4: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
5: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
6: Horses Kill The Partnership for a Death Free America (up)
7: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
8: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
9: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
10: What the drug war tells us about American capitalism DWP (up)
11: pharmacologically-savvy empath: this is an empathic individual with an ethnobotanical knowledge of safe and beneficial drug use worldwide, someone who recognizes psychological common sense and can advise on protocols that meet user needs while avoiding unwanted dependency. (up)

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Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war: "clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."

ME: "What are you gonna give me for my depression, doc? MDMA? Laughing gas? Occasional opium smoking? Chewing of the coca leaf?" DOC: "No, I thought we'd fry your brain with shock therapy instead."

Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.

No wonder conservatives are terrified of drugs. It is not safety that worries them, else they would demand education. They are terrified of new ways of seeing life. The outlawing of drugs is the outlawing of whole mindsets. It is a meta injustice.

We need a Controlled Prohibitionists Act, to get psychiatric help for those who think that prohibition makes sense despite its appalling record of causing civil wars overseas and devastating inner cities.

Outlawing substances like laughing gas and MDMA makes no more sense than outlawing fire.

First we outlaw all drugs that could help; then we complain that some people have 'TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION'. What? No. What they really "have" is an inability to thrive because of our idiotic drug laws.

The drug war is a way for conservatives to keep America's eyes OFF the prize. The right-wing motto is, "Billions for law enforcement, but not one cent for social programs."

The term "hard" is just our modern term for the kinds of drugs that doctors of yore used to call panaceas

All drugs have positive uses. It's absurd to prohibit them because one demographic might misuse them.

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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Meds fry the brain, not drugs

How Effexor made it impossible for me to think straight

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend