Open Letter to Erica Zelfand

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Open Letter to Erica Zelfand

or at least to her gatekeeper

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 29, 2024

Hi, folks.

Is there any way that I can communicate with Erica Zelfand ¹? 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.

Update: May 20, 2025

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 Stamets ⁴.

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

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

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 gaslighted ⁶. 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.

Getting Off Drugs

Open Letters

Notes:

1: Erica Zelfand 2024 (up)
2: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
3: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
4: Paul Stamets The Joe Rogan Experience (podcast), 2017 (up)
5: What the psychiatrist said when I told him I wanted to get off Effexor DWP (up)
6: How psychologists gaslight us about beneficial drug use DWP (up)
7: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
8: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)

read more essays here

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

The Hindu religion was inspired by drug use.

I have yet to find one psychiatrist who acknowledges the demoralizing power of being turned into a patient for life. They never list that as a potential downside of antidepressant use.

Imagine someone starting their book about antibiotics by saying that he's not trying to suggest that we actually use them. We should not have to apologize for being honest about drugs. If prohibitionists think that honesty is wrong, that's their problem.

When folks die in horse-related accidents, we need to be asking: who sold the victim the horse? We've got to crack down on folks who peddle this junk -- and ban books like Black Beauty that glamorize horse use.

As such, "we" are important. The sun is just a chaos of particles that "we" have selected out of the rest of the raw data and declared "This we shall call the sun!" "We" make this universe. Consciousness is fundamental.

FDA drug approval is a farce when it comes to psychoactive medicine. The FDA ignores all the obvious benefits and pretends that to prove efficacy, they need "scientific" evidence. That's scientism, not science.

Amphetamines are "meds" when they help kids think more clearly but they are "drugs" when they help adults think more clearly. That shows you just how bewildered Americans are when it comes to drugs.

We should hold the DEA criminally responsible for withholding spirit-lifting drugs from the depressed. Responsible for what, you ask? For suicides and lobotomies, for starters.

That's the problem with prohibition. It is not ultimately a health question but a question about priorities and sensibilities -- and those topics are open to lively debate and should not be the province of science, especially when natural law itself says mother nature is ours.

If there is an epidemic of "self-harm," prohibitionists never think of outlawing razor blades. They ask: "Why the self-harm?" But if there is an epidemic of drug use which they CLAIM is self-harm, they never ask "Why the self-harm?" They say: "Let's prohibit and punish!"

Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us

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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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