Is there any way that I can communicate with Erica Zelfand1? I'm a 65-year-old veteran user of antidepressants 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 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.
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.2
"Chemical means of peering into the contents of the inner mind have been universally prized as divine exordia in man’s quest for the beyond... before the coarseness of utilitarian minds reduced them to the status of 'dope'." -- Eric Hendrickson
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."
Trump is the prototypical drug warrior. He knows that he can destroy American freedoms by fearmongering. He has seen it work with the Drug War, which got rid of the 4th Amendment, religious freedom and is now going after free speech.
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.
Americans think that fighting drugs is more important than freedom. We have already given up on the fourth amendment, nor is the right to religion honored if we believe in the sacred nature of indigenous medicines. Pols are trying to end free speech about drugs as well.
The FDA uses reductive materialism to justify and normalize the views of Cortes and Pizarro with respect to entheogenic medicine.
If I want to use the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions, fight depression, or follow up on the research of William James into altered states, I should not have to live in fear of the DEA crashing down my door and shouting: "GO! GO! GO!"
The DEA has done everything it can to keep Americans clueless about opium and poppies. The agency is a disgrace to a country that claims to value knowledge and freedom of information.
Classic prohibitionist gaslighting, telling me that "drugs" is a neutral term. What planet are they living on?
The American Philosophy Association should make itself useful and release a statement saying that the drug war is based on fallacious reasoning, namely, the idea that substances can be bad in themselves, without regard for why, when, where and/or how they are used.
Listen to the Drug War Philosopher as he tells you how you can support his work to end the hateful drug war -- and, ideally, put the DEA on trial for willfully lying about godsend medicines! (How? By advertising on this page right c'here!)
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, Open Letter to Erica Zelfand: or at least to her gatekeeper, published on June 29, 2024 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)
i, folks.
You have been reading an article entitled, Open Letter to Erica Zelfand: or at least to her gatekeeper, published on June 29, 2024 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)