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Tapering for Jesus

how drug warriors moralize the withdrawal process

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 27, 2023



2025 update


Americans are always trying to fit the downsides of prohibition (cold turkey, drug overdoses, incarceration 1 , etc.) into a puritanical narrative, casting the victim of Drug War policy as a wayward soul in need of religion (or at least a "higher power") and a therapeutic realization of their own nothingness in the great scheme of things (which is ironic, since that's a humbling worldview that the Drug Warriors who create all these problems would never, ever think of adopting for themselves). What I hadn't realized until now, however, is that the practice of "tapering" a drug in the age of the Drug War is also a puritanical practice.

To see this clearly, ask yourself the following question: would a drug dealer tell you to "taper" a drug that you did not enjoy? No, of course not. He or she would tell you to ratchet up the use of a drug that worked better for you. The only reason we promote tapering is because we have outlawed all the better substances that one might use in the case of a problem - and the fact that removing a psychoactive drug without replacing it creates issues that allow us to medicalize and moralize the experience of the "taperer," thereby creating jobs for therapists and keeping the drug user cast as the prodigal son or daughter, only lately coming home to a hypocritically defined "sobriety" and a higher power (ideally, of course, to the Christian God of the average Drug Warrior).



This is why I have no interest in getting off of Effexor 2 , despite the fact that it tranquilizes me and turns me into a ward of the healthcare state. I am a 64-year-old with a busy work schedule, I do not have time to devote my "golden years" to a psychologically nerve-wracking struggle with withdrawal, not in an age in which all the medicines that could guide me through the experience (empathogens, opium , coca, speed...) have been outlawed.

Because the last thing that the Drug Warrior wants is for a user (even of a legal medicine) to get off of a psychoactive medicine easily. Then there is no way to open clinics for them and make a business model out of helping them, or a career in criminology out of arresting them. Then there is no way to cast the withdrawal experience as a moral drama, with the devil sitting over my left shoulder, urging me to continue using, and the angel sitting over my right shoulder, urging me to keep the course, full speed ahead to the monotheistic and self-denying religion of my forebears.

As always, materialist science abets this anti-patient approach by fretting that scientific onlookers need to keep their variables straight. When the withdrawal process involves multiple drugs (one that you're tapering off and others that you're ratcheting up), it is impossible to know which drug is doing what. And since the rights of the materialist come before those of the patient, the obvious answer to this dilemma is to deny the "taperer" additional medicines until such time as they have "gotten off" of the undesired substance.

If I had that much "psychological downtime" to throw away in my life, I would devote it to moving to a country or state that's less determined on throwing me in jail for improving my mental attitude with godsend medicines.

This is the evil of the Drug War: they portray it like they're jailing scumbags (black and poor), but what they are really doing is jailing those who seek to improve their lives, advisedly or otherwise. Besides, it's racist to the hilt. When Betty Ford announced the fact that she was abusing Valium (whatever that means), Americans pitied and respected her and ultimately praised her for developing treatment protocols for rich, white, respectable women like herself who wanted to return to the hypocritical sobriety of the Drug Warrior.

It never occurred to Betty that folks were using Valium for a reason, and that if long-term Valium use proved to be problematic, it did not therefore follow that any and all drug use was problematic. That's like saying that Amoxicillin did not work so there's no use in trying azithromycin.



Author's Follow-up: January 4, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


For more on this totally ignored topic, see my essay on .



Author's Follow-up: January 11, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up




You Can't Get There from Here



So, I called a compounding pharmacy in Maryland yesterday. The pharmacist sounded friendly at first and it seemed like she was actually going to be able to compound the drug into doses that made sense for me from a psychological point of view. This would mean that each daily pill would be fractionally reduced in drug content from its predecessor of the day before.

But I soon found out that this is not how compounding works. They can't just take the existing pill beads from my current prescription, count them, and then re-encapsulate them into specific new doses. No, they have to use Effexor powder of their own and write entire new formulas for each new pill dose, which service, as the lady assured me, would be astronomically expensive.

Yes, they could provide Effexor in liquid form, but not in the "extended release" formula that I had been taking -- and the liquid form would require monthly prescriptions since the liquid only remains chemically viable for a short time.

In other words, "you can't get there from here." Or in still other words, no one is thinking about the "patient" when it comes to Effexor formulations. No one has a financial interest in making withdrawal easy. They want us to remain children and rely on our doctors to set their own schedules for us using commercially available doses. Then, if we're so ungrateful to modern chemistry as to want to get off the drug entirely, we're told that we can count the pill beads ourselves once we have reduced dosage to below 37.5 mgs, the smallest dose available from pharmaceutical companies.

It's as if doctors, exasperated by my assertiveness as a patient, had finally just thrown some Effexor pill beads on the ground and shouted: "Here, count them yourself if you're so ungrateful to modern medicine for its wonder drugs!" One is reminded of the scene in "The Imaginary Invalid" in which the hypochondriac's brother tells his sibling to stop taking his prescribed enemas and to start thinking for himself for a change. The Invalid's doctor is enraged to think that his cash-cow invalid would even consider such advice:

"I have just heard nice news downstairs! You laugh at my enemas, and refuse to take the remedy which I ordered. Unheard of! What an unprecedented revolt of patient against doctor!"


Of course, the liquid Effexor could work for me "in theory," even if it is not "extended release." In a way, it would be ideal for tapering since I could use a syringe to decide daily dosage on my own, based on my psychological state at any given time during the process. But the 30-day prescription is a non-starter. I have trouble getting pharmacies and doctors to reliably get me my three-month supply of regular Effexor and I can only imagine all the delays and busy phone lines I'd encounter in trying to get a liquid formulation delivered to my door on a timely basis, even assuming that the price was something close to reasonable.

Let me say for the record: I was polite to the woman. I never raised my voice or interrupted her. However, a note of irritation did creep into my voice when she started harping on my doctor's role in all this. You see, in my view, all my doctor needed to do was to write a prescription stating that I was to receive a monthly supply of liquid Effexor sufficient for 30 daily doses of 150 mgs. Then, if there was any left over, I could discard it.

But she kept saying things like, "Well, your doctor has to decide how much he wants you to take..." This was irritating to me because I had finally gotten my doctor to do things my way, to let me use my own psychological common sense, and now here is this pharmacist telling me that I needed to go back to daddy (er, my psychiatrist) and see what HE wants me to take and when.

After a five-minute chat, the pharmacist put me on hold, during which I was disconnected. She never called me back. There's no money in dealing with mere patients like myself. If you want to get off a Big Pharma 3 4 drug, you're on your own. Now, if you're a dog, that's another story. Compounding pharmacies are all about compounding drugs for pets.

In a sane world -- one not controlled by billionaires, one in which corporations did not have the rights of individuals -- pharmaceutical companies would be required to provide low-dose formulations of their product that allow patients to taper off drugs without counting pill beads, without, that is, having to become compounding pharmacists in petto.

This anti-patient tapering reality provides just one more proof of the fact that American drug policy is anti-patient and inhumane.




Author's Follow-up: January 12, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


Or Can You?





I had a "light bulb" moment yesterday. It occurred to me that I might achieve my tapering goals by having a compounding pharmacist create just two different kinds of pills for me: One would be a tablet containing 5 mgs. of Effexor, and the other would be a tablet containing 2.5 mgs. I could then create my own slow-mo reduction schedule to get off the drug entirely. For instance, I could plan to get off Effexor in one year by reducing down to 25 mgs. (5 mgs at a time) over the course of 180 days. I could then spend the latter half of that year getting off the remaining Effexor by steadily scheduled drops of 2.5 mgs. at a time. This would accomplish my goal of getting off Effexor slowly and incrementally, without large sudden dosage drops and without having to count pill beads.

This is not just stubbornness on my part. This is not just my desire to be different. The fact is that the recidivism rate is around 95% for long-term users who try to escape this drug5, and so it is clear to me that the status quo approach does not work. That is why I want to pursue a common sense approach in which I can get off the drug very slowly and very steadily, in a way that makes psychological common sense.

Remarkably, I seem to be the only Effexor user who has come up with this approach. That's not surprising, though, because the party line out there says that we patients know nothing. We are told that we should follow the tapering suggestions of our doctor. But our doctors cannot prescribe low doses of Effexor, for the simple reason that low-dose formulations do not exist. So if we insist on actually getting off the drug, he or she is eventually going to tell us to start counting pill beads, and that, quite frankly, is outrageous.

I don't know if you've ever tried to count pill beads of Effexor, but it is very difficult, finicky and frustrating. I would need a magnifying glass, if not a microscope, to accomplish this job, and counting the beads of just one 150 mgs. pill would take me an hour, and that's only if I managed to keep my cool without dashing the product on the floor and cursing modern medicine.

I also miraculously found a compounding pharmacist yesterday who understood what I wanted to do and feels that it is a great idea. We will get together this coming week to discuss the details, but so far it's "all systems go."

One important component of my plan is that the dosage reductions will not be written in stone. I will certainly not reduce dosage more quickly than my general plan suggests, but I will be open to proceeding more slowly than planned if and when I experience excessive discomfort that seems traceable to the withdrawal process.

Another crucial element of the plan is just common sense psychology -- and even common sense philosophy. A body has to work. Daily. There can be no sitting around whatsoever and thinking about one's fate.

It cannot be said enough, however, that this huge recidivism rate for Effexor withdrawal is really just an artifact of inhumane drug law. What is recidivism all about, anyway? It is all about a few tough hours in which one is suddenly climbing the walls. A few hours. And those few hours could instantly be made bearable by the creative and strategic use of a wide variety of substances that idiot Drug Warriors have outlawed. I can get along just fine for 95% of my life while I am withdrawing from the drug, but it is those few dismal and introspective hours that are the bane of the recidivist.

What happens is this: You reach one of those moments during the withdrawal scheme and you cast about for some way to escape the psychological pain... and you realize that there is nothing: certainly nothing effective. The Drug Warrior has seen to that.

Now imagine that you had laughing gas 6 handy, or that you had access to a variety of phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin, or that you had DMT, in one form or another, to distract and perhaps even enlighten. Or maybe you had some opium 7 on hand in smokable form. Or you had cocaine 8 9 to bulldoze you through the angst. One could get through those dim hours without a problem. This is just psychological common sense. We do not need the FDA or pharma-backed researchers to tell us this.

It should go without saying that these drugs would have to be used advisedly according to the very specific conditions of any single case. I only have to mention this because the world (and hence even my readers) have been brainwashed to fear the creative use of psychoactive drugs and so they think only of the worst-case scenarios of such usage.

This is a horrible status quo because it promotes drug laws that rule out far more than dangerous use: they rule out ALL use, and so leave folks like myself sitting on their staircase at 2 in the morning with their head in their hands, contemplating suicide.

The idea is something like this: "If one white American teenager could die from using drugs, then no one should benefit from such drugs, in any way, ever." It is a hateful doctrine. It is a level of fearmongering that we do not associate with any other risky activity on earth: not with mountain climbing, not with horseback riding, and certainly not with hunting, drinking liquor, gun use, or driving a car.

But this is a digression from today's topic, a digression that would not be necessary except for the fearmongering of Drug Warriors.

So, to rewind and restart: All systems go. Stand by for new developments in my ongoing attempt to taper wisely -- or as wisely as possible given that the Drug War has outlawed everything that could absolutely ensure my success in getting off Effexor, or indeed almost any drug.












Notes for essay entitled Tapering for Jesus: how drug warriors moralize the withdrawal process:

1: Heather Ann Thompson. 2014. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. October 30, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/10/inner-city-violence-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/382154/. (up)
2: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
3: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
4: 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)
5: This is what my own psychiatrist told me several years ago. It was our last meeting. Circumstances have since suggested that he was fired for his candor on that subject. (up)
6: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
7: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
8: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
9: “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)




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Ten Tweets

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There are plenty of "prima facie" reasons for believing that we could eliminate most problems with drug and alcohol withdrawal by chemically aided sleep cures combined with using "drugs" to fight "drugs." But drug warriors don't want a fix, they WANT drug use to be a problem.

Drug prohibition began as a racist attempt to prevent so-called "miscegenation." The racist's fear was not that a white woman would use opium or marijuana or cocaine, but that she might actually fall in love with a Chinese, Hispanic or Black person respectively.

My impression has been that the use of cocaine over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine, 1884

My consciousness, my choice.

"The Oprah Winfrey Fallacy": the idea that a statistically insignificant number of cases constitutes a crisis, provided ONLY that the villain of the piece is something that racist politicians have demonized as a "drug."

The "scheduling" system is completely anti-scientific and anti-patient. It tells us we can make a one-size-fits-all decision about psychoactive substances without regard for dosage, context of use, reason for use, etc. That's superstitious tyranny.

The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.

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.

At best, antidepressants make depression bearable. We need not settle for such drugs, especially when they are notorious for causing dependence. There are many drugs that elate and inspire. It is both cruel and criminal to outlaw them.

The Drug War is the legally enforced triumph of human idiocy. We have rigged the deck so that our dunces can be right. The Drug War is a superstition. Indeed, it is THE modern superstition.


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