I wanted to give you a heads-up on a completely forgotten demographic in the psychedelic renaissance: people like myself who are stuck on antidepressants 2 that turn out to be extremely difficult to quit. According to Julie Holland, 1 in 4 American women are dependent on antidepressants for life3. And the worst thing is, these people are all INELIGIBLE for help from psychedelics. This is supposedly because of a fear of a very rare issue called "serotonin syndrome,4" however, in my view, it is really because of a fear of lawsuits and bad publicity. So-called serotonin syndrome is easily detectable and treatable and is very rare, at least as a life-threatening condition.
I have just retired and want to use myself as a guinea pig to document how I can get off of Effexor using plant medicines and fungi, particularly huachuma5, peyote6 and psilocybin7. I will be documenting my efforts so that my ultimate success can help others, or at very least suggest new lines of research. Although I am not a doctor, I have some common psychological sense8, which is something that modern materialist doctors tend to lack9. (Materialist doctors still are not even sure that laughing gas 10 could help the depressed!) I have read endless stories of how entheogens can inspire one in pursuing a goal, and I believe that this will apply to antidepressant withdrawal as much as to anything else.
I am telling you all this in case you can recommend some practical ways in which I can undertake this study. It looks like I would have to move to Canada to get legal access to peyote and huachuma, although the latter cactus can supposedly be grown legally in the States. Perhaps you have some ideas on how I can turn this into an "official" study and so get approval to use the necessary substances in the States.
There are many millions of antidepressant users who have been turned into eternal patients by the War on Drugs, which outlawed everything but dependence-causing medicines for depression11. When doctors learned that these drugs caused dependence, they did not apologize. Instead, they flipped the script and told me that I had a medical duty to take these drugs every day of my life. I think it's a shame that this misused demographic that I am part of is the only demographic that no one is helping during the psychedelic renaissance. I hope to set an example that can start to change that.
If you have any suggestions, practical or otherwise, please let me know!
Author's Follow-up: June 19, 2024
Frankly, these are the kinds of letters that are usually ignored, or at best "sloughed off," but check back here in a week or so in case I am pleasantly surprised.
Author's Follow-up:
April 20, 2025
How charmingly naive of me, huh? To think that the Chacruna Institute would actually get back to me at all, let alone chew the cud with me on such issues. Ha! Oh, I am precious!
Since inditing this amusingly disingenuous missive, I have created an Effexor withdrawal program of my own, with the help of a pharmacist who is now compounding the drug for me into the low doses that the manufacturer refuses to provide. Speaking of that refusal, I had also naively assumed that my psychiatrist would help me find such low-dose tablets, but that does not seem to be his job either. In fact, he looked at me like I was a Martian when I made it clear that I was determined to get off of Effexor.
Of course, I cannot even tell you about any substances that I might be using to make Effexor withdrawal possible -- since drug prohibition effectively frightens people into silence about discussing any benefits that they may achieve with the godsend medicines that grow at our feet. This is why the Drug War is so outrageous: it is predicated on the idea that godsend medicines have no positive uses -- and the very drug laws serve to reinforce that warped idea by making it dangerous to discuss any safe and valid uses.
For this and many more reasons, I am constantly saying that society can have drug prohibition or freedom -- but it cannot have both. Our mistaken belief that we could has led to inner-city shootings, the end of the rule of law in Latin America, the censorship of academia12... and now the end of democracy itself, thanks to the removal of millions of minorities from the voting rolls. Yet progressives and neoliberals continue to sign-off on the superstitious ideology of prohibition -- even after America's new monarch as moved into the Oval Office.
Materialists are always trying to outdo each other in describing the insignificance of humankind. Crick at least said we were "a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Musk downsizes us further to one single microbe. He wins!
If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol slaughters. Drug prohibition is the real killer.
Getting off antidepressants can make things worse for only one reason: because we have outlawed all the drugs that could help with the transition. Right now, getting off any drug basically means becoming a drug-free Christian Scientist. No wonder withdrawal is hard.
It is folly to put bureaucrats in charge of second-guessing drug prescriptions: what such bureaucrats are really doing is second-guessing the various philosophies of life which are presupposed by the way we use psychoactive drugs.
Now the US is bashing the Honduran president for working with "drug cartels." Why don't we just be honest and say why we're REALLY upset with the guy? Drugs is just the excuse, as always, now what's the real reason? Stop using the drug war to disguise American foreign policy.
Smart people in America are like Don Quixote. They are sane on every subject on earth, but mention the subject of "drugs," and they start talking politically correct blather.
If there was free speech in America, we would see billboards demanding freedom to use psychoactive substances for religious purposes, or to heal, or to follow-up on the research of William James regarding the nature of human consciousness.
This just in on the drug scene: A new New York Times report shows that America has been flooding the world with antidepressants, alcohol and cigarettes!
In fact, there are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???
Morphine can provide a vivid appreciation of mother nature in properly disposed minds. That should be seen as a benefit. Instead, dogma tells us that we must hate morphine for any use.
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