The Difference Between Psychiatric and Street Drugs? Ain’t None

     On his YouTube podcast this week, Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring lists the sequence of three states that a person goes through after starting to take a benzodiazepine.  “Doctor Josef,” as he is affectionately known, is an Australian psychiatrist who began to be disillusioned with psychiatry while in med school and then became horrified by how it is practiced today when he worked for the FDA. Today he runs The Taper Clinic to help get people safely off psychiatric drugs, and he also has a popular YouTube channel.

     When one starts a benzodiazepine like Xanax, one does often feel a sense of relief from the negative emotion – anxiety, sadness, fear — one has been experiencing. Soon, however, with continued use, that “high” disappears and one feels the need to increase the dosage in order to chase the relief one originally felt. Increased doses, however, or mixing in more prescriptions, do not do the trick. Finally, in the third stage, one simply feels horrible. The drug has too many side-effects of mental fuzziness, emotional blunting, and physical
discomfort.

     Dr. Josef does not say so in his short video, but this is actually the same sequence one goes through when any supposedly pain-relieving toxin is put into the body. It could be weed, heroin, or crack. It could even be alcohol.

     After a fairly short time none of those achieve the “high” they first did either. One then begins to crave more and more of the toxin to capture the same relief. Eventually, though, in the third stage, one’s life is ruined by too much body toxicity from any of them when taken for too long a time in too great a quantity. Street drugs or psych drugs, it’s the same toxic effect.

     Let’s forget for a second anything we’ve heard about the causes of addiction. Almost all of it is a bunch of psychological gobbledygook anyway, dreamed up by a psychiatrist to explain something he really knows nothing about.

     What if, simply enough, this sequence of these three stages of response to “pain relief” is only the body’s reaction to the long term ingestion of a heavy toxin over too long a time period? As the body’s biochemical state is altered by that much poison, the body gets sicker and sicker. At that point, the person himself is just along for the ride.

     It’s not a pleasant ride…heroin, Jack Daniels, or Xanax.

     The trick, of course, is not to take any of that stuff in the first place. 

     Or just shoot anyone who’s trying to “sell” it to you. Well, at least incarcerate them…as you would any evil drug dealer.