I Got Off Adderall and Xanax Using Psilocybin
The trip that beat back addiction and unleashed a cascade of better choices
In spring 2010, when I was 26, I began using Adderall, Xanax, oxycodone, and other pharmaceutical drugs in a decreasingly controlled manner. For two years, constantly trying to use fewer drugs while using ever more, I felt growing amounts of despair, worry, and hopelessness. By 2012, social situations required caffeine, a pharmaceutical stimulant, a benzodiazepine. The next day, I’d feel terrible, suicidal. I couldn’t seem to enjoy anything anymore unless I was on two or more strong drugs, even while alone.
During those dark years, I used LSD and psilocybin around 20 times and was shocked and heartened by their effects. They temporarily jarred me out of my habits — wallowing in depression, using pills to feel less bad — and made me feel saner. But my drug problem and bleak worldview (I vaguely subscribed to existentialism, which told me to make my own meaning in an indifferent universe) overpowered my psychedelic experiences, and I still felt stuck in helpless confusion, unable to stop using pills or find sustainable, compelling meaning in life.
In September 2012, I encountered the late psychedelics promoter Terence McKenna on YouTube. His ideas — that there’s nothing in society to be…
