It begins with Fiona, the stranger who pointed the way - then the long journey through CBD clinics she set off, a dreaded root canal, an old supplement my mother swore by, and at last the taper that just... worked.
I'll start with her, because everything that finally worked began with her.
For months I had been desperately looking for anyone in South East Queensland - especially on the Gold Coast - who was going through what I was. That's how I found Fiona: through her posts. I did a search for posts from people who mentioned they are from the Gold Coast, and came across some of hers but they were 2 years back. I wrote her a private message, asking how she had been and if we could talk. One day, driving to visit my parents in Brisbane, I got a 'Facebook phone call' from her all of a sudden. I was surprised! But very happy she did. She said she felt my suffering and wanted to help. She'd moved here from Scotland quite a few years back with her partner, had complex PTSD, and had been put on more and more psychiatric drugs the longer she was in the system (at some point 7!).
She told me what had been done to her. She'd gone to a detox centre that was supposed to be one of the good ones - The Currumbin Clinic - and it was awful. One day, deep in the withdrawal they had put her in (you can only stay there for 2 months!), she was late to an outpatient appointment with them where she needed her scripts renewed, due to her withdrawal symptoms. They refused to give them to her since she didn't arrive, and told her to book again - but the availability was quite a few weeks away. For someone in her state, that delay could have been lethal. When she told the receptionist, in plain terms, that she couldn't get a script from a normal GP for those drugs (I assume benzos) and not getting those scripts would kill her, the response was that they "weren't allowed to talk to her" if she said she wanted to die (they assumed she meant killed herself!) - and the person hung up on her! Her own psychologist at the centre was so appalled by what had happened that she resigned after she heard this.
Somewhere in all that, someone - from the centre or nearby - told Fiona quietly, "we're not supposed to tell you this," that CBD oil could help, and pointed her to CDA Clinic. The founder there, very senior in the field, gave her oils that finally let her taper off all of her drugs. That was the secret she passed on to me: not a slogan, not a forum dogma - a real, practical door, opened by someone who'd nearly died finding it.
I want to be careful with her story, because it's hers, not mine. She's still in touch with me, and she's doing the best she can - I'll leave it there. But there's one detail I can't let pass, because it's the same injustice that runs through everything I've written: some of the oils that could have helped her, she simply couldn't afford anymore. In Australia, medicinal cannabis is legal with a script and yet absurdly expensive, thanks to the red tape stacked around it. (Even the cheapest oils I could find - and I searched hard - ran to $180 a bottle and up.) So the very thing that saved her life was rationed by price, for her and for me both.
She never did more than point me toward what I needed - but that was everything. We've talked more since, especially now that I'm healed. When I try to say what she means to me, it comes down to this: she was a person who heard that a stranger was in trouble, picked up the phone, and spent an hour talking to him about his story - and about the thing that had saved her. No referral. No waitlist. No file. Just a human being who'd nearly died in this same maze, turning around to hold the door open for the next person. After a year of services that did everything but that, she was the one who actually did it.
She opened a door. Walking through it took the better part of a year, and every dead end you're about to read - the clinics, the oils that did nothing, the one doctor selling his own - before I found the thing that finally worked. This is that journey.
By late 2023 I'd have tried almost anything that might calm my nervous system enough to taper - devices, apps, and, above all, medicinal cannabis. The cannabis became its own long, expensive, confusing journey, mostly through clinics that didn't really know what they were doing, and it taught me a pattern I'd see repeat everywhere I went: long on selling, short on care. But the desperation started smaller, and stranger, than that.
Desperation makes you a target for every device that promises to calm a nervous system. I spent months obsessing over the Amofit S - a little device that's supposed to train your heart-rate variability and tone the vagus nerve - convinced it might be the thing. When it finally came, it cost me $346, and it didn't really help. I returned it within days. (I'd been comparing notes on these gadgets with Peter Smith, including the Pulsetto vagus-nerve stimulator - the whole sub-economy of people in withdrawal buying hope by the device.)
Not everything I reached for was a drug or a device. In the months I spent waiting to taper again - never fully stabilised after the last setback, with a band of chest anxiety most days - I found Barry McDonagh's DARE on Audible (which I'd only just discovered) and worked through its approach to panic: stop fighting the anxiety, let it wash through you, don't pile fear on top of fear. I sort of tried it. But the real comfort wasn't the technique - it was quieter than that. It was simply hearing that other people live with panic attacks and anxiety that have nothing to do with any drug at all. That, and his Irish accent, which was so calm and steady that the voice itself was easing my anxiety.
The clinics were where the real money - and the real disappointment - went. The first I tried was CDA - the clinic Fiona had pointed me to. By the time I reached it, though, its founder was gone - the clinic had parted ways with him after a regulatory matter. They dispensed through an online platform called CanView, and once I had the scripts I found myself chasing the particular CBD and THC brands they'd prescribed between different locations, often grabbing them at the last minute so I could try them that very night. They told me "low and slow," and I mostly obeyed - though I did push the CBD up a little faster than that. One night, desperate with insomnia, I took more of both the CBD and the THC, and felt nothing at all. These oils are genuinely hard to judge, because ingested they take two or three hours to do anything - and I refused to smoke or vape, so the faster routes were never on the table - I'm fanatical about protecting my lungs, and I hate smoking and especially the smell of pot. It also took Fiona to convince me to try medicinal cannabis in the first place - to drop the stigma and fears attached to it in my head, and to understand that it's NOT marijuana, and completely different from 'casual pot smoking'. The nurses, meanwhile, were wishy-washy: they didn't even know to tell me to separate the oil from my paroxetine. Like so many of these clinics, it sold hard and cared little. It didn't help.
After CDA came Dr Mehta. I found him the way a lot of people do - through a podcast, where he talked about getting people off sleeping pills (he mentioned Stillnox by name - a Z drug), and through his quirky, genuinely funny YouTube videos. He's a real sleep physician with a long CV, and he ran Dreamwell Sleep, so I did a lot of research on him early on and had real hope. In the same podcast, I also saw an interview with an Israeli lady who became a 'plant medicine' provider, with a PhD and a background in neurology. I contacted her clinic, but she was even more expensive than him if I remember correctly, and seemed (to me) really uninterested in helping me - even saying she doesn't know how to take people off benzos, despite in the podcast saying it can help with that. She recommended Dr Mehta instead, so I took her advice.
Here's the part I only came to understand later. In our first appointment he pitched the supply as a convenience: it's easy, he said, because there's a pharmacy dispensary right next to us - Brightleaf - and they post it to you express. What he did not say was that Brightleaf was his own business. He sold his own oil through it - "Brightleaf Supremo," a 25:25 THC-to-CBD oil - as well as other CBD oils he recommended to me, like the Entura I bought - back then at a higher price than other places I'd checked (around $240 for a 30ml bottle). He told me, as he tells his audiences, that I'd be able to come off the benzodiazepine once I was on the oils; in his words, "Brightleaf Supremo stops any benzo."
It was helpful with sleep, but came with some side effects. And when the Entura oil plainly wasn't working for me - even at 300mg of CBD a day - he insisted that it was working, and told me I could simply halve the benzodiazepine (from 1mg straight to 0.5mg at that stage) and then after a month just stop. For anyone who's read the earlier parts, you'll know that advice isn't just wrong, it's dangerous.
It wasn't the only thing he waved away. I told him - it's there in our emails - that the higher-THC oil was leaving me unable to urinate when I needed to - I was taking it before bed, and if I woke up to pee, I would stand in front of the toilet for almost a minute before I could even start - a very thin stream finally coming out - which was genuinely distressing. He told me, in effect, that this simply doesn't happen. It does; I found the documented cases easily enough. Being told that a real, frightening side effect "doesn't happen" - especially when admitting it would complicate the sell - is its own small harm. It's the gaslighting I minded, more than the mistake.
What stung most was the business of it. When I later found the Humacology oils that did help me, he wouldn't write me a script for them - even though, as I understand it, any authorised prescriber can - seemingly because they weren't his product, and he 'doesn't know much about them'. They were also about half the cost - and double the potency
And then there was the quiet, daily dread of driving. To be fair, Mehta always told me to wait many hours after a THC dose before getting behind the wheel - sensible advice. But here is the trap none of us could solve: in Queensland, driving with any detectable THC in your system is an offence in itself. It has nothing to do with whether you're actually impaired, or how long you've waited, and a prescription is not a defence. So even doing everything "right," I was effectively choosing between a medicine that was finally helping me and my licence. For someone already half-housebound and frightened, that turned every drive into its own source of anxiety.
And the more I learned, the more absurd it looked. Think about it: I can be genuinely incapable behind the wheel - flattened by benzodiazepines, or wrecked after a sleepless night - and that's perfectly legal. But a tiny amount of prescribed THC, taken the night before, that leaves me completely unimpaired by morning and below any meaningful threshold, can cost me my licence. The irony is that you can even swallow the oil in a capsule and there's almost no trace of it in your saliva at all - so what, exactly, is the roadside test protecting anyone from? I understand the law was written for people getting stoned and driving. But these are prescribed medicines now, and the law hasn't caught up. THC genuinely helps a lot of people - with pain, with Parkinson's, with sleep - and telling all of them they simply can't drive, regardless of impairment, isn't safety; it's laziness. The honest fix is an impairment test, not a presence test. (For the record: these days I mostly use a CBN oil with no THC at all, which keeps me entirely on the right side of the line.)
I didn't just stew about this. Tasmania already allows a medical defence; New South Wales has been moving toward recognising prescribed use; and I wrote to - and joined calls with - people up the chain in the Queensland government, asking them to do the same. The answer I got back was no. The fault here isn't any doctor's. It's a law that punishes patients for presence instead of impairment, and hasn't yet found the nerve to change.
I want to be fair to him, though, because it wasn't all self-interest. He also spent a good deal of time with me that he never charged for, and there was real care in how he did it. His initial consultation was $300 (around $150 of it came back through Medicare), but plenty of the contact afterwards - the emails, the catch-ups when I was frightened - he simply gave. He was also clearly passionate about the field; he posted almost daily on LinkedIn about new medicinal-cannabis research. He was a clinician with a genuine conflict of interest built into how his practice was structured, in my opinion, and a confidence in his own product that ran well ahead of what it actually did for me.
Before the oils that finally worked could come together, there was one more thing standing in the way - and it had been quietly waiting for me as much as I'd been dreading it. Here's a strange one: throughout withdrawal I'd get toothaches that wandered between teeth - phantom aches in odd places. I know now it was a withdrawal symptom, because the teeth that actually hurt turned out to be fine. The one that was quietly rotting wasn't hurting at all.
I had a dentist back in Brisbane I'd seen for years - affordable, a real relationship; I used to drive up from the Gold Coast just to see her. I couldn't manage that in this state, so I found a place near home for a scan (I warned them my anxiety was severe because of withdrawal, and they were lovely about it). The verdict: I needed a root canal, urgently. My old dentist had only been able to cap it - she wasn't an endodontist - and because it didn't hurt, I'd assumed I was fine. I wasn't. There were cavities to fill (again, not in the teeth that had been aching), and the infection in the tooth that needed the root canal could travel up into the bone, which is when it gets genuinely dangerous. In a grim way, withdrawal saved me there: if I'd been well, I'd never have gone looking.
Finding an endodontist was its own ordeal - the quotes were so expensive, which piled on another layer of anxiety. The one I found was a Persian man, and - I'll be honest, because the same hypervigilance from those months ran right through this - my first reaction was a flicker of fear: what if he wasn't one of the Persians who actually support Israel? So I never mentioned I was Israeli (though they may have guessed from my name). I tell you this not because it reflects on him - it doesn't - but because it's the truth of where my head was. And the truth also includes the ending: he turned out to be excellent, exceptionally gentle, and the cheapest of every quote I got. I owe him a lot.
The benzo groups, for all their faults, came through here: from reading them every day, I knew to ask what was safe to be injected with, terrified the wrong thing would tip me into a worse setback. The answer was an anaesthetic without adrenaline - plain lignocaine - and that's what we used. We did one treatment before Christmas and one after, which conveniently gave me a legitimate reason to keep delaying the restart of my taper (the Dreamwell oil, Entura, still wasn't working, and this was before I'd found the oils that did). In the end it was far easier than the months of dread had promised: no pain at all, and no withdrawal fallout.
After all the oils that didn't work, I finally found Humankind - or rather, their Humacology oils - by trawling Australian medicinal-cannabis sites and reading every review I could. I was so scared about the THC situation (and it was causing weird mental side effects like bizarre running thoughts before falling asleep) and I was looking for a CBN solution, after researching the subject so much I knew it was helpful for sleep and probably didn't have the addiction potential of THC or the strong psychoactive effect. Back then Humankind had their own bulk-billed over-the-phone service for scripts, and their oils as a bonus - were the cheapest per milligram I could find. They were also the only ones giving me the CBN I was looking for, built into their "pink" oil. Nurse Joe there was an angel - he even had his number published on the Humacology page, and he actually answered.
A word on how I actually used them, because it matters. The "yellow" was pure CBD with terpenes, and it helped me a great deal on its own during the day - within two hours anxiety would fade away. The "pink" added the CBN I'd been chasing, plus a small amount of THC - 2mg per 1ml (and I was taking 0.5ml) - for the evenings, to help me fall and stay asleep. As I said - the THC was the one thing I had to handle carefully. One night my bedroom air-conditioner died and I had to drag my mattress into the living room (which, honestly, felt safer anyway, and so I kept this setup until I was off the benzo). I'd already taken my evening dose - and, it turned out, slightly too much THC on top of the pink oil - which I needed as the pink oil alone normally didn't 'cut' it. My thoughts went strange and broken; I lost track of time; I felt like I was moving through a dream, half-doing things, fully aware it was happening to me. I managed to move the mattress, but honestly it was a challenge! and made sure to fall asleep immediately after. The odd part is it didn't frighten me - the CBD and THC together had me so relaxed that I was somehow fine with it - but it's a disturbing thing to live through, and a reminder that even the medicine that was helping me had an edge I had to respect.
The shadow over Humankind was the psychiatric doctor who ran it, Dr Crosby Rechtin. In March 2024, I told Nurse Joe that, as much as I appreciated the Humacology oils, for sleep it was only the Pink - plus a tiny amount of pure THC (1-2mg extra) - that was helping me sleep. He said that they don't make THC oils (their later oils - the Black that replaced the Pink and the White that replaced the Blue, removed THC altogether) and that it might be worth it if Dr Crosby would work with me directly. After Nurse Joe forwarded him an email thread between me and Dr Mehta, Crosby wrote to step back from my care - copying in, I HOPE accidentally, both Dr Mehta and Joe. There was, he said, "a situation of too many cooks in the kitchen": I had too many doctors giving conflicting advice, and he would defer my cannabis treatment to Dr Mehta. I felt a wave of anxiety, knowing that Dr Mehta was cc'd and being scared he would have HIS ego hurt and stop helping me too, and wrote straight back, raw - I'd had no sleep, I was in a fragile state, please don't drop me as a client! A few days later he added that there was "a bit more to it": Humankind had closed to new patients and was winding down what had been a free service, because it had grown beyond what was realistic, and I was the first patient to be told. But the oils are still out - I'll just need to get new scripts from another doctor/nurse practitioner.
In fairness, the logic isn't unreasonable, and the oils he and Joe had set me up with were the ones that finally worked. But being handed back - in writing, cc'd to the very doctor whose conflicting advice was half the problem - while I was still drowning in withdrawal, landed hard. Nurse Joe and the oils were genuinely helping me; the decision from the top still made me feel like a burden for the crime of having more than one person involved in my care.
I want to go back two weeks in the timeline, before I even started the Humacology oils - because it wasn't just those that helped me. It was really two things coming together that changed everything.
The first was Stabilium - the supplement my mother had recommended to her own patients for thirty years, the one she swears by for anxiety and depression, and also for coming off SSRIs. I'd "tried" it before and shrugged. But I realised I had never actually taken it properly: at least four capsules a day for two weeks, which is when it's meant to start working. I'd always balked at the price (very expensive in Israel, much cheaper in Europe) and under-dosed it. So this time I committed - six capsules a day (the amount my mum used to take, more than the label suggests) for two weeks.
The second was, as mentioned, the Humacology oils, which I started a few days before those two weeks were up. And the combination simply threw me into a zen state.
It's worth being clear about what this was and wasn't. It wasn't a magic single pill. It was a stack, on top of a year of slow learning - the cannabinoid oils (the pure-CBD "yellow," and the high-CBD/CBN "pink" with its small amount of THC for the evening), Stabilium taken properly at last, and the supplements I'd built up over time: glycine, NAC, magnesium glycinate, taurine, agmatine, theanine, and more. Individually, several of these had helped a little. Together, finally, they tipped me over into stability. I was also still taking Paroxetine 40mg which either compounded my issues until then, or finally made sense to my CNS - I honestly don't know, but it's worth noting that.
I didn't rush to taper the moment I felt calm. I sat in the zen state for a week or two first, still on 1mg, letting it be real. It's funny, I HATED my house and sitting on my recliner all day inside, and suddenly it was the most normal thing to do, no running negative thoughts, not feeling worthless. Then I started down - slowly, the right way. The first week was a cut of only around 3% of my current dose. Exponential, always a percentage of where I was now, never a fixed amount. I also changed it from a daily microtaper, which bit me in my ass before when I tapered too much and didn't know what step was the problem (Clonazepam has a long half life so it could well be 5 days before, and with a daily microtaper you just don't feel it fast enough). This time, something new happened: nothing. No setback. No Insomnia. No nightmares. No anxiety. No depression.
Because it was so easy, I let it speed up gently - increasing the percentage and tightening the interval, from every ten days down to about once a week. A few months later, I was off. After everything - the milk taper disaster, the water taper, the night terrors, the horrible year - the ending was almost anticlimactic. It just worked.
I finished my taper in August 2024. Finally, after a careless prescription took my life apart, I was free of it. When I jumped - at 0.025mg as per the Ashton Manual, I had a week that I would describe as just a tiny bit more anxiety than usual - something that any 'normal' person wouldn't even register in his mind more than 'I have a bit of anxiety this week, no big deal'. After that I was fine. In fact, BETTER than I ever was before. Depression - GONE. Anxiety - GONE. I felt COURAGEOUS. I felt DETERMINED. I felt JOY. And I slept WELL! I knew that at some point, I will have to taper the Paroxetine too. But now I had the knowledge of how to, and I was not planning to do it just yet, as it was working as it should. And I needed to restore my life, which was the next step!