Cocaine is a virtual cure for depression. But self-interested doctors demonized the drug by considering only those rare people who misused it 1. This was exactly like judging alcohol by focusing only on alcoholics. Instead of saying, "Wow! This drug could end depression for the vast majority of the depressed," doctors said, "This drug could put us out of business!" They did not want to cure depression, after all, they wanted to TREAT it. That's where the money lay. And so they launched an op-ed campaign to demonize the drug. They never mentioned in those scare pieces that they had a vested interest in the demonization and outlawing of cocaine 2. Nor did they ever bother to ask the depressed what THEY thought about cocaine before libeling the drug in popular outlets like The New York Times and Collier's Magazine. (It was that latter magazine that pressured Arthur Conan Doyle into delivering a clean-and-sober version of Sherlock Holmes for puritan America 3.) Sigmund Freud knew better, of course. He knew that cocaine was a godsend for the depressed. In fact, we would not have heard of Freud today had cocaine not roused him from his depression-inspired procrastination and motivated him to publish prolifically.
This is why drug prohibition is what I call a meta-injustice, for it outlaws our very ability to protest effectively against drug prohibition! Take myself, for instance. This site would be far more consistently annotated and updated had I the freedom to use an alkaloid from the divine plant of the Incas. I would then be far more diligent in keeping my blog and bio updated and in answering objections on X, etc. etc. I would, in short, be prolific a la Sigmund Freud. This is why I am frustrated by the vast majority of Drug War opponents, because they ignore the true evil of drug prohibition: the fact that it lets bureaucrats get into my very brain and control the activity therein, to control how ambitious I can be in life and how persistent. This is monstrous -- a far worse form of tyranny than the censorship of books and media that Americans have become so used to on the subject of drugs that they do not even see it as censorship.
Sure, there are almost no books on how to use opium and cocaine wisely -- but we actually think that's how it should be, so thoroughly have we been indoctrinated in the anti-indigenous biases of the westerner. We would rather people misuse coca and opium in any case: then we can turn around and blame the problems that they encounter in so doing on the drugs themselves. That's the vicious circle whereby racist politicians have persuaded gullible and puritanical Americans to support a demonstrably deadly policy like prohibition. Such Americans reason as follows: If we can stop one white young person (especially my own precious child!!!) from misusing drugs about which we fail to teach them and which we refuse to regulate as to quality and dose, then the rights of everybody else on the planet to heal themselves may be safely ignored -- as may the rights of minorities to live in safe communities and not be killed by the gunfire that prohibition has created out of whole cloth.
I am writing this preface in November 2025 after having browsed the following essay with jaundiced eyes. Most of this material was written before I had read Freud's "On Cocaine 4" -- and all of it was written before I had fully "digested" the same, philosophically speaking -- and so I fear that I may have been demonizing cocaine with faint praise in what follows. Indeed, it is only very recently that I found the nerve to use the word cocaine unapologetically in my essays -- that's just how thoroughly I had been brainwashed over the years to hate effective medicines. Analyzing the Drug War over a period of years is like peeling back an onion -- one finds layer after layer of lies and mischaracterizations. I finally saw through all the self-serving and enormously hypocritical blather about addiction and dependency -- for which I am grateful, given that even most drug-law reform advocates never reach this level of emancipation in their lifetime. Most go to their grave believing in the superstitious dogma of the Drug War Cult, that drugs can be categorized as good or bad without regard to context of use.
Psychonauts claim that set and setting matters for psychedelics. Well, guess what, friends: It matters for ALL drugs. Context matters. No drug is good or bad in itself. Even deadly Botox has positive uses. Indeed, it is now being used to treat migraine headaches. Had we outlawed the drug because it was dangerous in the abstract, as we now do with psychoactive drugs, this breakthrough treatment would never have been found. This is why drug prohibition is the outlawing of pharmacological progress. But this superstitious prejudice of ours has a price tag. Even the Drug Warriors pay for the sin of drug prohibition: Ronald Reagan died of complications from Alzheimer's Disease after doing everything he could to outlaw the kinds of drugs that improve mentation and even grow new neurons in the brain.
We now join my original essay, already in progress. Let us begin at the point where I remind the reader that cocaine is just one of many outlawed substances that could help the depressed, and that this fact is just psychological common sense, albeit the kind of common sense that is out of fashion these days in academia thanks to the influence of the passion-scorning doctrines of Behaviorism.
One final note: You will find references to "coca wine" in the following essay. This is because I was nervous about employing the word "cocaine" and so I was using "coca wine" as a kind of proxy. I had just learned about that invigorating quaff from reading "Coca and Its Therapeutic Application" by Angelo Mariani. 5 Mariani knew that coca had godsend qualities -- as did such 19th-century writers as HG Wells, Jules Verne, and Alexander Dumas.
Frankly, I was going to delete the following after perusing it and finding it to be made up of so much common sense. I felt like I was being condescending merely to publish it. Did I think that my readers were children? But then I remembered that the Drug War has, indeed, turned Americans into children when it comes to drugs and so I just wrote "stet" on my draft copy. We are all committed to the childish beliefs of the Drug Warrior, who feeds us the defeatist message that we can never learn to use drugs wisely, and that we therefore need a police state in order to ensure that we never use drugs at all.
What nonsense. Or rather, what tyrannical and anti-scientific nonsense. Indeed, what inhumane and anti-progress nonsense.
AUTHOR'S ASIDE
I personally doubt that America can ever learn this lesson, because there is a fundamental flaw with American democracy. It has become a mobocracy, wherein all principles -- as embodied in the U.S. Bill of rights -- are now ignored to the extent that they conflict with America's uninformed "feelings" about drugs. This is more than a problem with drug policy, it is a problem with America itself. I think, therefore, that the most probable way forward for drug re-legalization is for other countries to pick up the banner of freedom and so stand up for the hundreds of millions around the world who go without godsend medicine thanks to the one-size-fits-all prohibitions of the Drug Warriors. These other countries will accept the demonstrably obvious fact that drug prohibition kills and will legislate accordingly.
Portugal is a step in the right direction, but only a step. The Portuguese policy still treats drug users as pathological, as if it were pathological for one to try to take care of their own health -- as if it were pathological to try to improve one's concentration, to try to improve one's mood, or even to try to improve one's religiosity.
END ASIDE
ORIGINAL ESSAY (in progress)
Other such godsends include laughing gas, MDMA, marijuana, opium, psilocybin, LSD, and the hundreds of phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. Then there is the seemingly endless list of plants and fungi (as, for instance, those documented in "The Plants of the Gods"6) that have a wide range of potential benefits for humankind but which we have "damned" as well as worthless, based on the preposterous anti-scientific lie that they are "drugs" in the bad sense of that word and so can have no valid uses for anybody, anywhere, ever. Even this list of potential godsends expands exponentially when you consider the complementary use of these substances in various combinations and compounds.
So anyone who considers me to be an evangelist for coca wine is missing the point. Coca wine does appear to be a godsend for myself and from what I've read, it was a godsend as well for many 19th-century luminaries, such as HG Wells and Charles Gounod and Pope Leo XIII7. But the world is full of substances that could work miracles for the depressed, and this is the point I am trying to make - one which when fully understood will reveal prohibition as the progress-hating ideology of the ignorant.
What is depression after all? Based on a lifetime of experience, I would define it as follows: "Depression is the inability to get things done thanks to a seemingly innate feeling that there's no point in trying."
While the depressed are often able to set goals, and even get a good start on them... a gloomy outlook eventually kicks in and says, in feelings rather than words:" "What's the point? Why am I even bothering?" And so the depressed person is often right on the VERGE of accomplishing a great goal, but like an engine that runs out of steam at the top of a hill, there is always an inevitable back-sliding, and always at a point frustratingly close to the goal in view. This is why substances like coca wine are godsends: not because they "do all the heavy lifting," as the moralist and the materialist might complain. No. Far from it. These mood enhancers merely "egg on" the depressed in the positive direction that they were already going before a kind of primordial gloom kicked in and told them to "hang it up." Substances like coca shush that negative voice and replace it with a positive one, and this is why they are godsends: not because they create happiness but rather because they make it possible. And how? By silencing the counselor of despair that lives inside the depressed personality.
This is not to say that coca can only benefit the pathological. The sober mind is never at the top of its game when it comes to mental focus and staying power; it therefore makes perfect sense that every 19th-century writer worth his quill was drinking coca wine, especially since the uninquisitive west was not exactly scouring the planet in the 1800s for alternative psychoactive substances with similar mind-enhancing qualities.
But to paraphrase Marc Anthony, "I come not to praise coca but to bury the idiotic ideology of prohibition," thanks to which we have to forego the endless godsends that have been mentioned and/or hinted at above. And why do we have to do without these enormous potential benefits? Because of the anti-scientific and clearly religious belief of prohibitionists that psychoactive substances can have no valid uses for anybody, anywhere, ever.
Author's Follow-up: March 4, 2024
Let's be honest. By the same rationale stated above, it is clear that a drug like cocaine (as opposed to coca itself) can be a godsend for certain individuals, those for whom that negative voice is particularly ominous and omnipresent. This is common psychological sense. This is why I am always disappointed when I read drug-savvy people dissing cocaine, like Terence McKenna8, Alexander Shulgin9 and Andrew Weil10. I find that attitude extremely presumptuous. It's like these luminaries do not personally perceive the need for a kick-in-the-butt motivator like cocaine, and so they conclude that no one else should need it either, and that one is actually "faking it" when they use such drug.
But this is like saying,
"I do not need extra adrenalin in my life, so adrenalin shots should not be needed by anyone, even to get their heart pumping again. It's not a REAL11 help for them, after all, it is all just artificial."
That attitude not only makes no sense, but it would result in deaths if put into practice in the real world. And such an attitude is just as absurd when it comes to psychoactive drugs.
Besides, when you tell me that cocaine is no good, what exactly are you saying? At what dose is it no good? At every dose and in every possible situation? Really? How do you know that, exactly? Is there really not one imaginable case in which it might actually do more good than evil? Would you not even give the drug to a potential suicide, someone who is so overwhelmed with negative thoughts that they really want to die? Is it really better for a person to kill themselves than to risk using cocaine?
You see what's going on here? Folks like Weil and company are behaving just like Drug Warriors when it comes to drugs like cocaine: they agree with the prohibitionists that psychoactive drugs can be voted "up" or "down" without regard for the reasons or context of use. If cocaine is bad for a 19-year-old hoodlum at UCLA, it must be bad for a severely depressed 49-year-old in Canton, China. This is absurdly anti-scientific and illogical. And it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we vote a substance "down" and then outlaw it, we will never be ABLE to find good uses for the drug-- for the simple reason that it will be henceforth illegal (or at least institutionally discouraged) to look for any such cases. So now good uses will never be found, thus giving the false impression to the hoi polloi that fearmongers are right, that the drug really IS pure evil. For we have decided in advance that science should not be able to find any good uses in a drug like cocaine. It's as if we said: "We feel so strongly about this conclusion, that it should count as a scientific fact simply because we say so." And that is not science at work, it is rather Christian Science, the drug-hating religion of Mary Baker Eddy.
Another word about the presumption of the coke-hating trio mentioned above.
People have a vast range of personalities based on the complicated interplay of nature and nurture. We can imagine a child who is born with all the vocal equipment and genes to become a great opera singer -- that's the nature bit -- however, they happen to be raised in a family in which the parents are very insecure and teach that child timidity and self-doubt -- in a million nonverbal ways. That's the nurture bit.
These kinds of people will need strong medicine if they are to override that negative nurture. Unlike said trio, they did not have the luxury of a supportive -- or at least a neutral -- upbringing, one that would let the child's nature (genetics, predispositions) come to the fore. Once all psychoactive substances are re-legalized, psychedelics may be the drug of choice for them and may help them understand their situation and rise above it. But cocaine is another option that we cannot deny them in rising above their upbringing (so to speak), in transcending those voices of doubt. Cocaine can let them move forward IN SPITE of those silent niggling voices. In a sane world, the stymied opera star would have cocaine as a legal choice. And folks like Andrew Weil and company would not be able to veto such a choice based on their self-righteous and psychologically purblind view that, "Humph! I certainly would never NEED such a drug! Humph!"
Now, the Drug Warrior always spreads the lie that to talk honestly like this is to encourage drug use, but that is the great lie of the Drug War (or at least one of them): the anti-intellectual idea (sadly embraced by the federal government) that it is actually WRONG to talk honestly about drugs.
But Americans are still far from being able to be honest about drugs, for the powers-that-be have yet to even acknowledge the reason why people use psychoactive substances in the first place, namely for self-transcendence -- to be something better than they can be based on their normal "sober" programming." And until we understand the deep and valid psychological reasons for drug use, we can never talk rationally about it -- all we can do is spout Christian Science pieties about drug use being bad. Whereas, in reality, drug use can be just as big a godsend in our PSYCHOLOGICAL lives as it can be in our physical lives, and perhaps bigger.
But it's not just the depressed who suffer from the drug bigotry of cocaine haters. There are people who simply like the kick of cocaine and the experience of being incredibly "in control" as it were under the influence of the drug.
When folks like Alex "sniff" at this and say it's not "real," they are clearly stating a moral belief, not a scientific one. Once we remove all our Drug War prejudices, mere common sense (what used to be Psychology 101) tells us that many people will be very interested in a drug that makes them feel "on top of their game." Indeed, why would they not? Who's going to say, "No, I'd rather NOT be 'on top of my game,' thanks." The question simply is, "Are the risks of this drug worth it?" And that question can only be answered by the potential user, because only he or she knows how much they value the psychological benefits of the drug, so only they can perform a cost-benefit analysis of potential use.
If rock climbing enthusiasts are deciding whether to start "free climbing" (i.e., ascending a rockface without the help of climbing gear), their choice cannot be made by a third person who knows nothing of the climbers' ambitions and desires in life. Only the rock climbers themselves can decide if the heightened risk of free climbing makes sense for them given the kind of life that they want to lead and the goals that they want to accomplish. This is common sense for us when it comes to almost every other popular risky activity imaginable, but common sense flies out the window when "drugs" are involved and we think that basic common sense no longer applies. Indeed, if a free climber dies while climbing, the takeaway message is usually: "Well, at least they died doing something they really wanted to do." Whereas if a drug user dies, we consider it a knockdown argument for the drug to be demonized (for all purposes and all uses) around the globe.
Cocaine haters are basically making a moral claim: they are saying that we SHOULD lead a life a la Aristotle, always looking for the golden mean, and that excess of any kind is bad. This is, in fact, the metaphysic behind the federal government's century-long campaign to demonize cocaine -- and to KEEP IT demonized. It has nothing to do with public health; it's all about forcing Americans to adopt a certain predictable and non-confrontational "way of being in the world," a way in which Americans are psychologically defanged and so more ready to follow than to lead. The federal government wants Americans to live a calm Apollonian lifestyle rather than adopting the ecstatic Dionysian lifestyle championed by Friedrich Nietzsche. The former is the Christian lifestyle as they see it and they want to outlaw any substance that might empower Americans to live otherwise. It's a war against the empowerment of the Dionysian, it's a war against ecstasy and spontaneity and surprises. (For more on the contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian orientations toward life, see "The Birth of Tragedy" by Friedrich Nietzsche.)
I'm of course not saying that prohibitionists are consciously aware of these motivations: but the ferocity and longevity of the Drug War only makes sense when we postulate this unspoken Christian Science AGENDA on their part.
Author's Follow-up:
October 02, 2025
Freud's big breakthrough was not psychoanalysis12. That was just a breakthrough for academics. His real breakthrough for "patients" was his discovery that cocaine cured depression. This was, of course, something that the burgeoning medical field could not tolerate. They made their money on TREATING conditions like depression, not by curing them. So they focused one-sidedly, only on the rare abuser of cocaine. They threw all the depressed in the world under the BUS!
Most drug pundits are unaware of such facts or ignore them -- hence so much pushback against the Drug War and prohibition is ridiculously shallow.
"My impression has been that the use of cocaine 13 over a long time can bring about lasting improvement..." --Sigmund Freud, On Cocaine14
The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.
I have dissed MindMed's new LSD "breakthrough drug" for philosophical reasons. But we can at least hope that the approval of such a "de-fanged" LSD will prove to be a step in the slow, zigzag path toward re-legalization.
Psychiatrists keep flipping the script. When it became clear that SSRIs caused dependence, instead of apologizing, they told us we need to keep taking our meds. Now they even claim that criticizing SSRIs is wrong. This is anti-intellectual madness.
Outlawing drugs is outlawing obvious therapies for Alzheimer's and autism patients, therapies based on common sense and not on the passion-free behaviorism of modern scientists.
The MindMed company (makers of LSD Lite) tell us that euphoria and visions are "adverse effects": that's not science, that's an arid materialist philosophy that does not believe in spiritual transcendence.
Prohibitionists have blood on their hands. People do not naturally die in the tens of thousands from opioid use, notwithstanding the lies of 19th-century missionaries in China. It takes bad drug policy to accomplish that.
"When two men who have been in an aggressive mood toward each other take part in the ritual, one is able to say to the other, 'Come, let us drink, for there is something between us.' " re: the Mayan use of the balche drink in Encyc of Psych Plants, by Ratsch & Hofmann
The worst form of government is not communism, socialism or even unbridled capitalism. The worst form of government is a Christian Science Theocracy, in which the government controls how much you are allowed to think and feel in life.
"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.
There's more than set and setting: there's fundamental beliefs about the meaning of life and about why mother nature herself is full of psychoactive substances. Tribal peoples associate some drugs with actual sentient entities -- that is far beyond "set and setting."
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