Amphetamines

Aajonus drew an explicit parallel between amphetamines and the nutritional supplement industry. He said directly that taking speed or Benzedrine is the same thing as taking a supplement, that both operate through adrenal stimulation caused by toxic chemical irritants rather than through genuine nourishment. He extended this comparison to include cocaine, vitamin supplements derived from kerosene-extraction processes, and pharmaceutical medications of all kinds. His position was that the chemistry of the pharmaceutical industry and the chemistry of street amphetamines differ mainly in concentration and dilution, not in their fundamental mechanism. He said about amphetamines generally: "It's just like the chemistry of the pharmaceutical industry. It's just that they use smaller amounts, diluted more, than the pharmaceutical industry."

The supplements comparison was not casual. He described how supplements derived from animal substances or vegetation are processed using kerosene derivatives that the FDA labels food quality. When someone takes such a supplement and feels a lift, he said, they are experiencing kerosene poisoning triggering an adrenal response, not the action of the nutrient they believe they are taking. "Snort cocaine, won't do any more damage than your supplements," he said, making clear that in his assessment, amphetamines and pharmaceutical-grade stimulants sit at roughly the same level of damage as the processed supplement industry, and in some comparisons he suggested supplements could actually be more destructive.

The physiological explanation Aajonus offered for why amphetamines and stimulant drugs produce their effects centers on adrenal gland function. He explained that adrenaline is an extraordinarily concentrated hormone, normally produced only under genuine fight-or-flight conditions. A thousandth of a microgram, he said, can allow a mother to lift a three-thousand-pound car off her child. Cocaine dumps eight times the normal concentration into the bloodstream. Amphetamines, in his framework, work through the same mechanism. The body is not being energized in any productive biological sense; it is being put into an emergency state.

He distinguished this clearly from genuinely energizing substances like raw blood mixed with milk, which he described as giving him the ability to go three days without needing sleep without any of the destructive hormonal distortion, because the energy comes from rich bioavailable nutrients rather than from chemically induced adrenal flooding. The difference in his framework is fundamental: one substance feeds the body and its energy systems directly, while the other tricks the body into burning its emergency reserves.

Aajonus described his own amphetamine use in concrete terms. He was taking Benzedrine because he had chronic fatigue and all kinds of aches, and he had access to a continuous supply through truck drivers he worked alongside. He was simultaneously smoking two and a half packs of Lucky Strikes daily, and he later moved to drinking approximately a fifth of gin at night to sleep, because the stimulants made sleep impossible. He was, by his description, unable to eat, breathe, or move without drugs at that point in his life. His working situation at the time, writing programs and doing systems analysis for the third largest trucking company in the world, demanded sustained high performance that his diseased body could not provide without chemical intervention.

The arc he described was that stimulant use always leads to deterioration. Whatever short-term performance or energy is produced, the body pays for it in destroyed organic tissue. He used the phrase "pay the piper" to describe what happens at the end of the road for people who rely on stimulants, whether those stimulants are cocaine, amphetamines, or supplement-industry products. He said he did it for years and saw where it led.

Aajonus connected the broader category of amphetamine-class drugs to the pharmaceutical industry's management of children diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity. He described four million children in the United States placed on medication because they were diagnosed as ADD or ADHD, and his position was that the vast majority of these children were simply high-activity, sports-oriented people whose bodies produced larger amounts of hormones suited to physical life. He said these children had nothing wrong with them; they required heavy physical activity and sports, not chemical suppression.

His reading of the pharmaceutical industry's interest was explicit: a hyperactive child who can be convinced to need medication becomes a drug user for life. He described a ten-year-old girl brought to him in Chicago by her parents, whose iris analysis showed she was a naturally high-hormone, athletic type. He said the pharmaceutical industry knows this and uses the medical establishment to convert natural physical energy into a lifelong pharmaceutical dependency. The medications used for this purpose, in his framework, belong to the same chemical category as amphetamines and speed, substances that work by manipulating adrenal and hormonal output rather than by addressing any underlying nutritional or physiological need.

While amphetamines were the most personally autobiographical reference point, Aajonus used cocaine frequently as the clearer illustration of what stimulants do because cocaine's effects are more dramatic and quantifiable. He said cocaine raises adrenaline to eight times the normal fight-or-flight level. He described cocaine as destructive to every tissue in the body. He discussed crack cocaine as worse still, and methamphetamine, which he described as involving four to five types of detergents, kerosene, ammonia, and other abrasive chemicals in its production, as catastrophically destructive. He described one patient who had used methamphetamine for ten years, a twenty-seven-year-old woman whose entire vaginal area had become completely dry and hard, producing no mucus. The description was offered as an illustration of what happens to tissue when it is subjected to years of the chemical assault that stimulants, in his framework, represent.

He also noted that he had treated patients who had used cocaine and that recovery takes substantially longer. His assessment from iridology practice was that cocaine drug storages in the body are a factor that can double the estimated time needed for cellular recovery on the Primal Diet. He told practitioners to take prior cocaine use into account when estimating how long it would take a patient to genuinely heal.

Aajonus cited information from a psychologist and psychiatrist in San Diego who showed him data indicating that eighty-two to eighty-six percent of people diagnosed with crack cocaine addiction had been on Ritalin as children. He described this as a direct connection, the pharmaceutical management of children's high activity with amphetamine-class drugs creating a template for later illicit stimulant addiction. He connected this pattern explicitly to his own son, who was placed on psychotropic medication at six years old and who, at forty-two, continued to cycle in and out of crack cocaine addiction and incarceration. His analysis was that the medical profession taught his son to regulate behavior with drugs, and when pharmaceutical sources were unavailable, street sources replaced them.

Aajonus's general guidance on recovering from prior drug use, including amphetamines, was to follow the specific protocols described in "We Want to Live," looking up whatever chemicals are in the drug in question and working through what foods help extract those particular substances from the system. He did not provide a single universal formula for amphetamine detoxification in the source passages available, but he described the general principle as identifying which chemical byproducts are stored in the tissue and using appropriate raw fats, raw proteins, and in some cases fermented foods to facilitate their removal.

He acknowledged that prior drug use extends recovery timelines considerably. His rule of thumb was that cocaine use could nearly double the recovery time on the Primal Diet. Amphetamines and other stimulants would fall into a similar extended-recovery category, because the chemical residues stored in tissue have to be dissolved and eliminated before the cellular rebuilding process can proceed effectively. He described drug storages as a very slow process to clear and told people to think of the body like a castle being rebuilt stone by stone, where existing structure has to be maintained while rebuilding occurs simultaneously.