Cocaine

Aajonus stated plainly that cocaine is destructive to every tissue in the body. The mechanism he described centers on alkaloid content. Cocaine is, in his framework, very heavily loaded with alkaloids, and those alkaloids carry and concentrate heavy metals in the body. He described the heavy metal burden from cocaine as severe enough to cause systemic poisoning that works progressively through the nervous system, the teeth, and the organs.

He observed that the teeth of people with a cocaine history turn gray, which he attributed to the heavy metals in cocaine penetrating the nervous system and the dentine. He described this process in the context of a broader principle about how heavy metals from various sources, including pharmaceutical tetracycline and diets deficient in calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, and potassium, cause the same gray discoloration of teeth. In the case of cocaine, he said: "Cocaine is very concentrated in those heavy metals. That's why it turns people's teeth gray. It just starts rotting the whole system because it's very heavy in alkaloids."

The alkaloids in cocaine, he explained, force heavy metals into the nervous system rather than allowing them to be buffered or neutralized by minerals. This is the same mechanism he described for tetracycline. People without sufficient calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, and potassium in their diet cannot bind with those metals, so the metals enter the nerves, enter the dentine, and become incorporated into the tissue. The white spots and gray coloration of teeth that appear in cocaine users are, in his reading, toxins discharging from the brain and nervous system outward through the teeth.

He extended this analysis to indigenous populations in South America who chew raw cocaine leaf as a hunger suppressant due to extreme protein deficiency. "Look at the tribes in Colombia which don't have any animals to eat. They eat cocaine leaves raw. It destroys their appetite so they don't experience the hunger. But their teeth rots by the time they're in their mid-thirties." He was explicit that cocaine can make symptoms subside and suppress hunger and even generate a feeling of happiness, but that this does not make it healthful. The ability to alleviate symptoms does not equal nourishment or healing.

Aajonus explained the feeling of energy and wellbeing produced by cocaine through his framework of toxic adrenaline response rather than genuine nourishment. When the body encounters a toxic substance, certain hormones rush into the system. Cocaine causes adrenaline to dump into the bloodstream at approximately eight times the normal amount in a fight-or-flight response. He was specific about this quantity. The person feels high, energized, and pain-free, but this is the result of massive hormonal flooding triggered by the body's alarm response to a poison, not a sign of healing or improved function.

He drew a direct parallel between this mechanism and what happens when people take vitamin supplements extracted with kerosene derivatives. The supplement poisons the body, the adrenaline floods in, and the person thinks they are getting well. "Poisoning the body rushes adrenaline. And that's the high you're getting. You may as well take cocaine, because they're almost as harmful as cocaine." He repeated this comparison in multiple contexts, not to endorse cocaine, but to indict the supplements by placing them on the same level of harm.

He noted that hormones like those in the brain are composed roughly of sixty percent fat, five percent carbohydrates, and thirty-five percent protein. Fat is what harnesses toxins in the body. When the body produces massive quantities of hormones in response to a toxic substance, it is attempting to use those hormone fats to bind and manage the toxicity. The person experiences this as elevated energy and a sense of being healthier, when in fact the body is in a state of crisis management.

One of Aajonus's most direct and repeated comparative statements was that snorting cocaine does less damage than consuming kerosene, and that most vitamin supplements contain kerosene residues from the extraction process. He said this explicitly: "You do less damage by snorting cocaine than you would by eating kerosene. So if you've taken supplements, any form, natural supplement, you have kerosene to deal with in your body."

The reasoning was that solvents used to extract vitamins from plant or animal material are typically kerosene derivatives, and these residues remain in the final supplement product. The FDA, he argued, labels these solvents as food grade, but that designation does not make them safe. He extended this logic to processed soy, describing how it is soaked in a kerosene derivative during processing, and asked whether anyone would eat an apple soaked in kerosene for six hours. He then stated that soy is essentially that, and that the same mechanism of adrenaline excitation and tissue poisoning occurs.

He placed supplements and cocaine on the same spectrum of toxic adrenaline stimulation, distinguishing between healthy highs that come from genuine nourishment and toxic highs that come from the body's emergency response to a harmful substance. "Like I said in the introduction, the lecture part, they are toxic highs. They are not healthy highs. Take cocaine, it's the same thing and probably not quite as harmful as cocaine, processed cocaine, but close depending upon what the cocaine has been cut with. Just like depending on what the vitamin has been extracted with."

He acknowledged that some people can live a long time on cocaine and that individual tolerance and life choices vary. He cited Jack Nicholson as an example of someone who lived on cocaine and seemed to enjoy every minute of it, adding that he did not begrudge anyone that choice, but that the biological cost is real and cumulative.

Aajonus treated crack cocaine as categorically more damaging than powder cocaine. His primary objection was to the chemical composition of the production process rather than simply the concentration of cocaine itself. Crack cocaine is manufactured using a combination of four to five types of detergents, kerosene, ammonia, and other abrasive industrial chemicals. Every ingredient used to produce the crystal form of cocaine that is smoked is, in his words, completely an abrasive chemical.

He documented the physical consequences through a patient case. A 27-year-old woman came to him after ten years of crack cocaine use. Her entire vaginal area was completely dry and hard, producing no mucus. He presented this as an illustration of the kind of systemic tissue damage that results from a decade of exposure to the chemical compounds involved in crack cocaine, not merely the cocaine alkaloids themselves but the full spectrum of industrial solvents and cleaning agents that remain in the finished product.

He drew the same parallel for crystal methamphetamine, which he described as made from cleaning compounds and janitorial chemicals, including ammonia. He observed that with patients who had used crystal meth, you could see the cleaning fluids and ammonia compounds beginning to discharge through the skin. Crack cocaine and crystal meth occupied the same category in his framework: substances manufactured from industrial chemicals that introduce multiple layers of toxicity beyond whatever pharmacological effect the active compound produces.

Aajonus drew an explicit connection between childhood Ritalin use and adult crack cocaine addiction, citing two separate statistics from different sources. One psychologist and psychiatrist in San Diego, holding both doctoral degrees, provided him a report showing that 82 to 86 percent of people diagnosed as addicted to crack cocaine had been on Ritalin as children. In a separate reference, he cited a figure of 78 percent with the same connection. He presented these figures not as exact scientific citations but as evidence of a pattern he considered well-established and deliberately suppressed.

His analysis was that Ritalin teaches children to regulate their behavior and emotional state through a pharmaceutical substance. When that pharmaceutical is not available, the child, now an adult, seeks the same regulatory effect from street drugs. He described his own son as a direct example of this trajectory. His son was put on Ritalin at six years old. He is 42 years old at the time Aajonus described him, has been in and out of jail repeatedly, cycles on and off the Primal Diet, and every time he leaves the diet for six months to nine months he returns to crack cocaine use and re-enters the criminal justice system.

Aajonus was unambiguous about where he placed responsibility: "They taught him to control his behavior with drugs, and if he doesn't get them from the medical profession, he'll get them from the street." He framed this not as a moral failing of his son but as a predictable consequence of pharmaceutical training in childhood. He also noted a political dimension, stating that the Bush family was involved in running cocaine into the United States during the period when his son became addicted, though he did not develop this claim in clinical detail.

His son's case also demonstrated one of Aajonus's central claims about the diet and addiction: when his son was fully on the Primal Diet, he had no crack addiction. None. The desire went away entirely. The problem was maintaining the diet when embedded in a social and legal environment that made access difficult and created cycles of incarceration and street exposure. The diet, when maintained, resolved the addiction without withdrawal treatment or pharmaceutical intervention.

Aajonus's broader position on addiction was that for most people, adopting the Primal Diet causes addictions to resolve naturally and without deliberate effort. He stated that most people on any kind of addiction find that when they go on the diet, the addiction easily and naturally goes away. He attributed this to the body receiving genuine nourishment that meets the biochemical needs that the addictive substance was approximating or suppressing.

He noted one exception from his clinical experience: a woman who had been one hundred percent on the diet for three years and still maintained a cigarette addiction, and who was only just beginning to consider quitting at the time he described her. He presented this as unusual enough to be worth mentioning specifically.

For cocaine users, recovery through the diet takes longer than for people without drug histories. He estimated that a person with a cocaine history should approximately double the standard recovery timeline. His framework for calculating recovery was based on the percentage of living cells in the body and the degree of accumulated toxicity. A person in their late twenties with otherwise reasonable cellular health might take twenty years to reach optimal condition under the Primal Diet. If that person has cocaine storage in their tissues, the timeline extends considerably, because the stored cocaine compounds must be cleared before healthy tissue can fully regenerate in those areas.

Chemotherapy history extends the recovery timeline by a factor of two and a half, and some chemotherapy patients may not fully recover at all. Cocaine history does not carry that level of severity, but it is serious enough to nearly double the expected timeframe, and Aajonus was direct with patients about this so they could calibrate their expectations.

In his book "We Want to Live," Aajonus listed specific foods that bind with cocaine residues, including Novocain, and help remove them from the body. The food he specified for this purpose is avocados. Avocados appear in the same category as aspirin in his binding and removal protocol, suggesting that their fat content and specific chemical properties allow them to attract and escort these particular compounds out of the tissue.

He also described a broader drug detoxification diet in the book, involving alternating raw fatty beef and fresh oranges, eaten only when the stomach is completely empty, waiting until the stomach growls before eating each component. This protocol is designed so that drugs stored in the body are dumped into the stomach and can be arrested there. Eating during the dump phase, or mixing beef and oranges before one has fully digested, causes indigestion, increases nausea, and can cause vomiting. He noted that vomiting is actually beneficial in this context and is the quickest and easiest way for the body to eliminate drugs once they have dumped into the stomach. Blood and urine analyses after a six-week version of this protocol showed large quantities of drugs being expelled from the body.

For drugs in general, smoothies made with raspberries were listed as supportive. Amphetamines and caffeine are addressed with carob powder, raw kefir, and unheated honey. These are listed separately from cocaine in his reference tables, indicating that he considered the binding chemistry to be compound-specific rather than generic.

Aajonus presented one of his clearest examples of protective fat function in the context of a man who had used cocaine, speed, and methadone for approximately twenty-seven years while also drinking alcohol almost daily. When Aajonus examined this man, his internal organs were clean. His liver and pancreas were functioning well. His skin and connective tissue were damaged, and his lymph system was worn. But internally he appeared to be thirty years old or younger, despite being in his early fifties.

The explanation was body fat. This man had been three hundred pounds for twenty-seven years. His height was five feet nine inches. Aajonus's reading was that the large volume of fat in his body had continuously absorbed the cocaine, alcohol, and other drug compounds before they could penetrate and damage the internal organs. The fat acted as a buffer, sequestering the toxins and releasing them slowly through the skin and connective tissue, which bore the visible signs of damage, rather than allowing them to accumulate in the liver, pancreas, or other vital organs.

He stated: "Even bad fat protects you from the toxins that are in the body." The fat did not need to be pristine or metabolically ideal to perform this protective function. Its sheer volume was sufficient to intercept the chemical load. This man lost approximately two hundred and sixty-five pounds in the first four to five months after starting the Primal Diet, a rate of change Aajonus described as remarkable, and as that fat released it carried the stored drug compounds with it, primarily through the skin.

Aajonus placed cocaine within a spectrum of stimulants that all operate through the same fundamental mechanism of toxic adrenaline excitation. Coffee, nicotine, alcohol, Benzedrine, speed, supplements, and cocaine all produce a charge by forcing the body's stress response systems into action. He had personal experience with most of these from his own history of addiction before discovering the Primal Diet. He consumed Benzedrine, eleven cups of coffee daily, two and a half packs of Lucky Strike non-filter cigarettes daily, and a fifth of gin or bourbon nightly, all simultaneously at peak consumption in his late teens and early twenties.

His position was not that cocaine is the worst substance in this category, but that all of these substances operate on the same principle and exact a cumulative biological cost. "Sure, some people will get high and have lots of energy but it's a healthful energy. Will it promote better condition? Will it make them happier? Some people will. Some people can live a whole life on cocaine and drugs." He was not absolutist about the outcome for every individual, but he was consistent that the body pays the cost eventually. "Down at the end of the road, what happens? You pay the piper. Because you've destroyed a lot of organic tissue."

He made a specific distinction between cocaine and heroin in terms of their adrenaline effects. Cocaine causes adrenaline to spike to approximately eight times the normal level. Heroin does the opposite, keeping adrenaline flat or lowering hormonal levels. Most drugs and supplements produce the elevated adrenaline response rather than the suppressive one, which is why most of them produce a feeling of energy and heightened function that people mistake for health.

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