What the Honey Trick Tells us about Drug Prohibition
And why we need to re-legalize cocaine now
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
November 13, 2025
As I was watching some videos on Pranayama breathwork yesterday, I was pestered with occasional advertisements for a so-called "Honey Trick 12 " that was supposed to reverse mental decline in the elderly. The presenter, who had been dolled out as a medical doctor for the nonce, warned us to pay close attention as it was just a matter of time before a jealous Big Pharma "shuts this down," whatever "this" might be. After tolerating about ten seconds of this ostensibly altruistic appeal, I dismissed the advertisement as a scam and clicked the "skip ad" button to return to my Yogic practice. I soon reflected, however, that the advertisement's claims may be based on a half-truth at least, as, for instance, the antioxidant properties of honey might help suppress the formation of the amyloid plaques that cause Alzheimer's Disease, and so I paused my practice again to search for more videos on this so-called "Honey Trick."
I should have been suspicious when the YouTube algorithms served up dozens of short and similar-looking videos on the subject (all with runtimes of under four minutes), but the friendly female faces on the snapshot links suggested that these videos contained disinterested testimonials by everyday housewives, so I took a deep breath and clicked on a few of the proffered mugs (while yet keeping a metaphorical eye on my wallet, of course). To my frustration, however, none of these seemingly altruistic deponents made with the goodies. They sang the praises of naturally-occurring therapies and alluded to the brain-damaging chemicals in the air that we breathe, but they never described the Honey Trick itself nor explained how that protocol in particular would achieve the touted results of stopping -- and even reversing -- age-related mental decline.
Instead, each evangelist closed their peon to the "Honey Trick" by alluding to yet another video which would apparently tell us all that we needed to know on the subject. "Oh, so THAT'S your game, I thought to myself. "These 'disinterested' testimonials of yours are all designed to prep viewers for buying a product of some kind." Again, I returned to my Yogic practice, determined to waste no more time attempting to pry the secret of the Honey Trick from self-interested lips. It was clearly a scam, after all.
I did however stumble across the suggested video later that day. It turned out to be a lengthy infomercial with a script which tantalized the viewers for literally dozens of paragraphs, praising the "Honey Trick" by name while refusing to tell them what it actually was! I had no patience with this obvious advertising ploy and I clicked away. Subsequent research on my part, however, revealed that the infomercial's purpose was to sell a proprietary mix of Himalayan honey and an Ayurvedic plant known as Bacopa monnieri, ostensibly for the purpose of reversing mental decline, a claim which many an indignant science-loving American was actively demonizing online as unproven and deceptive.
Those readers who are unfamiliar with my philosophical approach to drugs will be asking themselves the following question right about now: "What does this have to do with drug prohibition, drug use, and the War on Drugs, etc.?"
To which I respond, everything.
First, consider the irony here. Americans have outlawed a drug that can greatly improve cognition and which cries out for use by those experiencing mental decline. It is called cocaine. There is no mystery about this drug: everybody knows that it works for most people by improving both mood and mentation -- and improving them both dramatically. We know this. Indeed, cocaine is so good at sharpening the mind that Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle made it the drug of choice for his famous detective, who has since become a byword for clear and powerful thinking. Sigmund Freud considered cocaine to be a veritable cure for depression 3. And yet this drug -- just like opium before it -- posed an existential threat to the medical industry. Such drugs actually worked -- and you cannot make a living by curing "illnesses," only by treating them. So they demonized cocaine by studying it only for its negative effects, as if they were to evaluate the use of alcohol by looking only at alcoholics 4. The depressed and the mentally challenged were never asked what THEY thought about the drug. Doctors launched an op-ed campaign to demonize cocaine, without a care in the world for the hundreds of millions of depressed and mentally challenged that they were thereby throwing under the bus!
Now look where we are today, a hundred years after the outlawing of cocaine. It is heart-wrenching to see so many mentally challenged Americans grasping for straws online, looking for something so basic as a drug to help them think straight! You would think that drugs that improve mental function were extremely hard to find, given the viral status of these "Honey Trick" ads, and yet nothing could be further from the truth. Cocaine is available here and now, were we only free to use the naturally occurring alkaloid. What's more, it is only one of many drugs which sharpen the mind, including many of the phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin 56. (I would mention the fact that morphine can dramatically improve mental concentration as well, but American readers are so brainwashed on that subject that I dare only mention this parenthetically while referring the interested reader to my many essays on that topic. 7)
Yet like all of us, the elderly have been brainwashed by the drug-demonizing ideology of substance demonization, so thoroughly that they cannot see a godsend when it is staring them in the face! If they want to fight mental deterioration, they need to stop searching for pie-in-the-sky "cures" from viral videos and begin protesting the drug prohibition which has deprived them of ready-to-hand options in the first place. We do not need mountebanks riding into town offering us new uses for Himalayan honey: we need an organized group of Americans demanding the renewal of their God-given right to take care of their own health as they see fit!
"Imagine how many people would have benefited during the past half-century had the government respected their autonomy and their right to self-medicate." --Jeffrey A. Singer, Your Body, Your Health Care --p. 978
Now, I am not making any claims here for the ability of cocaine to "cure" or "end" diseases like Alzheimer's. I am just pointing out a fact that is somehow too obvious for our behaviorist scientists to understand: the fact that a drug that improves mental focus is an obvious godsend for people who have problems with mental focus 9! Unfortunately, our materialist scientists do not like drugs that simply "work" -- they demand that efficacy be proven under a microscope, and hence they are blind to the needs of real people. Doctors ignore the obvious power of cocaine to increase concentration for the same reason that they ignore the obvious power of laughing gas to cheer up the depressed 10: they insist that a "real" cure must be justified by microscopic chemistry. They would rather that the depressed be sad and that seniors have mental confusion than to have them fix those conditions "unscientifically"! This is why it was a category error to place materialists and behaviorists in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place: they are blind to common sense -- and that blindness has ENORMOUS and TRAGIC consequences, forcing entire generations to suffer totally unnecessarily 1112!
But our philosophical consideration of the "Honey Trick" reveals more than just the fact that the elderly have been brainwashed by the drug-demonizing ideology of substance demonization. There is another aspect to this story to be found in the indignant rhetoric employed by the online critics of this alleged "cure." For, while it may be true that the "Honey Trick" as such is a scam, the protests against its online promotion are problematic in themselves. The protestors clearly worship at the temple of Science, and so they scold the fans of holistic medicine, telling us that this "Honey Trick" of ours is unproven as far as scientists are concerned. The studies have not been performed, the lab rats have not been tested!
This may sound like knock-down criticism at first, until we remember that these same scientists also think that cocaine is "unproven" -- so unproven, indeed, that scientists do not even think it is worth their time to study its potential efficacy in fighting mental decline!
Indeed, a search on "cocaine and Alzheimer's" reveals only hypocritical speculation by scientists about potential downsides of cocaine use, even for the mentally confused-- though even the drug-bashing AI had to admit -- apparently regretfully -- that cocaine use does not seem to cause Alzheimer's Disease. Amazingly then, our scientists see no benefit in fighting mental confusion with a drug that actually fights mental confusion! These are the same scientists who cannot imagine how laughing gas could help the depressed 13. It does not follow therefore that scientists are wrong about the Honey Trick, of course, but it does remind us that the ideas of scientists (and of Americans and their AI) are only as good as the presuppositions upon which they are based. Garbage in, garbage out. Emotion-scorning behaviorism in, heartless drug policies out.
Much is also made of the vested financial interest of those behind the "Honey Trick" promotion, and yet Big Pharma has vested interests of their own. I doubt that the folks at Pfizer and Vertex are losing sleep over the potential impact of Himalayan honey on their bottom line, but that is not because they are happy to have their customers finding real cures for their own complaints. They are sleeping well merely because they know that the "Honey Trick" is, at best, a rearguard effort in the age of the War on Drugs to squeeze some marginal benefits out of the underused class of substances known as antioxidants. Now, if the "Honey Trick" made use of the coca plant, you can bet that those executives would sit up and take notice. They would send out their lobbyists and instruct their advertisers to launch public service ads to slander "the Divine Plant of the Inca. 1415"
This is why I find it hard to get excited about Ayurvedic medicine. The very fact that the drugs in that Hindu pharmacopoeia are legal in America is sufficient proof to me that they do not work -- at least in any glaringly obvious way. A child could tell you that drug prohibition is all about outlawing precisely those drugs that clearly work, thereby keeping the medical industry and politicians in charge and in control of the mind and mood of the American citizen. Now, this is not to say that Ayurvedic medicine is pointless, but it seems to me that it works only to the extent that one makes a lifestyle out of it; it is not going to work in real-time to make a clear difference in mentation or mood -- and even if an Ayurvedic herb were discovered that could do just that, it would be outlawed the moment that the DEA realized that it was providing such a benefit. If drug prohibition is about anything, it is about disempowering Americans when it comes to personal healthcare.
And so we come to the politically incorrect conclusion of this essay:
The American elderly do not need a "Honey Trick" or any other "treatment of the month" created by entrepreneurial YouTubers -- they need access to cocaine, and all other drugs that have the power to improve mental functioning!
AFTERWORD
I have said above that cocaine is an obvious treatment for mental decline. I have also said that it is not necessarily a cure for such decline. However, that latter statement should be qualified. The fact is that we do not know the limits of the human mind when it comes to effecting physical changes in the body and in the brain in particular, in part because we have scorned the use of all drugs that leverage the power of our minds to do just that. And so we have yet to sound the limits of human willpower. As Joseph Glanvill asks in his preface to Ligaea by Edgar Allan Poe:
"Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will." 16
I am not alluding to some mystical doctrine here, but rather to the well-established medical fact that a patient's mental disposition matters. This is what accounts for the many "miracle" cures in hospitals, when a seemingly deadly illness finds its match in the indomitable will of a patient. We can therefore ask with Glanvill, "Who knows the limits of the will when it comes to overcoming mental decline-- especially when that will is bolstered and amplified by the use of a mind-focusing drug like cocaine?" Shakespeare himself realized that "use almost can change the stamp of nature." To what extent then can the routine employment of drug-induced concentration change the brain for the better?
We need not wait for an indomitable will to come along to answer this question -- here is a drug that can help MAKE the will indomitable. It can help focus the mind of a willing human being on a given goal, such as mental focus. In so doing, cocaine may do more than help in a symptomatic way, it may even have the potential to cure in certain cases. Its will-strengthening powers may be just what is needed to tip the balance between pathology and health in the case of progressive brain diseases. The fact that we dogmatically withhold such mind-improving drugs from those going through the hell of mental decline is nothing less than a crime against humanity.
Let's arrest drug warriors, confiscate their houses, and deny them jobs in America -- until such time as they renounce their belief in the demonstrably ruinous policy of substance prohibition.
All drugs have potential positive uses for somebody, at some dose, in some circumstance, alone or in combination. To decide in advance that a drug is completely useless is an offense to reason and to human liberty.
Chesterton might as well have been speaking about the word 'addiction' when he wrote the following: "It is useless to have exact figures if they are exact figures about an inexact phrase."
There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.
It's rich when Americans outlaw drugs and then insist that those drugs did not have much to offer in any case. It's like I took away your car and then told you that car ownership was overrated.
Attention People's magazine editorial staff:
Matthew Perry was a big boy who made his own decisions. He didn't die because of ketamine or because of evil rotten drug dealers, he died because of America's enforced ignorance about psychoactive drugs.
"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau
David Chalmers says almost everything in the world can be reductively explained. Maybe so. But science's mistake is to think that everything can therefore be reductively UNDERSTOOD. That kind of thinking blinds researchers to the positive effects of laughing gas and MDMA, etc.
Just saw a prosecutor gloating about the drug dealers she has taken down. What a joke. How much is she getting paid to play whack-a-mole? RE-LEGALIZE MIND AND MOOD MEDICINE!
The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.
Let's arrest drug warriors, confiscate their houses, and deny them jobs in America -- until such time as they renounce their belief in the demonstrably ruinous policy of substance prohibition.
