Just watched an episode of Air Disasters in which two pilots flew their small passenger jet into the ground in final approach to the Durango, Colorado airport. The cause of the crash? Well, if the show's narrator is to be believed, it was cocaine.
It turns out the pilot had been up late the night before the accident, at which time he was partying with a girlfriend and "doing" cocaine -- a scene that the documentary luridly re-creates with blurred video and leering conspiratorial visages.
But was the accident really caused by cocaine?
Of course not. Had the pilot been drinking the night before, it would not have been caused by alcohol either.
The crash was caused by the pilot's lack of sleep, which was in turn caused by the pilot's irresponsible decision to stay up all night partying.
But given the sloppy thinking of the Drug War mentality, the show's writers feel justified in concluding that cocaine caused the plane crash.
This is a problem, because it tends to justify the War on Drugs. After all, if cocaine causes planes to drop out of the sky, shouldn't we ban it?
The DEA hierarchy must be smiling every time they watch such a documentary, because they know that their jobs are safe for another generation, as Americans continue to be influenced by the logically challenged conclusions of Drug Warrior America.
Of course, we might as well conclude that the plane crash was caused by milk, since it's likely that the pilot imbibed that notorious indigestion-causing substance on the very day of the accident!
But then the National Dairy Association would never let that happen. They're far too savvy when it comes to PR. Remember when it was discovered that 30% of milk drinkers experienced gastrointestinal problems when consuming that beverage? The product wasn't exactly pulled from the shelves, was it? Instead, the Dairy Association successfully blamed the problem on the milk drinkers themselves, insisting that they were lactose intolerant and that the product itself was just fine, thank you very much. Of course, if I put out a product that sickened 30% of my customers, I'd be hauled off to jail -- but not so the Dairy Association.
Thus whom we blame for our country's ills depends on politics rather than on a rational evaluation of the facts at hand, and nowhere is this more true than in the case of Richard Nixon's bigoted, know-nothing Drug War.
Cocaine Users, before and after Drug War propaganda...
If you search the term "cocaine" on the site of a stock photo company such as Shutterstock, you'll be bombarded with photographs of white powder sprinkled around blood-covered money with a revolver lying nearby for good measure. This is all Drug War propaganda designed to villainize a substance that posed a threat to Big Liquor. The coca plant has been used historically by South American peoples for ages. Writers and musicians used coca wine religiously, including HG Wells, Jules Verne, Henrik Ibsen. Freud considered cocaine to be a godsend for depression 12 . Hundreds of millions go without blessed relief today because self-interested doctors decided to judge the drug by its worst possible use, exactly as if they were to judge alcohol by only looking at alcoholics. They thereby threw a world of depressed people under the bus-- denied them the right to heal. They then acquired them as patients for life by shunting them off onto Big Pharma drugs that caused lifelong dependency 3 .
Author's Follow-up:
October 29, 2025
I was recently browsing Board Game Arena and I came across a game called Sky Team 4. The website describes it as a cooperative game "in which you play a pilot and co-pilot at the controls of an airliner." The players take turns rolling dice and placing them on spaces with names like "engines," "landing gear," "brakes," and so forth. The values of the dice determine the performance of the plane in the relevant categories. The goal is to keep the plane "in trim" during flight and to land safely in the seventh and final round. Now, I'm not a pilot, but I play one in my dreams, so I made a note of this board game, resolving to introduce it to my sister on our next virtual game night. Scarcely had I placed the sticky note on my laptop, however, when I noticed a number of coffee-cup icons in the rule book. I immediately became intrigued... and a little suspicious. What are coffee-cup icons doing in a game about flying a plane? I would not want MY pilot to have the jangled nerves of a caffeine junkie! I thought the FAA required a drug-free cockpit these days!
So thinking, I scanned the rule book for an explanation -- meanwhile muttering to myself, "Coffee cup, indeed. I want MY pilot to be CLEAN and SOBER, thank you very much..." -- and I soon came across an answer that was to confirm my worst suspicions. It seems there is an optional space on the game board entitled "concentration," and when a player places a die on that spot, they receive... wait for it, folks... A CUP OF COFFEE, after which their concentration score increases by one point.
Talk about a stealth drug! Coffee flies right past the drug-testing lab as the manager tells his employees: "Oh, that's good old Charlie! EVERYBODY knows Charlie! Let him pass!"
Talk about the power of advertising (aka propaganda)! The coffee industry did not sit idly by as they watched the drug hysteria of the last half-century. They launched an advertising campaign designed to indemnify their cash cow against the demonization of Drug Warriors. They spent billions of dollars over the years on a campaign to associate coffee with tradition, patriotism, apple pie, motherhood, fatherhood, you name it 5. In the game Sky Team, players are encouraged to use drugs on the job. Their score improves as they consume more caffeine. Conclusion: We see the benefits to substance use the second that we stop referring to those substances as drugs.
And it worked – to put it mildly. Not only has caffeinated coffee drinking become normalized in America, but coffee is no longer even considered to be a drug. That is why the producers of Sky Team felt free to sneak a coffee cup into the cockpit: because they knew that the brainwashed public would be completely blind to the irony of their doing so.
Speaking of air disasters...
The passengers of Comair 5191 might be alive today had their two pilots been using cocaine on the morning of August 27, 2006 6. Maybe then the drowsy duo would have noticed the clearly marked fact that they were taking off on the wrong runway. There was a reason why Arthur Conan Doyle made cocaine the drug of choice for the most perceptive detective in the world. He knew that cocaine focused the mind and allowed the user to notice important details, skills that were sadly lacking in the all-too-sober crew of the doomed flight. And so they plowed their jet down a runway that was little more than half the required length for takeoff, resulting in the deaths of 49 passengers and crew.
In an ideal world, the NTSB accident report would have concluded as follows:
"The accident is the result of excessive sobriety on the part of the pilots and their consequent inability to focus sufficiently on the tasks at hand."
Getting off antidepressants can make things worse for only one reason: because we have outlawed all the drugs that could help with the transition. Right now, getting off any drug basically means becoming a drug-free Christian Scientist. No wonder withdrawal is hard.
In fact, there are times when it is clearly WRONG to deny kids drugs (whatever the law may say). If your child is obsessed with school massacres, he or she is an excellent candidate for using empathogenic meds ASAP -- or do we prefer even school shootings to drug use???
"Dope Sick"? "Prohibition Sick" is more like it. The very term "dope" connotes imperialism, racism and xenophobia, given that all tribal cultures have used "drugs" for various purposes. "Dope? Junk?" It's hard to imagine a more intolerant, dismissive and judgmental terminology.
We should not be talking about the potential harm of drugs -- we should be talking about the well-established harm of drug PROHIBITION.
They drive to their drug tests in pickup trucks with license plates that read "Don't tread on me." Yeah, right. "Don't tread on me: Just tell me how and how much I'm allowed to think and feel in this life. And please let me know what plants I can access."
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
America is an "arrestocracy" thanks to the war on drugs.
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.
Harm Reduction is not enough. We need Benefit Production as well. The autistic should be able to use compassion-enhancing drugs; dementia patients should be able to use drugs that speed up and sharpen mental processes.
We won't know how hard it is to get off drugs until we legalize all drugs that could help with the change. With knowledge and safety, there will be less unwanted use. And unwanted use can be combatted creatively with a wide variety of drugs.
If you search the term "cocaine" on the site of a stock photo company such as Shutterstock, you'll be bombarded with photographs of white powder sprinkled around blood-covered money with a revolver lying nearby for good measure. This is all Drug War propaganda designed to villainize a substance that posed a threat to Big Liquor. The coca plant has been used historically by South American peoples for ages. Writers and musicians used coca wine religiously, including HG Wells, Jules Verne, Henrik Ibsen. Freud considered cocaine to be a godsend for depression 1 2 . Hundreds of millions go without blessed relief today because self-interested doctors decided to judge the drug by its worst possible use, exactly as if they were to judge alcohol by only looking at alcoholics. They thereby threw a world of depressed people under the bus-- denied them the right to heal. They then acquired them as patients for life by shunting them off onto Big Pharma drugs that caused lifelong dependency 3 .
I was recently browsing Board Game Arena and I came across a game called Sky Team 4. The website describes it as a cooperative game "in which you play a pilot and co-pilot at the controls of an airliner." The players take turns rolling dice and placing them on spaces with names like "engines," "landing gear," "brakes," and so forth. The values of the dice determine the performance of the plane in the relevant categories. The goal is to keep the plane "in trim" during flight and to land safely in the seventh and final round. Now, I'm not a pilot, but I play one in my dreams, so I made a note of this board game, resolving to introduce it to my sister on our next virtual game night. Scarcely had I placed the sticky note on my laptop, however, when I noticed a number of coffee-cup icons in the rule book. I immediately became intrigued... and a little suspicious. What are coffee-cup icons doing in a game about flying a plane? I would not want MY pilot to have the jangled nerves of a caffeine junkie! I thought the FAA required a drug-free cockpit these days! 
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