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Depressed? Ask Your Doctor if Assisted Suicide is Right for You

Philosophical musings on the strange case of Claire Brosseau

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 16, 2026



I have already written half a dozen essays on the strange case of Claire Brosseau, the depressed Canadian entertainer who wants the state to help her commit suicide, the same state that is denying her all the drugs that might make her want to live.
Depressed woman huddled up under grey blanket on white couch. Text reads: 'Depressed? Ask your doctor if assisted suicide is right for you.'
North Americans are so bamboozled by Drug War lies that we literally would prefer suicide to drug use.


The fact that none of the various "professionals" involved in the case even notices this glaring angle to the issue shows how propaganda and censorship have fried their brains. They now truly seem to believe the enormous demonstrable lie that psychoactive medicines have no positive uses for anybody, anywhere, ever, not at any dose or in any situation. For absent such indoctrination, the question on everybody's sane lips would be: why are we not fighting for Claire's right to the use of the plants of Mother Nature, why are we not fighting for her right to take care of her own health as she sees fit: why, in short, are we not fighting to end drug prohibition on her behalf rather than to help her to kill herself so that she can escape the hell that drug prohibition is forcing her to endure totally unnecessarily?

It seems Claire herself is bamboozled, because she seems to believe that drugs have nothing to offer her -- which is absurd considering that drugs have inspired entire religions and many have the power to elate and inspire in real-time, notwithstanding the self-interested lies of medical doctors who give us their metaphysical spiel about the need for "real" cures: you know, the kinds that turn the "med" user into patients for life. The very idea that drugs cannot help with depression is an enormous self-interested lie of the medical establishment, first promulgated when doctors saw their business model endangered by drugs that really worked, first opium, and then cocaine.


Line of people passing condemned building for 'Beneficial Drugs' -- continuing on to building for Assisted Suicide instead.
Modern drug attitudes are beyond parody. Depressed westerners demand that the state use drugs to kill them, but they don't demand their right to the drugs that could make them want to live.




Let us, however, ignore the fact that drug prohibition is rendering suicide necessary here (at least in the indoctrinated mind of Claire), and let us look at the case in isolation, as do all other pundits on this issue, more's the pity. Even if we assume the big lie here, namely that no drugs could help Claire, there is something ironic about granting the right to die to an ardent activist on that topic. For the mere fact that Claire can function enough to put her cause on the map -- with the drug-bashing New York Times, no less -- and to argue for herself so effectively makes me doubt her need for suicide. What a paradox, in fact: the more powerful her arguments, the more I question whether she really needs such a drastic measure. Of course, in reality it is Claire's decision -- but it can only REALLY be her decision were we to end drug prohibition, and that is not Claire's goal, unfortunately. Instead of fighting for the return of a time-honored right to heal, she is seeking instead for a recherché new right to have the government help her to kill herself -- and this, to repeat, is the same government that is denying her the medicines that could make her want to live!










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Drug use is judged by different standards than any other risky activity in the western world. One death can lead to outrage, even though that death might be statistically insignificant.

"Just ONE HORSE took the life of my daughter." This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.

In an article about Mazatec mushroom use, the author says: "Mushrooms should not be considered a drug." True. But then NOTHING should be considered a drug: every substance has potential good uses.

In a free world, almost all depressed individuals could do WITHOUT doctors: these adult human beings could handle their own depression with the informed intermittent use of a wide variety of psychoactive substances.

Addiction thrives BECAUSE of prohibition, which limits drug choice and discourages education about psychoactive substances and how to use them wisely.

The Hindu religion was inspired by drug use.

It's interesting that Jamaicans call the police 'Babylon,' given that Babylon denotes a society seeking materialist pleasures. Drug use is about transcending the material world and seeking spiritual states: states that the materialist derides as meaningless.

"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda (There would be no Hindu religion today had the drug war been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.)

We live in a make-believe world in the US. We created it by outlawing all potentially helpful psychological meds, after which the number-one cause of arrest soon became "drugs." We then made movies to enjoy our crackdown on TV... after a tough day of being drug tested at work.

Had we really wanted to "help" users, we would have used the endless godsends of Mother Nature and related synthetics to provide spirit-lifting alternatives to problem use. But no one wanted to treat users as normal humans. They wanted to pathologize and moralize their use.


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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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