Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs

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Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 20, 2023

A friend of mine told me yesterday that he believed we should have the right to assisted suicide in cases in which pain has grown unbearable.

I told him I agreed with him, sort of, but...

Assisted suicide is just like shock therapy and antidepressant use: it cannot be discussed meaningfully without first acknowledging the role that substance prohibition plays in shaping our views on the topic.

Shock therapy for depression, for instance, makes no sense whatsoever in a society that outlaws hundreds of godsend medicines (natural and synthetic) that could make the depressed happy without damaging one's brain ¹. Indeed, it shows a kind of Nazified ² Christian Science materialism ³ to fry the brain ⁴ of the depressed ⁵ (while they bite down on a stick) in preference to letting the 'patient' use the plant medicines that grow at their very feet, or in preference to letting them use laughing gas , or in preference to letting them chew the coca leaf, or in preference to letting them use any of the hundreds of godsend mind-opening synthetics formulated by Alexander Shulgin0054.

Surely American society is clinically ill for legislating such a cruel state of affairs.

Likewise, the use of dependency-forming anti-depressants makes no sense in a world in which we have outlawed hundreds of godsend pick-me-ups that cause far less (or even no) dependence and which inspire rather than tranquilize.

Yet psychiatric pundits continue to this day to laud shock therapy ⁶ and anti-depressant use ⁷, as if the Drug War does not exist and such therapies were the only conceivable way to treat depression: that is, either by damaging the brain of the depressed or else by tranquilizing them until they no longer complained of their situation in life, meanwhile turning them into a lifetime ward of the healthcare state.

For the same reason, it makes no sense to discuss assisted suicide in the abstract, without first acknowledging the role that prohibition plays in shaping our views on the topic.

For the fact is that most people would not need assistance to commit suicide if prohibition were ended. A large dose of morphine could dispatch the user peacefully. Seen in this light, one wants to ask, why should we ask for the assistance of bureaucrats or medical staff to exercise such a supposed right?⁸

The question is: when should a reasonable person believe that it is no longer worthwhile to live? After how much pain, for instance? After what dreary prospects?*

Yes, this must be a personal decision, but it should also be a fully informed decision, based on the fullest possible leveraging of the power of uncensored psychoactive medicine to help one endure, psychologically speaking, if not to thrive. The suicidal should know what's possible, not simply in the physical realm, but in the mental - and they can only know that once we start learning about psychoactive medicines rather than demonizing them.

The fact is, we do not know how much a human being can bear because we have never actively researched the psychoactive medicines that could help them to buck up, become more insightful, to see life (and pain) in a new way, etc. We know that morphine can give the intellectually inclined user a deep appreciation of Mother Nature. We know that Ecstasy can give the callous a feeling of love for their fellow human being.

We know that opium ⁹ can provide metaphorical dreams in which tooth pain, for instance, can be objectified as the pounding of the sea and thus separated from the sufferer's own experience, essentially turning them into one of those legendary mountain-dwelling yogis with astonishing mental powers ¹⁰.

So, yes, we should have the right to 'assisted suicide' - but only in a world in which we have leveraged the mind-improving power of psychoactive medicine to the hilt - and we cannot do this until we renounce our nature-hating materialist outlook and start seeking out the endless wise and safe uses of psychoactive substances - though not with the help of those reductionist scientists who brought us the psychiatric pill mill ¹¹ . Instead, we need what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths to whom any human on earth can resort ¹² (humans, mind, not 'patients'), not just to treat supposed pathologies like depression but simply in order to make sure that one is living the life that they desire, and not the life that Mary Baker Eddy would have them lead according to her drug-hating religion known as Christian Science.

My friend countered that some folks may not want to use morphine - and that's fine. Indeed, some pain is beyond the power of morphine ¹³ to overcome. But my point is that the suicidal should have all sorts of pharmacological options available to them from the world of psychoactive medicine: hundreds of medicines, for surely a drug-using American is better than a dead American (and sometimes MUCH better) - and yet right now the suicidal have almost zero pharmacological options thanks to the materialistic and puritanical mindset of modern prohibitionists - those who, not content to kill Latinos in Latin America, are just as happy to make sure that suicidal Statesiders have as little to look forward to as possible.

*The endurance level of human beings is fantastically variable, even without the help of psychoactive medicine. There's the case of a former editor of Elle magazine who suffered locked-in syndrome and full-body paralysis and yet, instead of choosing suicide, wrote an entire book about his situation by blinking his eye in such a way as to dictate the text.

Author's Follow-up: April 21, 2023

follow-up on essay by the Drug War Philosopher

Prohibitionists will say that I'm 'glorifying drugs ¹⁴,' but unlike them, I'd rather see a suicide ¹⁵ risk addiction and arrest than to kill themselves. Moreover these risks, both of addiction and arrest, are products of the Drug War, not of drugs. And a person can stage a comeback from addiction -- at least if Mother Nature is free again and we leverage her mind-healing powers to the hilt -- whereas no one has yet staged a comeback from suicide ¹⁶.

Author's Follow-up: January 30, 2024

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

Even when effective psychoactive drugs are still technically legal, psychiatrists never think of employing them, partly due to the stigma that is attached to them thanks to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization and partly thanks to a materialist dogma which tells them they must treat 'the real problem,' not merely make the client happy -- which in practice means a laborious, lengthy, expensive and failure-prone process. Moreover such therapists completely ignore the therapeutic value of happiness -- and anticipation of happiness -- that drug use can provide, not to mention the virtuous circle that this can create: drug use increases happiness and contentedness, which increase one's performance levels in life, which increases one's happiness, etc. Depression is stubborn in the States only because therapists are blind to common-sense psychology.

For even though most psychoactive drugs have been outlawed, there are still a few that the DEA has yet to deprive us of: like laughing gas and coca wine -- although the DEA's job appears to be to remove every decent mind improving drug from the market -- and indeed, as I write, the feds are trying to treat laughing gas ¹⁷ as a 'drug' -- which means a politically damned substance.

Author's Follow-up:

April 20, 2025

Speaking of glorified drug use, streaming channels are full of Jim Beam commercials, purposefully targeted at young people.

Materialism

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Notes:

1: How Scientific American reckons without the drug war DWP (up)
2: Blaming Drugs for Nazi Germany DWP (up)
3: How materialists lend a veneer of science to the lies of the drug warriors DWP (up)
4: Meds fry the brain, not drugs DWP (up)
5: Electroshock Therapy and the Drug War DWP (up)
6: Why Scientists are not qualified to study the effects of DMT DWP (up)
7: Why SSRIs are Crap DWP (up)
8: Euthanasia in the Age of the Drug War DWP (up)
9: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
10: How Scientific American reckons without the drug war DWP (up)
11: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
12: Time to Replace Psychiatrists with Shamans DWP (up)
13: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
14: Glorifying Beneficial Drug Use DWP (up)
15: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
16: Coca Wine DWP (up)
17: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.

If psychoactive drugs had never been criminalized, science would never have had any reason or excuse for creating SSRIs that muck about unpredictably with brain chemistry. Chewing the coca leaf daily would be one of many readily available "miracle treatments" for depression.

Laughing gas inspired the philosophy of William James. Outlawing N20 is outlawing academic freedom. Laughing gas should be available for the suicidal. Drug prohibition is not a victimless crime.

In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.

Prohibitionists have blood on their hands. People do not naturally die in the tens of thousands from opioid use, notwithstanding the lies of 19th-century missionaries in China. It takes bad drug policy to accomplish that.

I hated the show "The Apprentice," because it taught a cynical and hate-filled lesson about the proper way to "get ahead" in the world. I saw Trump as a menace back then, long before he started declaring that American elections were corrupt before the very first vote was cast!

It's disgusting that folks like Paul Stamets need a DEA license to work with mushrooms.

When we place the FDA in charge of deciding whether a psychoactive drug should be re-legalized or not, we are asking them to decide on things like the relative importance of appreciating a sunset, a task for which the FDA has no expertise whatsoever.

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

It is far better to "treat the symptoms" than to irreversibly modify brain chemistry in one particular way based on the theories of a financially-motivated biochemical determinist working for a pharmaceutical company.

Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us

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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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