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Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs



by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher



April 20, 2023



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 brain1. Indeed, it shows a kind of Nazified2 Christian Science materialism to fry the brain of the depressed3 (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 therapy4 and anti-depressant use5, 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?6

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 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 powers7.

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. Instead, we need what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths to whom any human on earth can resort8 (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 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






Prohibitionists will say that I'm 'glorifying drugs,' but unlike them, I'd rather see a suicide 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 suicide9.


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 as a 'drug' -- which means a politically damned substance.




Author's Follow-up:

April 20, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up


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


Materialism






In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James demonstrated how materialists are blind to the depth and meaning of psychological states of ecstasy and transcendence -- or in other words the states that are peculiar to mystics like St. Teresa... and to those who use psychoactive substances like laughing gas. The medical materialist is dogmatically dismissive of such states, which explains why they can pretend that godsend medicines that elate and inspire have no positive uses whatsoever:

"To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce."


And so materialist scientists collaborate with the drug war by refusing to see glaringly obvious drug benefits. They acknowledge only those benefits that they believe are visible under a microscope. The Hindu religion would not exist today had materialist scientists held soma to such a standard. But that's the absurd pass to which prohibition eventually brings us in a society wherein materialist science is the new god: scientists are put in charge of deciding whether we are allowed to imagine new religions or not.

This materialist bias is inspired in turn by behaviorism, the anti-indigenous doctrine of JB Watson that makes the following inhumane claim:

"Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic."

According to this view, the hopes and the dreams of a "patient" are to be ignored. Instead, we are to chart their physiology and brain chemistry.

JB Watson's Behaviorism is a sort of Dr. Spock with a vengeance. It is the perfect ideology for a curmudgeon, because it would seem to justify all their inability to deal with human emotions. Unfortunately, the attitude has knock-on effects because it teaches drug researchers to ignore common sense and to downplay or ignore all positive usage reports or historic lessons about positive drug use. The "patient" needs to just shut up and let the doctors decide how they are doing. It is a doctrine that dovetails nicely with drug war ideology, because it empowers the researcher to ignore the obvious: that all drugs that elate have potential uses as antidepressants.

That statement can only be denied when one assumes that "real" proof of efficacy of a psychoactive medicine must be determined by a doctor, and that the patient's only job is to shut up because their hopes and dreams and feelings cannot be accurately displayed and quantified on a graph or a bar chart.





  • A Quantum of Hubris: how know-it-all materialists block scientific progress
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Behaviorism and the War on Drugs: or why doctors and researchers are blind to common sense
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Common Sense and the Drug War: How prohibition and materialistic science work together to turn Americans into babies when it comes to psychoactive medicine
  • Constructive criticism of the MAPS strategy for re-legalizing MDMA
  • David Chalmers and the Drug War: how reductive materialism ruins American healthcare
  • Dogmatic Dullards: why scientists are the slow kids in the class when it comes to drugs
  • Every Day and in every way, you are getting more and more bamboozled by drug war propaganda
  • Five problems with The Psychedelic Handbook by Rick Strassman
  • How AI turned William James into a Drug Warrior: letter to the editors of New Scientist
  • How Bernardo Kastrup reckons without the drug war: a philosophical review of 'Why Materialism is Baloney'
  • How materialists turned me into a patient for life
  • How Scientific Materialism Keeps Godsend Medicines from the Depressed
  • I've got a bone to pick with Jim Hogshire: a philosophical review of 'Opium for the Masses'
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Materialism and the Drug War
  • Materialism and the Drug War Part II: open letter to the Discovery Institute
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart: author of 'Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear'
  • Open letter to Wolfgang Smith: author of 'The Quantum Enigma'
  • Science News Unveils Shock Therapy II: just when you thought it was safe to go back into the insane asylum...
  • The Inhumanity of Drug Prohibition: and its roots in materialist morality
  • The Poorly Hidden Materialist Agenda at Scientific American: in response to the September 2024 issue
  • Unscientific American: the hypocritical materialism of Elon Musk: how sci-fi nerds ignore the healing power of Mother Nature
  • What Can the Chemical Hold?: a review of the paper by Katherine Hendy on Academia.edu
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs: an open letter to a reader
  • William James rolls over in his grave as England bans Laughing Gas: an open letter to Steve Taylor, author of 'The Genius of William James'
  • Without Philosophy, Science becomes Scientism

  • Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths






    In an ideal world, we would replace psychiatrists with what I call pharmacologically savvy empaths, compassionate healers with a vast knowledge of psychoactive substances from around the world and the creativity to suggest a wide variety of protocols for their safe use as based on psychological common sense. By so doing, we would get rid of the whole concept of 'patients' and 'treat' everybody for the same thing: namely, a desire to improve one's mind and mood. But the first step toward this change will be to renounce the idea that materialist scientists are the experts when it comes to mind and mood medicine in the first place. This is a category error. The experts on mind and mood are real people with real emotion, not physical doctors whose materialist bona fides dogmatically require them to ignore all the benefits of drugs under the belief that efficacy is to be determined by looking under a microscope.

    This materialism blinds such doctors to common sense, so much so that it leads them to prefer the suicide of their patient to the use of feel-good medicines that could cheer that patient up in a trice. For the fact that a patient is happy means nothing to the materialist doctor: they want the patient to 'really' be happy -- which is just there way of saying that they want a "cure" that will work according to the behaviorist principles to which they are dedicated as modern-day materialists. Anybody could prescribe a drug that works, after all: only a big important doctor can prescribe something that works according to theory. Sure, the prescription has a worse track record then the real thing, but the doctor's primary job is to vindicate materialism, not to worry about the welfare of their patient. And so they place their hands to their ears as the voice of common sense cries out loudly and clearly: "You could cheer that patient up in a jiffy with a wide variety of medicines that you have chosen to demonize rather than to use in creative and safe ways for the benefit of humankind!" I am not saying that doctors are consciously aware of this evil --merely that they are complicit in it thanks to their blind allegiance to the inhumane doctrine of behaviorism.

    This is the sick reality of our current approach. And yet everybody holds this mad belief, this idea that medical doctors should treat mind and mood conditions.

    How do I know this?

    Consider the many organizations that are out to prevent suicide. If they understood the evil consequences of having medical doctors handle our mind and mood problems, they would immediately call for the re-legalization of drugs and for psychiatrists to morph into empathizing, drug-savvy shamans. Why? Because the existing paradigm causes totally unnecessary suicides: it makes doctors evil by dogmatically requiring them to withhold substances that would obviously cheer one up and even inspire one (see the uplifting and non-addictive meds created by Alexander Shulgin, for instance). The anti-suicide movement should be all about the sane use of drugs that elate. The fact that it is not speaks volumes about America's addiction to the hateful materialist mindset of behaviorism.

    More proof? What about the many groups that protest brain-damaging shock therapy? Good for them, right? but... why is shock therapy even necessary? Because we have outlawed all godsend medicines that could cheer up almost anybody "in a trice." And why do we do so? Because we actually prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than to have them use drugs. We prefer it! Is this not the most hateful of all possible fanaticisms: a belief about drugs that causes us to prefer suicide and brain damage to drug use? Is it really only myself who sees the madness here? Is there not one other philosopher on the planet who sees through the fog of drug war propaganda to the true evil that it causes?

    This is totally unrecognized madness -- and it cries out for a complete change in America's attitude, not just toward drugs but toward our whole approach to mind and mood. We need to start learning from the compassionate holism of the shamanic world as manifested today in the cosmovision of the Andes. We need to start considering the human being as an unique individual and not as an interchangeable widget amenable to the one-size-fits-all cures of reductionism. The best way to fast-track such change is to implement the life-saving protocol of placing the above-mentioned pharmacologically savvy empaths in charge of mind and mood and putting the materialist scientists back where they belong: in jobs related to rocket chemistry and hadron colliders. We need to tell the Dr. Spocks of psychology that: "Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need your help when it comes to subjective matters, thank you very much indeed. Take your all-too-logical mind back to the physics lab where it belongs."

  • Addicted to Addiction: in Drug War USA
  • Addicted to Ignorance: problems with the 'no pain, no gain' school of de-tox therapy
  • Addiction
  • After the Drug War: what a free world would look like
  • After the Drug War part 2
  • Another Cry in the Wilderness: open letter to US Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine
  • Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs
  • Beta Blockers and the Materialist Tyranny of the War on Drugs
  • Brahms is NOT the best antidepressant: A critique of The Emperor’s New Drugs
  • Case Studies in Wise Drug Use
  • Common Sense Drug Withdrawal: an open letter to Austin of the Huachuma Project
  • Declaration of Independence from the War on Drugs
  • Drug Use as Self-Medication
  • Drugs are not the enemy, hatred is the enemy: an open letter to Joshua Falcon, author of Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness
  • Ego Transcendence Made Easy: or how Schopenhauer was reckoning without drugs before it was cool to do so
  • Elderly Victims of Drug War Ideology
  • Four reasons why Addiction is a political term
  • Getting off antidepressants in the age of the drug war: an open letter to Charley Wininger, author of 'Listening to Ecstasy'
  • Goodbye Patient, Hello Client: a new shamanic approach to drug use and mental healing
  • Harold & Kumar Support the Drug War
  • Heroin versus Alcohol: an open letter to Professor Steven Gimbel of Gettysburg College
  • How Cocaine could have helped me
  • How Drug Prohibition Leads to Excessive Drinking and Smoking
  • How Psychiatry and the Drug War turned me into an eternal patient: and what we should do about that
  • How the Drug War Blinds us to Godsend Medicine
  • How the Drug War is a War on Creativity
  • How the Drug War Killed Amy Winehouse
  • How The Drug War Killed Andy Gibb
  • How the Drug War Punishes the Elderly
  • How the Myth of Mental Illness supports the war on drugs: and leads to the preventable suicides of our loved ones
  • How to Unite Drug War Opponents of all Ethnicities: Open letter to Sean McAllister, drug policy reform lawyer
  • Hypocritical America Embraces Drug War Fascism: a warning to any remaining friends of freedom
  • In Praise of Doctor Feelgood: Why psychiatry must become pharmacologically informed shamanism
  • In Praise of Drug Dealers: replacing the modern barbaric treatment of so-called addicts with pharmacologically informed shamanism
  • In Praise of Thomas Szasz
  • Introduction to the Drug War Philosopher Website at AbolishTheDEA.com
  • Let's Hear It For Psychoactive Therapy: as opposed to just Psychedelic Therapy
  • Medications for so-called 'opioid-use disorder' are legion: it's just that we have outlawed them all
  • Open Letter to Dr. Carl L. Hart: author of 'Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear'
  • Open Letter to Erowid: about a misleading 2018 article by Karolina Zieba
  • Open Letter to Gabrielle Glaser: author of 'The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous'
  • Open Letter to Lisa Ling: whose documentary about Chicago violence does not even mention the Drug War!!!
  • Pihkal 2.0: Finding drugs that work for users rather than for pharmaceutical companies
  • Replacing 12-Step Programs with Shamanic Healing
  • Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism: The post that got me banned for life from the Reddit Psychiatry group
  • Science is not free in the age of the drug war: an open letter to The American Council on Science and Health
  • Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms
  • Someone you love is suffering unnecessarily because of the war on drugs
  • Thank God for Erowid: in response to a 2015 Vice article by Adam Rothstein
  • Thank God for Soul Quest: It's time to stop blaming others for the problems caused by drug prohibition
  • THE ANTI DRUG WAR BLOG: combatting drug war propaganda and lies, one post at a time
  • The Drug War and Armageddon: An open letter to Bryan Walsh, author of End Times
  • The Great Philosophical Problem of Our Time
  • The Mother of all Western Biases: an open letter to Science News
  • The Muddled Metaphysics of the Drug War: How modern science helps normalize prohibition
  • The Myth of the Addictive Personality
  • The Origins of Modern Psychiatry: How to create a billion-dollar industry in three easy steps
  • The Philosophical Idiocy of the Drug War
  • The real reason for depression in America
  • Using Opium to Fight Depression: on replacing psychiatry with pharmacologically savvy shamanism
  • What Jim Hogshire Got Wrong about Drugs: a philosophical review of Pills-a-Go-Go
  • Why America's Mental Healthcare System is Insane: and how the work of Alexander Shulgin can inspire us to fix it
  • Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use: how the drug war blinds us to lifesaving medicine
  • Why Louis Theroux is Clueless about Addiction and Alcoholism: like almost every other would-be Drug War reformer on the planet
  • Why Scientists Should Not Judge Drugs: an open letter to a reader




  • Notes:

    1 Quass, Brian, How Scientific American reckons without the drug war, 2023 (up)
    2 Quass, Brian, Blaming Drugs for Nazi Germany, 2022 (up)
    3 Quass, Brian, Electroshock Therapy and the Drug War, 2020 (up)
    4 Quass, Brian, Why Scientists are not qualified to study the effects of DMT, 2023 (up)
    5 Quass, Brian, Why SSRIs are Crap, 2023 (up)
    6 Quass, Brian, Euthanasia in the Age of the Drug War, 2019 (up)
    7 Quass, Brian, How Scientific American reckons without the drug war, 2023 (up)
    8 Quass, Brian, Time to Replace Psychiatrists with Shamans, 2019 (up)
    9 Quass, Brian, Coca Wine, 2024 (up)



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    Some Tweets against the hateful war on drugs

    Drug warriors are too selfish and short-sighted to fight real problems, so they blame everything on drugs.
    "Is cocaine use good or bad?" The question does not even make sense. Cocaine use is a blessing for some, just a little fun for most, and a curse for a few. Just like any other risky activity.
    Simar Bajaj's recent article about marijuana in the NYT is typical of all media coverage about drugs. It criticizes drugs from the viewpoint of materialist science, completely ignoring all glaringly obvious holistic benefits of use. This is pharmacological colonialism.
    It's already risky to engage in free and honest speech about drugs online: Colorado politicians tried to make it absolutely illegal in February 2024. The DRUG WAR IS ALL ABOUT DESTROYING DEMOCRACY THRU IGNORANT AND INTOLERANT FEARMONGERING.
    I don't believe in the materialist paradigm upon which SSRIs were created, according to which humans are interchangeable chemical robots amenable to the same treatment for human sadness. Let me use laughing gas and MDMA and coca and let the materialists use SSRIs.
    The idea that drug use has to be drug abuse is a warped idea of modern times, one that promotes a dark ages when it comes to mind and mood medicine.
    "In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the peyote tells us where to find it." --Antonin Arnaud
    Do drug warriors realize that they are responsible for the deaths of young people on America's streets? Look in the mirror, folks: J'excuse! People were not dying en masse from opium overdoses when opiates were legal. It took prohibition to bring that about.
    America never ended prohibition. It just redirected prohibition from alcohol to all of alcohol's competitors.
    That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.
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    You have been reading an article entitled, Assisted Suicide and the War on Drugs published on April 20, 2023 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)