Claire Brosseau does not need the right to assisted suicide: she needs the right to take care of her own health as she sees fit

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Claire Brosseau does not need the right to assisted suicide: she needs the right to take care of her own health as she sees fit

an open letter to New York Times health reporter Stephanie Nolen

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 21, 2026

Good Day, Stephanie.

I am a 67-year-old chronic depressive, a philosopher, and an expert on antidepressants, insofar as I have been on them for 40 years. This is where I am "coming from" when I politely insist that Claire Brosseau does NOT need assisted suicide but rather that she needs the far more obvious right to take care of her own health as she sees fit. She needs, in other words, an end to the demonstrably deadly policy of drug prohibition.

I have not heard back on my previous letter on this subject, but since Claire's life is at stake, I feel compelled to pester you with a second. Like the previous letter, I have published it on my website at abolishthedea.com.

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.

Letter to Stephanie Nolen, healthcare reporter at The New York Times

As a 67-year-old chronic depressive who is critical of both drug prohibition and the psychiatric pill mill, I am used to being ignored, not only by the media (like Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Science News, Psychology Today, etc.), but by academia and the healthcare establishment as well. And yet I have to pester you a second time about the case of Claire Brosseau since I believe that my failure to do so would make me complicit in the Canadian's totally unnecessary death. I hope that you, for your part, will give my ideas a fair hearing, since I am sure that, like myself, you would not want Claire to make a decision about suicide based on a misleading and/or incomplete understanding of the facts of her own case.

And this brings me to your December 2025 article about the case in question: 'Claire Brosseau Wants to Die. Will Canada Let Her?'¹

Drugs have not failed Claire

First, it is simply not true that "drugs" could not help Claire. Opium is called "the drug of paradise" for a reason. Laughing gas inspires states of bliss that William James characterized as "religious" in his classic work, 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.' The phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin in the 1990s (when the chemist had a brief but highly atypical dispensation to perform drug research without hindrance from the federal government) evoked user reports such as: "More than tranquil, I was completely at peace, in a beautiful, benign, and placid place." And cocaine is a godsend for the majority of the depressed, as Freud well knew, even though the self-interested healthcare industry chose to focus only on the statistically rare misuse of the drug, exactly as if they were to judge alcohol by only studying alcoholics -- thus consigning millions of folks like myself to a lifetime of dependence on underperforming Big Pharma antidepressants that are far harder to kick than heroin ².

So, when you write that Claire had tried "drugs" and that they did not work, this is misleading. It suggests that drugs have been ruled out as an answer for Claire. And yet it is impossible that "drugs" of some kind -- or combination -- could not cheer Claire up, at very least to the point where she no longer thought that suicide was the answer. The human brain is designed to benefit psychologically from drug use: Claire would have to be a space alien to be impervious to all potential psychological benefits of all drugs. Nor do all drugs merely inspire happiness in the abstract, but rather a sense of focus and a spirit of exploration. The drug morphine gives certain educated persons an almost surreal appreciation of Mother Nature, as Edgar Allan Poe demonstrates in his short story entitled "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains." And 19th-century poets used opium to facilitate creativity in what author Richard Middleton described as "a series of quarterly carouses."

Even if we accept the enormous lie of the prohibitionists that potentially addictive drugs can only be used addictively, surely it is better for Claire to be addicted to a drug than for her to be dead -- especially when we consider that 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma drugs which they take every single day of their lives!

I do not know what "drugs" Claire tried and under what circumstances, but given the legal landscape, she probably tried very few indeed, and those under a materialist protocol that made her use the drugs in a sterile medical landscape. She almost surely tried psychedelics, since they are one kind of drug that is slowly slipping through the ideological sieve of the prohibitionists, and yet those drugs are a lousy fit for the deeply depressed since the results are always influenced by the state in which a user begins their journey. She almost certainly did not try cocaine, least of all in a calm and inspiring environment, since North America's laws and attitudes make such use almost unimaginable. She certainly was not taught how to peaceably smoke an opium pipe at night or told how to profit from the nightly inhalation of laughing gas. The co-founder of Johns Hopkins was a daily morphine user, but we can be sure that Claire was not allowed to use morphine in a world where the use of such drugs is on a moral level with murder.

Politically Incorrect Truths about Antidepressants

I am an expert on the subject of antidepressants because I have been on the receiving end of these nostrums for 40 years now. Of course, I am not considered an expert by the healthcare industry and I am told to shut up and take my meds when I complain, but I am an expert nonetheless if experience (whence the word "expert" derives) counts for anything in this life. Indeed, I was "fired" as a patient by my own psychiatrist when I politely questioned why I was placed on Big Pharma drugs that were harder to kick than heroin. Apparently, one should be honest with their psychiatrist about everything except psychiatry itself. But my experience of these drugs has taught me two things that are highly relevant in the Brosseau case: first, that antidepressant drugs cause extreme dependency, and second, that those who get off these drugs entirely after long-term use are subject to severe depression, a depression that is experienced as more severe than the original pathology itself.

I know this from hard experience. My psychiatrist told me that Effexor has a 95% recidivism rate ³ for long-term users (according, he said, to an NIH study), and yet I was determined to get off the drug. I had to hire a compounding pharmacist to create pills for this purpose because the pill maker, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, does not make small doses. Nor could the pharmacist give me any extended-release pills, because they contain a proprietary formula that Wyeth will not allow them to use. Nevertheless, I persevered, and I was glad to find that I could easily reduce the doses during a year of methodical tapering, or so it seemed. I was down from 250mg a day to 10mg a day, however, when I was suddenly hit by the worst depression I had ever experienced in my life, far worse than my original depression. I sat on the stairs. I could not move. Why not? I could find no reason to move. The world was completely black. I sat there for two hours, trying not to go back to my medicine cabinet for a 150mg tablet and thereby lose a year's worth of progress in getting off the drug -- but I finally had to go back. Indeed, I soon found that I could not think straight without taking the drug, as if the Effexor had changed my brain chemistry such that it was now a baseline requirement for functioning in life.

My point here is that antidepressants may have done WORSE than merely fail for Claire, they may be implicated in the severe depression that she is experiencing after their use.

Nor is this the only downside of antidepressants to which my 40 years' of experience has exposed me. I find that my experience on other drugs is altered by the fact that I am on Effexor. I cannot use marijuana anymore because the effects are quite different to those that I encountered before I was using Effexor. The effects are strange but not desirable. My use of Effexor also makes it more difficult for me to profit from psychedelic use. Unfortunately, the mainstream press never covers such concerns, although an outlawed drug would be pilloried to the ends of the earth if it appeared to have the kinds of downsides that I have discovered with the use of Effexor.

My point here again is this: that antidepressants may have done WORSE than simply fail for Claire; they may have ultimately served to strengthen her depression and to render it resistant to a variety of other drug interventions.

Yet, there are thousands of so-called "drugs" in the world (potentially millions when we consider synthetic drugs), and the idea that none of them can work for Claire is not supported either by common sense or by science -- unless science resorts to the metaphysical argument that "drugs" do not "really" work because they do not do so via some recognized biochemical pathway. This, however, is just a way of gaslighting North Americans about the benefits of drugs that have been obvious to Homo sapiens, even without a science degree, since the Paleolithic Age. This is how scientists help to normalize drug prohibition by giving it the imprimatur of "science."

Conclusion

Claire's case is not hopeless. In fact, it is completely treatable! Completely!

This is why Claire and her TRUE friends should be arguing, not for her right to assisted suicide, but for her right to take care of her own health as she sees fit. In other words, Claire and her friends should be calling for an end to the demonstrably deadly policy of drug prohibition!

Sincerely Yours,
Brian Quass

Assisted Suicide for the Depressed

Notes for essay entitled Claire Brosseau does not need the right to assisted suicide: she needs the right to take care of her own health as she sees fit: an open letter to New York Times health reporter Stephanie Nolen:

1: Nolen, Stephanie, and Chloë Ellingson. 2025. “Claire Brosseau Wants to Die. Will Canada Let Her?” The New York Times, December 29, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/health/assisted-death-mental-illness-canada.html. (up)
2: Heroin versus Antidepressants DWP (up)
3: I have been unable to confirm this stat. But the WHO notes clinical recidivism rates for depression ranging from 50% to 85%. Do we count that as a recidivism rate of Effexor? Not when Biopharma is paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget, as reported by John LaMattina in the Sep 22, 2022 edition of Forbes magazine. (up)

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Kids should be taught beginning in grade school that drug prohibition is wrong.

Daily opium use is no more outrageous than daily antidepressant use. In fact, it's less outrageous. It's a time-honored practice and can be stopped with a little effort and ingenuity, whereas it is almost impossible to get off some antidepressants because they alter brain chemistry.

Immanuel Kant wrote that scientists are scornful about metaphysics yet they rely on it themselves without realizing it. This is a case in point, for the idea that euphoria and visions are unhelpful in life is a metaphysical viewpoint, not a scientific one.

We need a few brave folk to "act up" by shouting "It's the drug war!" whenever folks are discussing Mexican violence or inner city shootings. The media treat both topics as if the violence is inexplicable! We can't learn from mistakes if we're in denial.

If opium and cocaine were legal again in America, the healthcare industry would suddenly have to undergo extensive downsizing, as Americans were once again put in charge of their own health.

I'm going to get on the grade-school circuit, telling kids to say no to horses. "You think you can handle horses, kids? That's what Christopher Reeves thought. The fact is, NOBODY can handle horses!!!"

Anyone who has read Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin knows that the drug warriors have it exactly backwards. Drugs are our friends. We need to find safe ways to use them to improve ourselves psychologically, spiritually and mentally.

We deal with "drug" risks differently than any other risk. Aspirin kills thousands every year. The death rate from free climbing is huge. But it's only with "drug use" that we demand zero deaths (a policy which ironically causes far more deaths than necessary).

We're living in a sci-fi dystopia called "Fahrenheit 452", in which the police burn thought-expanding plants instead of thought-expanding books.

Kids should be taught in grade school that prohibition is wrong.

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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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Claire Brosseau does not need the right to assisted suicide: she needs the right to take care of her own health as she sees fit

an open letter to New York Times health reporter Stephanie Nolen

Assisted Suicide for the Depressed

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend