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Elizabeth, I'm comin' to join ya!

How the Claire Brosseau case almost gave me a coronary

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 17, 2026



I have still not recovered from reading Stephanie Nolen's January article in the New York Times in which a 48-year-old depressed Canadian entertainer is demanding her right to avail herself of assisted suicide.1 She demands that the State help her to use drugs that will bring about her death. And what State is this? The self-same State that denies her the use of drugs that could make her want to live! My jaw is still down on the floor! Could a person be more bamboozled by drug-war lies and misrepresentations than is Claire in making this request? It makes you wonder what Claire's grade school teachers taught her (or failed to teach her) about the basic principles of human agency upon which democratic countries were ostensibly founded.

And yet this was just the first of two jaw-dropping surprises that I was to encounter in the Times article.


Female psychiatrist on left, seated, speaking to depressed young female to her right, also seated. Psychiatrist saying: 'No, cocaine would be a copout. How about we treat your depression with assisted suicide instead?'
Our crazed attitude about drugs has now resulted in the ultimate absurd outcome, where psychiatrists are advocating assisted suicide for their patients without advocating for their right to use medicines that would cheer them up in a trice!




The author does not even mention the topic of drug prohibition, the deadly government policy which is keeping Claire depressed in the first place! What?!

As Redd Foxx used to say after hearing a shocking avowal: "Elizabeth, I'm comin' to join ya!"2

But then philosopher Whitehead warned us about this in the introduction to his lecture series on The Concept of Nature.

"The substantial reason for rejecting a philosophical theory is the 'absurdum' to which it reduces us." --Alfred North Whitehead, Concept of Nature3


If we can consider the collection of contradictory and ad-hoc presuppositions of the modern Drug Warrior to constitute a philosophy, then it is clearly a philosophy that we must reject, for it reduces us to a plethora of absurd outcomes when we take it seriously, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of Claire Brosseau. The Drug War "philosophy," or mindset, has now placed us in a world in which the government denies us the right to treat our own health while yet offering to kill us if that deprivation should make life unbearable for us. It has placed us in a world in which psychiatrists and lawyers will help us to exercise this wholly novel "right" to state-assisted suicide while yet refusing to fight for our far more obvious, time-honored and fundamental right to take care of our own health as we see fit!

We live in just such a world today. This is made clear by the fact that the subject of drug prohibition is never even mentioned by any of the pundits or reporters who write on the topic of assisted suicide. And so the policy of drug prohibition is impervious to criticism, for the simple reason that westerners do not acknowledge that drug prohibition even exists, apparently under the childishly naive assumption that it has no practical effects in the real world.

But then Stephanie Nolen and the psychiatrists whom she quotes are in good company when they pretend that drug prohibition has nothing to do with major social issues. It was drug prohibition which first brought brutal gunfire to America's inner cities, and yet the community groups which protest that violence refuse to mention that inconvenient truth.

Likewise with the organizations that claim to fight on behalf of the depressed. Such organizations never mention the fact that drug prohibition outlaws drugs that could cheer people up in a trice!4

Then there are the organizations dedicated to ending school shootings. These organizations never mention the fact that drug prohibition has outlawed the kind of drugs that could help hotheads to feel compassion for their fellow creatures and thereby prevent such needless massacres.

Then there are the organizations that claim to fight Alzheimer's and dementia, but which refuse to mention the fact that drug prohibition outlaws drugs that can sharply focus the mind, some of which can grow new neurons in the brain.

Then there are the organizations opposed to electroshock therapy. They never mention the fact that drug prohibition outlaws drugs that could make shock therapy unnecessary (assuming that it was ever truly necessary in the first place, of course).

Clearly, America's prime imperative is to hate on drugs -- and the solution of all social problems must be postponed or outlawed as necessary in order to keep that priority intact.











Notes for essay entitled Elizabeth, I'm comin' to join ya!: How the Claire Brosseau case almost gave me a coronary:

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: 28 Sanford And Son Quotes From The Classic '70s Sitcom Gupta, Writvik, Kidadl, 2023 (up)
3: Alfred North, Whitehead. 1920. Review of The Concept of Nature. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg. 1920. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18835. (up)
4: Dig deep enough, and you'll find that many of these latter groups have been created by Big Pharma in an effort to normalize the psychiatric pill-mill thanks to which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on 'meds' for life. (up)




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against the hateful war on US




I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.

If the depressed patient laughs, that means nothing. Materialists have to see results under a microscopic or they will never sign off on a therapy.

The drug war has created a whole film genre with the same tired plots: drug-dealing scumbags and their dupes being put in their place by the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, which has nothing but contempt for altered states.

Outlawing drugs is outlawing obvious therapies for Alzheimer's and autism patients, therapies based on common sense and not on the passion-free behaviorism of modern scientists.

The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.

The front page of every mycology club page should feature a protest of drug laws that make the study of mycology illegal in the case of certain shrooms. But no one protests. Their silence makes them drug war collaborators because it serves to normalize prohibition.

Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.

Every time I see a psychiatrist, I feel like I'm playing a game of make-believe. We're both pretending that hundreds of demonized medicines do not exist and could be of no use whatsoever.

The U.S. Congress considered the following to be a scientific fact back in 1924: "A person taking narcotics regularly impedes evolutionary progress and tends to degenerate backwards toward the brute." -- Richmond Hobson

The very idea of a DEA Museum creeps me out. It makes me want to say, like a Valley girl: "Ok, like... this is so wrong on so many levels."


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