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.
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.
Hollywood presents cocaine as a drug of killers. In reality, strategic cocaine use by an educated person can lead to great mental power, especially as just one part of a pharmacologically balanced diet.
If our loved ones should experience severe depression and visit an emergency room for treatment, they will be started on a regime of dependence-causing Big Pharma drugs. They will not be given any drugs that elate and inspire.
Drug Warriors will publicize all sorts of drug use -- but they will never publicize sane and positive drug use. Drug Warrior dogma holds that such use is impossible -- and, indeed, the drug war does all it can to turn that prejudice into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The massive use of plea deals lets prosecutors threaten drug suspects into giving up their rights to a fair trial.
The Drug War is the most important evil to protest, precisely because almost everybody is afraid to do so. That's a clear sign that it is a cancer on the body politic.
America takes away the citizen's right to manage their own depression by making opium and cocaine illegal. Then psychiatrists treat the resulting epidemic of depression and anxiety by damaging the patient's brain with shock therapy.
Google founders used to enthuse about the power of free speech, but Google is actively shutting down videos that tell us how to grow mushrooms -- MUSHROOMS, for God's sake. End the drug war and this hateful censorship of a free people.
Scientists are responsible for endless incarcerations in America. Why? Because they fail to denounce the DEA lie that psychoactive substances have no positive medical uses. This is so obviously wrong that only an academic in an Ivory Tower could disbelieve it.
America legalizes alcohol and then outlaws all the drugs that could help prevent and cure alcoholism.
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.
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