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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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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The goal of rehab should not be to get people off of all drugs, it should be to teach them to be in control of their drug use and to use drugs wisely for beneficial purposes.

If drug war logic made sense, we would outlaw endless things in addition to drugs. Because the drug war says that it's all worth it if we can save just one life -- which is generally the life of a white suburban young person, btw.

The Cabinet of Caligari ('62) ends with a shameless display of psychiatric triumphalism. Happy shock therapy patients waltz freely about a mansion in which the "sick" protagonist has just been "cured" by tranquilizers and psychoanalysis. Did Robert Bloch believe his own script?

All drugs have positive uses at some dose, for some reason, at some time -- but prohibitionists have the absurd idea that drugs can be voted up or down. This anti-scientific notion deprives the modern world of countless godsends.

Ug! Fire bad! There were 4,731 fire-related deaths in America in 2023. Learn more at the Partnership for a Death Free America.

The existence of a handful of bad outcomes of drug use does not justify substance prohibition... any more than the existence of drunkards justifies a call for liquor prohibition.

Many articles in science mags need this disclaimer: "Author has declined to consider the insights gained from drug-induced states on this topic out of fealty to Christian Science orthodoxy." They don't do this because they know readers already assume that drugs will be ignored.

Drug prohibition has resulted in hundreds of thousands of completely unnecessary deaths thanks to totally preventable drug overdoses!

I'm grateful to the folks who are coming out of the woodwork at the last minute to deface their own properties with "Trump 2024" signs. Now I'll know who to thank should Trump get elected and sell us out to Putin.

The DEA conceives of "drugs" as only justifiable in some time-honored ritual format, but since when are bureaucrats experts on religion? I believe, with the Vedic people and William James, in the importance of altered states. To outlaw such states is to outlaw my religion.


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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