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.
"All these anti-opium articles... are based upon the same model. They assume certain statements as existing and acknowledged facts which have never been proved to be such, and then proceed to draw deductions from those alleged facts." --William Brereton
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.
There would be almost no recidivism for those trying to get off drugs if all drugs were legal. Then we could use a vast variety of drugs to get us through those few hours of late-night angst that are the bane of the recidivist.
Countless millions suffer needlessly in silence because of America's fearmongering about drugs.
If I should die of some unusual concatenation of circumstances, I want my survivors to pass "Brian's Law," a law stating that we will no longer pass laws based on hard cases and so needlessly fill our prisons by taking common-sense discretion out of the hands of judges.
The Drug War is based on a huge number of misconceptions and prejudices. Obviously it's about power and racism too. It's all of the above. But every time I don't mention one specifically, someone makes out that I'm a moron. Gotta love Twitter.
We're living in a sci-fi dystopia called "Fahrenheit 452", in which the police burn thought-expanding plants instead of thought-expanding books.
His answer to political opposition is: "Lock them up!" That's Nazi speak, not American democracy.
"Users" can be kept out of the workforce by the extrajudicial process of drug testing; they can have their baby taken from them, their house, their property -- all because they do not share the intoxiphobic attitude of America.
@HKSExecEd The use of Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace and love to the British dance floors in the 1990s. When are political scientists going to acknowledge the potential for such substances to pull our species back from the brink of nuclear annihilation?
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