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Euthanasia in the Age of the Drug War

doctors can now kill patients but they can't make them feel better

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

December 2, 2019



If you want proof that the Drug War is insane, think about the increasing popularity of euthanasia in the west, which is already the law of the land in Holland. Think about what euthanasia means in a country that has banned plant medicines.

It means that I can ask my doctor to give me plant medicines that will make me happy and he will indignantly say "no." But if I ask that same doctor for a drug that will kill me, he will say, "Your wish is my command."


Cartoon titled Euthanasia Meets the Drug War. Doctor talks to patient: The bad news is we can't give you drugs for your depression. The good news is, we can kill you if your depression gets too bad.
Americans have been taught to superstitiously believe that drugs are bad. Drugs are not bad or good. They are inanimate objects. Their widespread misuse tells us something about society, not about drugs.




What more proof do we need that the Drug War is a nature-hating sadomasochistic incarnation of Christian Science? It is the triumph of extreme puritanism that says that death itself is preferable to feeling good with the help of Mother Nature's psychoactive plants.

Would a sane society allow doctors to kill their patients BEFORE first giving those doctors free rein to prescribe the naturally occurring medicines of their choice, many of which have been proven to help the elderly (and the rest of us, for that matter) make their peace both with life and death?

Only a society that had a pathological distrust of Mother Nature's pharmacy could take such a heartless stance and then seek to enforce it by draconian laws.

{^Doctor to depressed elderly patient: "The bad news is, we can't give you psilocybin for your depression. The good news is, we can kill you if the depression gets too bad."}{

Author's Follow-up: August 31, 2022



This site is all about proving via reductio ad absurdum that the Drug War represents a wrong way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve and then some. This can be clearly seen here in the fact that we are willing to prescribe death in the age of the Drug War, generally by "removing life support," but we are not allowed to prescribe godsend medicines like morphine 1 that would make our patient actually want to live. That shows the pathological fanaticism of our Christian Science stand on psychoactive medicines, that we would prefer that our fellow country persons die -- a potentially very painful death, in fact -- rather than let them experience happiness with the help of a demonized substance.

Author's Follow-up: September 30, 2022


The drugs that we demonize today have inspired entire religions. And yet we'd rather kill patients than have them use such medicines. Western society is insane on the topic of the politically created boogieman called "drugs."











Notes for essay entitled Euthanasia in the Age of the Drug War: doctors can now kill patients but they can't make them feel better:

1: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Drug Warriors never take responsibility for incentivizing poor kids throughout the west to sell drugs. It's not just in NYC and LA, it's in modest-sized towns in France. Find public housing, you find drug dealing. It's the prohibition, damn it!

@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?

If I smoke opium nightly, I am a drug scumbag. If I use Big Pharma "meds" every day of my life, I am a good patient.

It's "convenient" for scientists that their "REAL" cures happen to be the ones that racist politicians will allow. Scientists thus normalize prohibition by pretending that outlawed substances have no therapeutic value. It's materialism collaborating with the drug war.

Who would have thought back in 1776 that Americans would eventually have to petition their government for the right to even possess a damn mushroom. The Drug War has destroyed America.

This is why the foes of suicide are doing absolutely nothing to get laughing gas into the hands of those who could benefit from it. Laughing is subjective after all. In the western tradition, we need a "REAL" cure to depression.

Folks point to the seemingly endless drugs that can be synthesized today and say it's a reason for prohibition. To the contrary, it's the reason why prohibition is madness. It results in an endless game of militaristic whack-a-mole at the expense of democratic freedoms.

Prohibitionists have blood on their hands. People do not naturally die in the tens of thousands from opioid use, notwithstanding the lies of 19th-century missionaries in China. It takes bad drug policy to accomplish that.

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.

We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.


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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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