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Science discovers new method for ending depression: suicide found to have stunning 100% success rate

an open letter to Caiuby Labate, author of Prohibition, Religious Freedom and Human Rights

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

February 27, 2026



Dear Caiuby,

I am a 67-year-old chronic depressive who has been making a philosophical study of western drug attitudes -- and their unrecognized negative consequences -- for the last seven years. I am writing to you because I recently became aware of your co-authorship of a book entitled "Prohibition, Religious Freedom and Human Rights."1 Although I have yet to locate an affordable copy, I have read a review of the work on Academia.edu by Leonardo Rodriguez Perez in which he states that "The authors show how the current drug conventions violate the human right of access to healthcare in the developing world." My hope in writing this is that I can convince you that the problem with drug conventions is worse than this statement suggests: that drug laws inherently outlaw the right of all individuals to take care of their own health as they see fit. So, while drug conventions certainly outlaw traditional collective practices in a cavalier and ethnocentric fashion, the more fundamental problem with drug conventions is that they outlaw the right to healthcare per se, for all people, regardless of the demographic to which they belong.


Prescription pad: text reading: 'Kill yourself'
Depressed? Ask your doctor if assisted suicide is right for YOU.




This claim on my part has become painfully obvious in the case of depressed activists like Claire Brosseau, who are demanding the right to assisted suicide because of their depression. Assisted suicide! I urge you to think what this means in the context of drug prohibition. It means that Claire Brosseau is demanding that the state help her to die -- the exact same state that is denying her access to the sorts of drugs that could make her want to live! This can only mean that Claire has been blinded by drug propaganda, both to the negative effects of drug prohibition and to the positive effects of drug use. As I am sure you know, there are a wide variety of phenethylamines -- both extant and potential -- whose informed and strategic use could inspire and elate. The use of laughing gas, already vainly advocated by William James for the purpose of philosophical investigation, could give the depressed visions of heaven itself. And Sigmund Freud's real achievement, in my view, was the realization that cocaine was a virtual cure for the majority of depressives, even though self-interested doctors demonized the drug by focusing only on downsides, exactly as if they were to evaluate alcohol by studying only drunkards. (Of course, no one bothered to ask the depressed what they thought about cocaine.)

And yet the western world refuses to hold drug prohibition responsible for the evil that it causes. I was stunned to discover that I am the only one who is speaking up for Claire's right to the use of medicines that could make her wish to live! The only one! All the other pundits -- including Claire's two psychiatrists, the New York Times health reporter and Jeffrey Singer of the Cato Institute -- frame the issue as "assisted suicide" and refuse to even mention the role of drug prohibition in bringing the western world to this absurd pass: one in which psychiatrists and healthcare pundits prefer that Claire die rather than to use drugs that could cheer her up in a trice! I have even sent a plea to Claire herself to cease advocating for assisted suicide for the depressed and to join with me instead in dedicating the rest of her life to ending the drug prohibition that outlaws her right to heal. I have asked her to help me form a nonprofit called "Chronic Depressives against Drug Prohibition," an organization whose very existence would place prohibitionists and fearmongers on notice that there are more stakeholders in the criminalization debates than the white young people whom we refuse to educate about safe use. Such an organization would remind Americans that the outlawing of drugs for recreational purposes always entails the outlawing of drugs for therapeutic purposes as well.

This is why I do not believe in invoking utilitarian arguments to justify drug use. To me, this is like justifying the freedom of speech on utilitarian grounds. If we do so, we miss the main point: that some rights are fundamental to a freedom-loving society and need not be justified with a cost/benefit analysis. Surely, our right to the use of potentially healing medicines is one of those rights. And yet westerners have been so persuaded of the contrary thanks to propaganda and censorship that we now prefer death itself to the use of godsend medicines. Death itself!

Besides, no one is qualified to do a cost-benefit analysis of psychoactive drug use. To do so, they would have to know the precise value of appreciating a sunset or of experiencing a perceived state of spirituality or of finishing an important task or of being able to connect with their fellow human beings despite their inherent bashfulness, etc. Only a deity could know the precise value of such things for any specific person. Whenever human beings pretend to such knowledge, they are necessarily imposing their own value system on the data. A healthcare official will prioritize safety over the self-actualization of a substance user (subconsciously motivated thereunto by insurance regulations and their employer's corporate policies, etc.), whereas for most people, the attainment of their dreams in life always comes first, with safety, however important a factor in and of itself, being only a secondary consideration.

I hope these arguments resonate with you. I have written on this subject to all parties concerned in the Claire Brosseau case and have only been answered by Jeffrey Singer. Singer recognizes that drug prohibition entails the outlawing of our right to heal (as he makes clear in his new book, "Your Body, Your Health Care"), and yet he does not seem to have connected the dots. Like all pundits, he continues to discuss assisted suicide for the depressed without discussing the drug prohibition which alone makes suicide seem necessary to the depressed in the first place. This is not just a philosophical argument but a matter of life and death for depressed folk like myself, for if Claire has her way, then the western world will soon begin sacrificing the lives of the depressed in an effort to normalize the drug prohibition which renders their healing impossible. I ask myself how much worse the effects of prohibition have to become before I will no longer be the only one who is pointing them out.

I'd love to hear your thoughts!












Notes:

1: BOOK REVIEW Prohibition, Religious Freedom, and Human Rights: Regulating Traditional Drug Use. Caiuby Labate, Beatriz, and Cavnar, Clancy. Perez, Leonardo Rodriguez , Academia.edu, 2014 (up)




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against the hateful war on US




The Drug War treats doctors like potential criminals and it treats the rest of us like children. Prohibition does not end drug risks: it just outsources them to minorities and other vulnerable populations.

Many psychonauts (like Terence McKenna) praise psychedelics while demonizing other psychoactive substances. No substance is bad in itself. All substances have some use at some dose for some reason for some people in some circumstance.

Someone needs to create a group called Drug Warriors Anonymous, a place where Americans can go to discuss their right to mind and mood medicine and to discuss the many ways in which our society trashes godsend medicines.

Today's doctors are "quacks" because they fail to see any of the many obvious uses for psychoactive substances.

Drug warriors have taught us that honesty about drugs encourages drug use. Nonsense! That's just their way of suppressing free speech about drugs. Americans are not babies, they can handle the truth -- or if they cannot, they need education, not prohibition.

Drug-designing chemists have no expertise in deciding what constitutes a cure for depression. As Schopenhauer wrote: "The mere study of chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher."

"The homicidal drug is booze. There's more violence on a Saturday night in a neighborhood tavern than there has been in the whole 20-year history of LSD." -- Timothy Leary

AI is like almost every subject under the sun: it takes on a very different and ominous meaning when we view it in light of the modern world's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine.

The fact that some drugs can be addictive is no reason to outlaw drugs. It is a reason to teach safe use and to publicize all the ways that smart people have found to avoid unwanted pharmacological dependency -- and a reason to use drugs to fight drugs.

To say that psilocybin has not been proven to work is like saying that a hammer has not yet been proven to smash glass. Why not? Because the process has not yet been studied under a microscope.


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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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