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Suicide and the Drug War

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 25, 2022



Today is National Suicide Prevention Day, but no one's talking about the 6,000-pound gorilla in the room. For the fact is that the Drug War has outlawed all the godsend psychoactive medicines that could actually help to prevent suicide.

The coca leaf has been used for millennia by the Indians of Peru to combat fatigue and keep their society together in peace and harmony. Re-legalize the leaf and the suicide crisis would disappear overnight. But Drug Warriors have tarred the leaf's reputation by conflating its effects with those of the cocaine 1 2 alkaloid that the leaf contains. This is like demonizing peaches because they contain prussic acid. By re-legalizing the coca leaf, we would not only cut down on suicides, but we would end the civil wars in South America that our Drug War has caused and is causing this very minute in Mexico.

Learn more. Read: Potter, Carol. "Coca: Divine Plant of the Incas." Scribd.com. January 01, 2017. https://www.scribd.com/read/369871777/Coca-Divine-Plant-of-the-Incas.

Laughing gas could end the suicide crisis overnight, by giving the depressed temporary relief from sorrow -- and, as importantly, something to look forward to in their darker moments: namely, the fact that they can use laughing gas 3 occasionally to take a break from gloomy introspection. Yes, there are legitimate safety concerns with all substances, but that is precisely why we need to start educating people about safe use, rather than conducting the fearmongering smear campaigns that the Drug Warrior always launches against psychoactive medicine.

MDMA 4 (aka ecstasy) brought peace, love and understanding to the dance floor. It could work wonders in preventing suicide, and is already being fast-tracked for psychotherapy. It should have been legalized 40 years ago, but the self-serving DEA ruled against its own legal council in 1985 in order to keep the drug illegal, clearly so that the DEA could keep its relevance and its workload. (Ecstasy was blamed for a handful of deaths, but these deaths were all caused by the Drug War itself, which discourages education about substances and demonizes them instead.)

And what about the shrooms that grow at my very feet? Psilocybin is a therapeutic godsend for depression, and yet the government says I cannot use this gift from Mother Nature, thus violating the natural law upon which America was founded.

And what about ayahuasca? It has spawned new religions. Surely it could help prevent suicide as part of a therapeutic regimen of some kind.

And yet the world is so bamboozled by Drug Warrior lies that we can actually have a Suicide Prevention Day in which nobody even mentions the Drug War! Why not? Because we have been fed the unscientific lie that certain substances (namely "drugs" as hypocritically defined by racist and warmongering politicians) are bad in and of themselves, without regard for how, when or why they are used. But, of course, there are no substances of that kind. Even the deadly Botox has positive uses.

The Drug War not only encourages suicide by denying godsend medicine, but it even forces children to suffer severe pain. Why? Because many countries outlaw the use of morphine 5 in hospice because they'd rather fight a War on Drugs than to keep children from suffering intense pain.

When will this madness end? Only when America wakes up to the true evil of the anti-patient and unscientific "War on Drugs."

In short, we have no right to complain about suicide if we're not willing to complain about the Drug War.


You have no right to complain about suicide 6 if you're not willing to complain about the War on Drugs.



1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent on Big Pharma 7 8 drugs for life, drugs which cause emotional flat-lining in long-term users. They are eternal patients. And the Drug Warrior has no problem with this. For the Drug Warrior does not want us to stop using drugs, he or she wants us to start using the RIGHT drugs -- the ones that benefit Wall Street and the healthcare industry while giving jobs to law enforcement by outlawing the stuff that actually works when used wisely. Of course, the Drug Warriors make sure that there is no "wise use," since they're all about slandering drugs, not educating about them.









Notes for essay entitled Suicide and the Drug War:

1: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
2: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
3: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
4: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
5: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
6: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
7: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
8: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)




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There's more than set and setting: there's fundamental beliefs about the meaning of life and about why mother nature herself is full of psychoactive substances. Tribal peoples associate some drugs with actual sentient entities -- that is far beyond "set and setting."

Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing.

There are hundreds of things that we should outlaw before drugs (like horseback riding) if, as claimed, we are targeting dangerous activities. Besides, drugs are only dangerous BECAUSE of prohibition, which compromises product purity and refuses to teach safe use.

Assisted suicide cannot be discussed meaningfully without discussing the drug prohibition that renders it necessary in the first place.

The DEA stomped onto Thomas Jefferson's estate in 1987 and confiscated the founding father's poppy plants in violation of everything he stood for, politically speaking. And the TJ Foundation helped them! They sold out Jefferson.

I hated the show "The Apprentice," because it taught a cynical and hate-filled lesson about the proper way to "get ahead" in the world. I saw Trump as a menace back then, long before he started declaring that American elections were corrupt before the very first vote was cast!

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 Holy Trinity of the Drug War religion is Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and John Belushi. "They died so that you might fear psychoactive substances with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."

Almost every article about suicide is shallow because it takes drug prohibition as a natural baseline, even though drug prohibition outlaws substances that could so clearly elevate mood.

Videos about science and psilocybin are funny. They show nerds trying to catch up with common sense.


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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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