The immorality of assisted suicide in the age of drug prohibition
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 24, 2026
When I first learned that North Americans like Claire Brosseau were demanding the right to assisted suicide on account of their depression, I was stunned. I simply could not understand how such westerners could "make that call" without realizing the obvious: namely, that it is drug prohibition which is keeping them from using drugs that could make them want to live! I could not understand how activists like Claire were not calling for an end to drug prohibition rather than demanding their right to die with the help of the state: the same state that was refusing to let them heal! Now that I am coming to my senses after that blow, like a boxer shaking off the effects of a left hook, I realize that assisted suicide for any reason is morally reprehensible insofar as the option is chosen in willful ignorance of the option-limiting policy of drug prohibition.
How can we decide on a person's quality of life without taking their mental state into account? And if drug prohibition prevents us from improving that mental state, how can we make a fair decision about "allowing" that patient to die?
Westerners believe they can pass judgment on the value of a paralyzed life by considering only the physical elements of that existence. They pay short shrift to the ability of the human mind to rise above challenges -- so much so that they outlaw all the drugs that could help a disabled person leverage that mental power to new heights of ecstasy and insight.
This mental power arises naturally in some. After having been paralyzed by a stroke, French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby dictated an entire book about his life through the strategic blinking of his left eye. (Had his left eye itself been inoperative, Bauby might well have been considered to be braindead.) We have a moral duty to use any and all drugs necessary to prompt the many less naturally motivated patients to rise above their paralyzed condition as well, not so that they too can write their memoirs, but so that they too can rise above their condition and gain a sort of philosophical perspective on their troubles with the help of the attitude improvement vouchsafed by the strategic use of a wide variety of motivating drugs.
Make no mistake, I occupy the high ground in this argument. I am merely making the common-sense claim that we should use all available medicines to help the paralyzed patient -- whereas the prohibitionists believe that we should use only those drugs of which politicians approve, and to hell with the mental state of the depressed paralytic -- even though the mental state of the patient is ultimately all that really matters for them in life.
As an Elizabethan poet once wrote:
My mind to me a kingdom is;
Such perfect joy therein I find
That it excels all other bliss
Which God or nature hath assign'd.
We are morally guilty of torturing patients when we knowingly deprive them of drugs that could improve their mental states and so improve their ability to tolerate their pathologies, whether we consider those pathologies to be physical or psychological.
The so-called opiate crisis is really a drug prohibition crisis.
The DEA should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for withholding godsend medicine from the depressed. Here is just one typical drug-user report that appeared in "Pihkal": "A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like..."
When we place the FDA in charge of deciding whether a psychoactive drug should be re-legalized or not, we are asking them to decide on things like the relative importance of appreciating a sunset, a task for which the FDA has no expertise whatsoever.
Even fans of sacred medicine have been brainwashed to believe that we do not know if such drugs "really" work: they want microscopic proof. But that's a western bias, used strategically by drug warriors to make the psychotropic drug approval process as glacial as possible.
To understand why the western world is blind to the benefits of "drugs," read "The Concept of Nature" by Whitehead. He unveils the scientific schizophrenia of the west, according to which the "real" world is invisible to us while our perceptions are mere "secondary" qualities.
We have to deny the FDA the right to judge psychoactive medicines in the first place. Their materialist outlook obliges them to ignore all obvious benefits. When they nix drugs like MDMA, they nix compassion and love.
One merely has to look at any issue of Psychology Today to see articles in which the author reckons without the Drug War, in which they pretend that banned substances do not exist and so fail to incorporate any topic-related insights that might otherwise come from user reports.
Americans are far more fearful of psychoactive drugs than is warranted by either anecdote or history. We require 100% safety before we will re-legalize any "drug" -- which is a safety standard that we do not enforce for any other risky activity on earth.
The drug war is a whole wrong way of looking at the world. It tells us that substances can be judged "up" or "down," which is anti-scientific and blinds us to endless beneficial uses.
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.
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