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The Right to LIVE FULLY is more important than the Right to DIE

open letter to Gino Kenny, People Before Profit

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

June 14, 2023



I sent the following message to Gino Kenny on his contact page at GinoKenny.com. Gino is leading a movement to promote 'assisted dying' in Ireland.

Author's follow-up for September 13, 2025


(abolishthedea.com)

Hi, Gino. I agree that there are cases in which we should allow people to die peacefully. However, I do not think that euthanasia can be properly discussed without taking into account the War on Drugs and the fact that we have outlawed all the drugs that might make people WANT TO LIVE. American pharmacist Alexander Shulgin synthesized hundreds of drugs that can inspire and elate without causing addiction1. Coca and opium can inspire and elate as well -- and surely their use is far preferable to euthanasia2. Psychedelics can also make depressed people want to live. As for the right to die, westerners actually had that right before drug prohibition, since an immoderate dose of morphine 3 would allow them to do just that. Today we have outlawed not only morphine 4 , but hundreds of drugs which inspire and relax and expand the mind5.


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.




If we promote euthanasia while ignoring the Drug War, we are like those who promote shock therapy for the depressed while denying the depressed the godsend medicines that could have cheered them up without damaging their brains and without turning them into zombies6. In short, there is a Drug War going on, and we need to recognize that fact. It has huge consequences for how we think about subjects like depression and euthanasia. As a chronic depressive myself, I believe we should have the right to die... but before the government gives me the right to die, I demand my right to live fully! I demand my right to mind and mood medicine and the plants and fungi that grow at my very feet!

Ending drug prohibition would "kill two birds with one stone": it would not simply end prohibition but it would give patients the right to the medicines with which they could allow themselves to die peacefully -- without begging leave of their government to do so.7



Author's Follow-up:

September 13, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up






This is unfortunately a topic that no one wants to discuss. The entire western world reckons without the Drug War. No one realizes that topics like suicide 8 and depression cannot be meaningfully discussed without acknowledging the fact that drug law has outlawed our sovereignty over our own body and healthcare. This is why drug prohibition survives today, nearly one hundred years after America's disastrous experiment with liquor prohibition: because no one holds drug prohibition responsible for its downsides, and above all the fact that it has denied us the right to take care of our own health as we see fit. Before opium prohibition, everyone had a tacit right to peaceful death. We needed no political movement to establish that right.

It's ironic: if Gino demands the right to a peaceful death without confronting drug prohibition, then he ultimately has to demand our right to use opium to kill ourselves while yet denying that we have a right to use opium 9 in order to make us want to live! The enemies of brain-damaging electroshock therapy make the same mistake. They too ignore the effects of drug prohibition. So they are forced to oppose that barbarous intervention while yet failing to support the re-legalization 10 of substances that could make that intervention unnecessary!

In short, all enemies of human disempowerment are hamstrung these days by their failure to recognize, let alone combat, the most fundamental human disempowerment of all, and that is drug prohibition, which denies us sovereignty over our own mental and emotional states.











Notes for essay entitled The Right to LIVE FULLY is more important than the Right to DIE: open letter to Gino Kenny, People Before Profit:

1: Alexander Shulgin: American Hero DWP (up)
2: Fadiman, James. Psychedelicexplorersguide.com. 2011. https://www.psychedelicexplorersguide.com/. (up)
3: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
4: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
5: In Praise of Augustus Bedloe DWP (up)
6: Science News Unveils Shock Therapy II DWP (up)
7: "Easeful death" is nothing to be scorned. We would not need to fight for the "right to die" if opium were re-legalized. This is another reason why prohibition is tyrannical madness: it puts the government in charge of deciding not only how we can live -- but how -- and even when -- we can die. It is amazing that this enormous power grab is not seen as such, even by most Libertarians. (up)
8: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
9: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
10: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




If they're going to throw doctors in jail for prescribing too much pain medication, they should also throw them in jail for prescribing too LITTLE.

Here is a typical user report about a drug that the DEA tells us has no positive uses whatsoever: "There is a profoundness of meaning inherent in anything that moves." (reported in "Pikhal" by Alexander Shulgin)

The Shipiba have learned to heal human beings physically, psychologically and spiritually with what they call "onanyati," plant allies and guides, such as Bobinsana, which "envelops seekers in a cocoon of love." You know: what the DEA would call "junk."

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."

Why don't those politicians understand what hateful colonialism they are practicing? Psychedelics have been used for millennia by the tribes that the west has conquered -- now we won't even let folks talk honestly about such indigenous medicines.

"My faith votes and strives to outlaw religions that use substances of which politicians disapprove."

Drug prohibition is the perfect racist crime. It brought gunfire to inner cities, yet those who seek to end the gunfire pretend that drug prohibition has nothing to do with it.

There are definitely good scientists out there. Unfortunately, they are either limited by their materialist orthodoxy into showing only specific microscopic evidence or they abandon materialism for the nonce and talk the common psychological sense that we all understand.

"Drugs" is imperialist terminology. In the smug self-righteousness of those who use it, I hear Columbus's disdain for the shroom use of the Taino people and the Spanish disdain for the coca use of the Peruvian Indians.

Yeah. That's why it's so pretentious and presumptuous of People magazine to "fight for justice" on behalf of Matthew Perry, as if Perry would have wanted that.


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






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Book Cover

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

This book features 150 annotated images, designed to force brainwashed Americans to confront the fact that drug prohibition is wrong. Here is what author Richard Parrish II says of the book's compiler: "The drug prohibition philosopher provides first-hand, principled, persuasive, and insightful arguments against the current drug prohibition regime..."

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Book Cover

Diary of a Drug Fiend

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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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