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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

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.

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:

1: Alexander Shulgin: American Hero DWP (up)
2: The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys Fadiman, James, Park Street Press, New York, 2011 (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 (up)


Euthanasia and Shock Therapy in the age of the Drug War




It is bizarre that we should have "the right to die" in a world that outlaws drugs. That means, in effect, that we have a right to die, but we do not have the right to use drugs that might make us want to live. Bad policy is indicated by absurd outcomes, and this is but one of many absurd outcomes that the policy of prohibition foists upon the world -- and yet which remain unaccountably invisible to almost everyone, including almost all proponents of the aforesaid euthanasia.

  • Electroshock Therapy and the Drug War
  • Euthanasia in the Age of the Drug War
  • Science News Unveils Shock Therapy II
  • The Drug War and Electroshock Therapy
  • The Right to LIVE FULLY is more important than the Right to DIE





    • Ten Tweets

    against the hateful war on US




    The main form of drug war propaganda is censorship. That's why most Americans cannot imagine any positive uses for psychoactive substances, because the media and the government won't allow that.

    Daily opium use is no more outrageous than daily antidepressant use. In fact, it's less outrageous. It's a time-honored practice and can be stopped with a little effort and ingenuity, whereas it is almost impossible to get off some antidepressants because they alter brain chemistry.

    If daily drug use and dependency are okay, then there's no logical or scientific reason why I can't smoke a nightly opium pipe.

    Here are some political terms that are extremely problematic in the age of the drug war: "clean," "junk," "dope," "recreational"... and most of all the word "drugs" itself, which is as biased and loaded as the word "scab."

    First we outlaw all drugs that could help; then we complain that some people have 'TREATMENT-RESISTANT DEPRESSION'. What? No. What they really "have" is an inability to thrive because of our idiotic drug laws. 3:51 PM ยท Jul 15, 2024

    Drug warriors have harnessed the perfect storm. Prohibition caters to the interests of law enforcement, psychotherapy, Big Pharma, demagogues, puritans, and materialist scientists, who believe that consciousness is no big "whoop" and that spiritual states are just flukes.

    The U.S. government created violence out of whole cloth in America's inner cities with drug prohibition -- and now it is using that violence as an excuse to kick the people that they themselves have knocked down.

    Cocaine use is a blessing for some, just a little fun for most, and a curse for a few. Just like any other risky activity. We need to educate people about drugs rather than endlessly arresting them for attempting to improve their mental power!

    The FDA is not qualified to tell us whether holistic medicines work. They hold such drugs to materialist standards and that's pharmacological colonialism.

    If we let "science" decide about drugs, i.e. base freedom on health concerns, then tea can be as easily outlawed as beer. The fact that horses are not illegal shows that prohibition is not about health. It's about the power to outlaw certain "ways of being in the world."


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    Copyright 2025, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

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