What the assisted suicide debate tells us about the evils of drug prohibition
An open letter to Robert Whitaker and the Mad in America website
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 2, 2026
Dear Team:
I hope that you will do me the favor of reading this letter in its entirety. Before I begin, however, I would like to apologize for any intemperate language that I may have employed in the past when contacting the Mad in America organization. I have to admit that I was astonished to have my personal story rejected by MIA after having had my healthcare concerns ignored by seemingly every mainstream publication in America. I had just assumed that your organization would be an exception to this rule, that Mad in America at least would give me a voice. Rather than despairing, however, I should have simply rewritten my story to reflect the editor's concern, the fear that I might be seen to be giving medical advice. This particular criticism, however, bothered me somewhat, because this ban on giving medical advice about treating depression presupposes that there is an authoritative source to which we should be going for such advice, and what is that source? Why, it is the very doctors who caused my problem in the first place, the biochemical determinists who placed me on a "med" that turned out to be far harder to kick than heroin, thereby turning me into a lifetime ward of the healthcare state. This, however, was a point that I could have made in my rewrite and I need not have taken umbrage.
THE ISSUE
Please understand that this letter is not a submission of any kind, however; it is rather an attempt to inform the MIA staff about a different yet related issue that seems to be off the radar of everyone in the world but myself (judging, at least, from an Internet search on the topic).
It concerns the recent attempts of depressed people to qualify for state-assisted suicide. I am thinking in particular of the case of Canadian activist Claire Brosseau, whose story was documented in the New York Times on December 29, 2025 in an article entitled "Claire Brosseau Wants to Die. Will Canada Let Her?" by healthcare reporter Stepanie Nolen.
Anyone who is familiar with the state-of-the-art in ethnobotany, pharmacology and drug history knows that there are many outlawed drugs that could improve Claire's mood and attitude in a trice. In a trice. And yet Nolen never mentions drug prohibition in her article, nor does Claire, nor do her two psychiatrists, one of whom is championing Claire's right to die. This astonished me. This can only mean that drug propaganda -- and above all the censorship of all positive reports of beneficial drug use in the media -- have convinced professional and laypeople alike that drugs have no benefits whatsoever. Only with that blatantly false assumption in mind could they be discussing assisted suicide without mentioning the policy of drug prohibition. Only propaganda could have brought Americans to this embarrassing state of universal ignorance about matters of fact, an ignorance combined with a naïve faith in science to solve all of our problems, not just in the material realm but in the psychological realm as well.
And our silence about drug benefits has consequences, as the case of Claire Brosseau reveals. For if Claire succeeds in having the state help her to die, she will have been sacrificed on the altar of the drug demonizing ideology of the west. We should therefore stop waiting for microscopically obsessed scientists to say something positive about drugs and start speaking common sense to power, that drugs can help as well as harm. Otherwise, we are telling the chronically depressed that there is, indeed, no hope for them. If Big Pharma's dependence-causing meds do not make them wish to live, then tough luck, for that is all the medicine that there is in the world! So say pundits who have fallen for the Drug Warrior lie about the evil of drugs, which is to say almost everybody, given the silence on this topic from all and sundry, indeed, from everybody but myself.
Colleen Cowles tells us in "War On Us" that no reputable organization dares to advocate drug legalization for fear of being stigmatized as extremist, and yet the Claire Brosseau case tells us that we have to make up our minds: we can either speak out against drug prohibition as the outlawing of our right to heal, or we can let the Claire Brosseaus of the world die completely unnecessarily. There is no other choice. For it is just common sense that a wide variety of drugs could help Claire were she to employ them in psychologically obvious ways. Entire religions have been inspired by drug use, after all, as the psychoactive Soma juice inspired the creation of the Vedic, and hence the Hindu, religion. Laughing gas gives users a glimpse of heaven. The phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin in the 1990s produced such user reports as "It was a glorious feeling, and beauty was everywhere enhanced," and "Tremendous feeling of confidence in life and the life process. Complete sense of resolution."
A calm analysis would show that most currently outlawed drugs could be used sensibly by most people and without causing dependence; yet even if this were not the case, even if Claire became chemically dependent on drugs, so what? Surely dependence is better than death, especially in a world in which 1 in 4 American women are dependent on Big Pharma meds for life and we actually praise them for being so.
How can we dare to debate the propriety of state-assisted suicide without acknowledging the existence of the many outlawed drugs that can inspire and elate? For this is exactly how the debate about assisted suicide is currently taking place. It is taking place in what philosopher Alfred North Whitehead might have called "the willful ignoration" of the benefits of outlawed drugs. As a result, I seem to be the only one on the planet who can see the connection between drug prohibition and Claire's desire to die. And I have acted on that knowledge, first and foremost in an effort to save Claire's life.
I have written to all parties in Claire's case, including to Claire herself, pleading with her to stop advocating for her unprecedented right to state-assisted suicide and to advocate instead for the end of the drug prohibition which has so clearly outlawed her right to heal. I have urged her to join me, a fellow chronic depressive, in my effort to claw back this most fundamental of our rights from the self-interested healthcare establishment. So far, however, I have received no response, neither from Claire nor from any other of my would-be correspondents, but then I have come to expect to be ghosted whenever I write a letter suggesting that drugs might have positive uses. I have found that most North Americans simply "refuse to go there."
The only good thing about Claire's case is that it makes the downsides of drug prohibition obvious, even if no pundit but myself is willing to publicly acknowledge those downsides. It shows us that we have a choice: Either we can end drug prohibition or we can have unnecessary suicides: it is as simple as that. There is no third option.
I sometimes fear that it is too late for common sense to prevail in the west, however. Maybe the ongoing censorship of all positive uses of psychoactive substances has rendered us incapable of imagining any positive uses for drugs. That seems to be the only explanation for the complete silence on this topic in all commentary about Claire's case. And that's a shame, because that silence has a body count. Indeed, it has always had a body count. It's just that the 49,000 suicides a year in America used to happen in private and without fanfare; now assisted-suicide laws are placing faces on those statistics and forcing us to acknowledge the immorality of our self-interested complicity in the prohibitionist status quo.
To summarize, then, my claim is the following: that an ethical debate about the propriety of assisted suicide for the depressed must include a debate about the propriety of drug prohibition.
THE SUGGESTION
This is where a writer would ordinarily supply an "action" step, explaining what they wish the recipient to do with the information that the writer has provided. But my goal in writing today is merely to bring this issue to your attention. I am sure that you know better than I do how your organization can best share this story with your readership should you choose to do so. This may pose a bit of a problem, however. I would ordinarily recommend that you find some good writer with the relevant academic bona fides who can make these points for you in a feature essay – and yet I seem to be the only one in the world who has even recognized the existence of this issue. I therefore offer my own humble services for writing such an essay, should you be interested. I may not have a Ph.D. in a related subject matter, but as a chronic depressive myself, I am an expert in the literal sense of that word, having spent 40 years on under-performing "meds" which have turned me into a patient for life. Unlike Claire, however, I have responded to my depression, not by giving up on life, but rather by channeling my frustration into a daily effort to end drug prohibition. How? By writing letters such as these, for starters.
I am also founder of the Drug War Philosopher website at abolishthedea.com, where I have written hundreds of essays against drug prohibition over the last seven years from the point of view of a med-dependent person, an approach that no other philosopher in the world seems to be bringing to this subject. Rather than argue from the Libertarian grounds of utility, I am trying to convince the world that the right to take care of one's own health is a fundamental right and need not be justified on the basis of a cost/benefit analysis any more than we need justify free speech on such a basis or the right to breathe. I find therefore that drug prohibition is a prima facie evil, completely incompatible with human freedom. To say that this viewpoint places me in the minority these days would be an enormous understatement, but I have to speak up. As a chronic depressive, I feel the impact of drug prohibition every day of my life – and so I will never stop protesting the same until I die a natural death, content with knowing that I have done all that I personally can to restore the right to heal to future generations of the depressed.
If this backstory persuades you that you can "trust me in the driver's seat," please let me know and I will write a piece for Mad in America on the current debate about assisted suicide for the depressed and what it tells us about the evils of drug prohibition. In so doing, I promise to follow all relevant specs and to take editorial criticism in stride. If not, however, that's fine too. I only ask that you make this issue known to your readership, someway, somehow. The death of Claire Brosseau by assisted suicide would set a terrible precedent for the chronically depressed everywhere. It would tell them that there really is no hope for them. And this is simply not true. We only think so because we ignore the obvious benefits of drugs in slavish fealty to the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. I believe therefore that it is time for us to leave our personal and collective comfort zones and start publicly affirming what everybody has always known "in their heart of hearts": namely, that there are positive uses for drugs and that outlawing psychoactive substances is therefore a violation of our most fundamental right to heal.
This story is of the utmost relevance to your mission statement, in which you vow to consider drug policy from the human being's point of view. But it is a timely story as well. As such, its publication would be in line with your newly announced goal of providing "timely coverage of 'breaking' news," as stated in Mr. Whitaker's February post concerning the Mad in America Substack.
PS In my tri-monthly office visits, the doctors always begin the session by asking me intrusive questions, such as: "Have you considered suicide since our last visit?", to which I always want to respond: "Only when I consider how drug prohibition has turned me into a ward of the healthcare state."
The government makes psychoactive drug approval as slow as possible by insisting that drugs be studied in relation to one single board-certified "illness." But the main benefits of such drugs are holistic in nature. Science should butt out if it can't recognize that fact.
There are neither "drugs" nor "meds" as those terms are used today. All substances have potential good uses and bad uses. The terms as used today carry value judgements, as in meds good, drugs bad.
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.
The FDA approves of shock therapy and the psychiatric pill mill, but they cannot see the benefits in MDMA, a drug that brought peace, love and understanding to the dance floor in 1990s Britain.
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.
Now drug warriors have nitrous oxide in their sights, the substance that inspired the philosophy of William James. They're using the same tired MO: focusing exclusively on potential downsides and never mentioning the benefits of use, and/or denying that any exist.
Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.
If opium and cocaine were legal again in America, the healthcare industry would suddenly have to undergo extensive downsizing, as Americans were once again put in charge of their own health.
Smart people in America are like Don Quixote. They are sane on every subject on earth, but mention the subject of "drugs," and they start talking politically correct blather.
Imagine the Vedic people shortly after they have discovered soma. Everyone's ecstatic -- except for one oddball. "I'm not sure about these experiences," says he. "I think we need to start dissecting the brains of our departed adherents to see what's REALLY going on in there."
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