Why assisted suicide for the depressed cannot be discussed ethically without discussing the drug prohibition that makes it seem necessary

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Why assisted suicide for the depressed cannot be discussed ethically without discussing the drug prohibition that makes it seem necessary

an open letter to Reason magazine

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

April 1, 2026

PREFACE

I am the first and so far only philosopher to point out that assisted suicide for the depressed cannot be discussed ethically without also discussing the drug prohibition that makes it necessary, at least in the minds of the depressed. ¹ Amazingly, I cannot seem to convince anybody else of this fact, however. Mainstream westerners have learned their lessons too well from the conglomerate media, which simply will not publish any stories of beneficial drug use (although they'll run prime-time ads for Jim Beam bourbon targeting young people on prime-time television ²). But this is all par for the brainwashed course in the Age of the Drug War. I am used to being ignored. This is why I call myself the Ignaz Semmelweis of our times ³.

That does not mean that I am "standing down," however. To the contrary, I just sent the following proposal to Reason magazine ⁴ for an op-ed piece by yours truly on the subject of drug prohibition and assisted suicide for the depressed.

Dear Katherine et al.

I am writing to call your attention to a big story that no one in the world is covering. It has to do with the increasing number of depressed westerners who are demanding their "right" to assisted suicide with the help of the state. Of course, the subject of assisted suicide itself has received plenty of coverage; that is not the topic upon which I am writing to you today. But there is a huge irony to these stories that everyone is missing, including journalists, pundits and the depressed people themselves. It consists in the fact that these depressed people are asking the state to help them to die, and that this is the same state that denies them the use of substances that could make them want to live. Instead of fighting for their right to die, then, these people should be fighting for their right to live. They should be fighting for their right to take care of their own psychological health as they see fit. They should be fighting, in short, for the end of drug prohibition.

This is the big story, then: the fact that no one seems to recognize that the subject of assisted suicide for the depressed cannot be discussed advisedly without also discussing how drug prohibition has outlawed all the drugs that could so obviously and so quickly cheer these people up. And yet this is exactly what is going on today. No one is mentioning the 6,400-pound gorilla in the room when discussing assisted suicide for the depressed, the implication being that everyone assumes that death itself is preferable to using drugs. Death itself. As a 67-year-old chronic depressive, I am both astonished and depressed that the mainstream is drawing this tacit conclusion. Surely, even the most addictive form of drug use is preferable to committing suicide, especially in a world in which we applaud Americans for taking Big Pharma drugs every day of their life. What next? A public service announcement telling us to "Ask your doctor if assisted suicide is right for YOU"?

I draw your attention in particular to the case of Claire Brosseau, a Canadian activist and entertainer who is demanding her right to assisted suicide. ⁵ In healthcare reporter Stephanie Nolen's December 2025 article on Claire's situation in The New York Times ("Claire Brosseau Wants to Die. Will Canada Let Her?" ⁶ ), the subject of drug prohibition is never even mentioned, not by Claire, not by her two psychiatrists (one of whom is championing Claire's right to die), and not by Stephanie herself. Stephanie writes simply that Claire tried drugs and that they did not work, as if "drugs" was a small and objective category of substances and not a politically created dysphemism for hundreds of psychoactive substances of which pharmacologically clueless politicians disapprove. It is simply not possible that no drug could provide Claire with inspiration and elation of some kind. Drugs have inspired entire religions, after all, as the psychoactive Soma juice inspired the creation of the Vedic, and hence the Hindu, religion. The human brain is constructed in such a way as to receive psychological benefits from a wide variety of chemical substances.

Anyone who has followed developments in pharmacology and ethnobotany over the years – indeed, anyone with common sense – knows that there are substances that could cheer Claire up in a trice. In a trice. Sigmund Freud believed in cocaine for this purpose, until self-interested doctors demonized the drug by studying only the downsides of use, exactly as if they were to study alcohol by only looking at alcoholics ⁷. Of course, no one asked the depressed what they thought about the drug. The depressed could also benefit from the strategic intermittent use of a wide variety of substances, including laughing gas ⁸, opium ⁹, and the kinds of phenethylamines synthesized by Alexander Shulgin in the 1990s ¹⁰. This is just common sense, or at least it used to be until self-interested doctors began demanding that proof of efficacy be established by looking under a microscope, thereby leading to an absurd world in which our scientists claim (both explicitly and by implication) that substances like laughing gas could not help the depressed. Laughing gas, for God's sake! (See the laughably clueless article in Forbes magazine entitled "Can Laughing Gas Help People with Treatment Resistant Depression?" by Dr. Robert Glatter, published June 9, 2021 ¹¹.)

This failure to recognize the relevance of drug prohibition to the assisted suicide debate is part of a still larger problem: the fact that the depressed are not considered stakeholders in that debate. The only recognized stakeholders are the white American young people whom this nation refuses "on principle" to educate about safe drug use. This is why I hope that you will consider publishing an article of mine on this subject to set that record straight. I am an expert on this topic insofar as I am a chronic depressive who was turned into a ward of the healthcare state thanks to drug prohibition, which outlawed all the substances that could cheer me up in a trice and shunted me off instead onto an expensive and under-performing Big Pharma "med" that is far harder to kick than heroin. Medical ethicists talk about the rights of the patient, but what about my right not to be a patient in the first place? This is a humiliating status quo. I have to see an RN who is less than half my age every three months of my life for the purpose of obtaining yet another supply of the "meds" that I have been taking responsibly for over three decades now. These sessions always begin with a long list of humiliating questions, including, "Have you considered suicide since your last visit?", to which I always want to respond: "Only when I think how drug prohibition has turned me into a patient for life."

PROPOSAL

I would like to write a first-person opinion piece on this subject for Reason magazine. My goals in doing so would be threefold: 1) to give a voice to the tens of millions of med-dependent Americans (including 1 in 4 American women ¹²) who are sick and tired of jumping through humiliating hoops in order to receive an expensive, underperforming and highly dependence-causing med; 2) to remind the world of what Thomas Szasz pointed out long ago: that when we outlaw recreational drugs, we outlaw therapeutic drugs as well ¹³; and 3) to convince people like Claire Brosseau that they should not be demanding a newfangled right to assisted suicide, but that they should rather be insisting on their time-honored right to take care of their own health as they see fit: in other words, that they should be demanding an immediate end to drug prohibition ¹⁴.

These are not Libertarian arguments, perhaps, but they do strengthen the Libertarian case for re-legalizing drugs by highlighting a downside of drug prohibition that is never discussed in America: namely, the fact that drug prohibition has led to the complete infantilization of adults by the so-called "mental healthcare" field, a field that clearly has drug prohibition to thank for much, if not most, of its power, influence and financial well-being today.

I hope you agree with me that med-dependent Americans deserve a voice in the drug debate. If so, please let me know and I will be happy to write an opinion piece against drug prohibition from this so-far ignored point of view. I will be happy to provide footnotes for all objective claims that I might make in such a piece.

Sincerely Yours...

PS I am founder of the Drug War Philosopher website at abolishthedea.com, where I have written hundreds of essays against drug prohibition over the last eight years. My site is unique in that I alone argue from the point of view of someone who has "skin in the game," as someone who has been turned into a ward of the healthcare state by drug prohibition. I have attempted to share my concerns with various mainstream publications (like Rolling Stone ¹⁵, The Atlantic ¹⁶ and The New York Times ¹⁷); however, I have been ghosted by them all. I guess their healthcare writers believe that I should just "shut up and take my meds." Nor can I publish my story on platforms like "The Conversation,¹⁸" because they insist that I acquire a Ph.D. before I can speak up. (Although I majored in Philosophy – VCU 1989 – I have no Ph.D. in the field.) This is quite irritating because it means that drug-hating researchers can bash drugs at will on that platform in impressive-looking papers containing a long list of nepotistic footnotes, thereby giving drug prohibition a veneer of science, and yet I am not allowed to write a rebuttal "from the other side of the couch" as someone whom our dogmatic hatred of drugs has turned into a patient for life.

I am also the only philosopher in the world who formally protested to the FDA about their proposal to start treating "laughing gas" as a drug. I protested in the name of academic freedom and the legacy of William James, whose work with laughing gas changed his philosophical point of view about the nature of consciousness and of reality writ large ¹⁹:

One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James ²⁰

It is a sign of the bamboozled times that James' alma mater, Harvard University, does not even mention laughing gas in their online biography of the man ²¹.

Notes:

1: No one would need assisted suicide if we ended drug prohibition: what Claire Brosseau's case tells us about the warped mindset of the west when it comes to drugs DWP (up)
2: Jim Beam and Drugs DWP (up)
3: The Semmelweis Effect in the War on Drugs DWP (up)
4: Reason: Free Minds and Free Markets Reason magazine (up)
5: Open Letter to Claire Brosseau DWP (up)
6: Nolen, Stephanie, and Chloë Ellingson. 2025. “Claire Brosseau Wants to Die. Will Canada Let Her?” The New York Times, December 29, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/health/assisted-death-mental-illness-canada.html. (up)
7: “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)
8: Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas DWP (up)
9: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
10: Shulgin, Alexander T, and Ann Shulgin. 2019. Pihkal : A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Ca: Transform Press. (up)
11: Glatter, Robert. 2021. “Can Laughing Gas (Nitrous Oxide) Help People with Treatment-Resistant Depression?” Forbes, June 9, 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2021/06/09/can-laughing-gas-nitrous-oxide-help-people-with-treatmentresistant-depre (up)
12: Richard Louis Miller. 2017. Psychedelic Medicine : The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca. Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press. (up)
13: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)
14: Open Letter to Claire Brosseau DWP (up)
15: Cocaine is a Blessing, not a Curse DWP (up)
16: How the Atlantic Supports the Drug War DWP (up)
17: Claire Brosseau does not need the right to assisted suicide: she needs the right to take care of her own health as she sees fit DWP (up)
18: The Depressing Story of Laughing Gas in the age of drug prohibition DWP (up)
19: Why the FDA should not schedule Laughing Gas DWP (up)
20: The Varieties of Religious Experience James, William, Goodreads, New York, 1902 (up)
21: How Harvard University Censored the Biography of William James DWP (up)

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The best harm-reduction strategy is to re-legalize drugs.

The UK just legalized assisted dying. This means that you can use drugs to kill a person, but you still can't use drugs to make that person want to live.

@HKSExecEd The use of Ecstasy brought UNPRECEDENTED peace and love to the British dance floors in the 1990s. When are political scientists going to acknowledge the potential for such substances to pull our species back from the brink of nuclear annihilation?

The fact that drugs have positive uses for human beings is a psychological corollary of Husserl's phenomenology and Whitehead's philosophy of organism.

Americans HATE big government -- and yet they have no problem with government using drug prohibition to control their pain relief and how and how much they can think and feel in this life.

Most people think that drugs like cocaine, MDMA, LSD and amphetamines can only be used recreationally. WRONG ! This represents a very naive understanding of human psychology. We deny common sense in order to cater to the drug war orthodoxy that "drugs have no benefits."

The drug war outlaws everything that could help both prevent addiction and treat it. And then they justify the war on drugs by scaring people with the specter of addiction. They NEED addiction to keep the drug war going.

If Americans want less government, they should get rid of the Drug War Industrial Complex, rather than abandoning democracies around the world and leaving a vacuum for Russia and China to fill.

According to Donald Trump's view of life, Jesus Christ was a chump. We should hate our enemies, not love them.

When the FDA tells us in effect that MDMA is too dangerous to be used to prevent school shootings and to help bring about world peace, they are making political judgments, not scientific ones.

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Why assisted suicide for the depressed cannot be discussed ethically without discussing the drug prohibition that makes it seem necessary

an open letter to Reason magazine

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against the hateful war on US

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

Diary of a Drug Fiend