How black comedies have become reality in Drug-War North America
What the case of Claire Brosseau tells us about the evils of drug prohibition
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 13, 2025
In the 1987 movie "Heathers," the school counselor at Westerburg High speaks the following deadpan advice to Veronica, a rich white student who is depressed because of the ups-and-downs of teenager politics:
"Whether to kill yourself," quoth Pauline, "is one of the most important decisions a teenager has to make."
This was a hilarious line in 1987, because it was understood by the viewer as a patently absurd line, something that a counselor would never say to a depressed student. Fast forward 40 years, however, and this line takes on a grim new meaning when we are now talking about providing medically assisted suicide for the depressed while yet refusing to let the depressed use the drugs that could make them want to live. How can it be that no one recognizes this monstrosity -- this height of Christian Science PERFIDY even.
In 'Heathers,' the counselor warns Veronica: "Whether to kill yourself is one of the most important decisions a teenager has to make.' This advice has gone mainstream now that we have legalized assisted suicide without re-legalizing drugs.
I used to be forgiving for psychiatrists who refrained from standing up for their patients' right to godsend medicine, but now we live in a world in which that failure to provide healing is leading DIRECTLY TO STATE-ASSISTED DEATH!!
This is the bizarre dystopia that we have come to by following the drug-war ideology of substance demonization to its logically absurd conclusion: namely, to the point that we think it is actually better to be dead than to use the substances that the western world has demonized as "drugs."
Why am I the only one in the world who is calling this to the attention of the pundits -- and the Stephanie Nolens of the world who write articles on this subject while completely ignoring what it tells us about America's deadly attitude toward drugs1 -- and yet Stephanie Nolen is the New York Times healthcare reporter? Since when has unnecessary suicide become healthy, Stephanie?
We were already well on the road to this path because our doctors have long advocated brain-damaging shock therapy for the depressed while refusing to fight for the right of their patients to use substances that improve mentation and actually create new neurons in the brain -- all without damaging that organ. I simply cannot believe that I am the only one who recognizes this problem, wherefore I am determined to create a new non-profit organization called Depressed Patients for the end of Drug Prohibition -- the policy that now invites us to kill ourselves with the help of the state - but not to use drugs that might make us want to live!
Richard Evans Schultes seems to have originated the harebrained idea (since used by the US Supreme Court to suppress new religions) that you have no right to use drugs in a religious ritual if you did not grow up in a society that had such practices. What tyrannical idiocy!
If Americans cannot handle the truth about drugs, then there is something wrong with Americans, not with drugs.
After a long life, I have come to the conclusion that when all the establishment is united, it is always wrong. (Harold MacMillan)
No drug causes addiction after one use. From this fact alone, it follows that even drugs like meth and crack and Fentanyl can be used wisely -- on an intermittent basis.
Freud found that cocaine CURED most people's depression and he "got off it" without trouble.
It's interesting that Jamaicans call the police 'Babylon,' given that Babylon denotes a society seeking materialist pleasures. Drug use is about transcending the material world and seeking spiritual states: states that the materialist derides as meaningless.
In the 19th century, author Richard Middleton wrote how poets would get together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses."
Outlawing drugs is outlawing obvious therapies for Alzheimer's and autism patients, therapies based on common sense and not on the passion-free behaviorism of modern scientists.
Google founders used to enthuse about the power of free speech, but Google is actively shutting down videos that tell us how to grow mushrooms -- MUSHROOMS, for God's sake. End the drug war and this hateful censorship of a free people.
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.
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