What the case of Claire Brosseau tells us about the drug-hating madness of the west
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 22, 2026
The Case of Claire Brosseau demonstrates how insane North Americans have become thanks to drug propaganda. Even the Cato Institute is supporting Claire Brosseau's right to kill herself, thereby sending the clear message that it is better to die than to use "drugs" that would cheer one up in a trice. There is a potentially endless list of drugs that could improve Brosseau's mood dramatically, yet I am the only one in the world who is pointing this out -- in essays, of course, that are buried alive by Google's inherently conservative algorithms. But I have sent personal emails to the movers-and-shakers on this topic, and no one has replied. They are all determined to frame Brosseau's case as a fight for assisted suicide -- when it should be an enormous red flag that drug prohibition is denying Claire the right to take care of her own health as she sees fit. In other words, Claire and her allies should be fighting for an end to drug prohibition and not for her right to assisted suicide.
How do you change minds in a world where everyone now believes that it is better to DIE than to use drugs?!
Self-medicating is just a pejorative term for taking care of one's own psychological health. Doctors demonize the practice for obvious financial reasons.
Clearly, the answer has got to come from outside the United States. Some country has got to speak up for drug re-legalization on behalf of the citizen's right to take care of their own health as they see fit. Of course, Portugal is a small step in this direction, but the Portuguese system is really just a "kinder, gentler Drug War." Their system still assumes that drug use represents a pathology -- as if it is a disease to attempt to take care of one's own health without the permission of the self-interested healthcare establishment.
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against the hateful war on US
An Englishman's home is his castle.
An American's home is a bouncy castle for the DEA.
All drugs have positive uses at some dose, for some reason, at some time -- but prohibitionists have the absurd idea that drugs can be voted up or down. This anti-scientific notion deprives the modern world of countless godsends.
Drug Prohibition is a crime against humanity. It outlaws our right to take care of our own health.
The term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they connote.
If religious liberty existed, we would be able to use the inspiring phenethylamines created by Alexander Shulgin in the same way and for the same reasons as the Vedic people of India used soma.
Most substance withdrawal would be EASY if drugs were re-legalized and we could use any substance we wanted to mitigate negative psychological effects.
"There has been so much delirious nonsense written about drugs that sane men may well despair of seeing the light." -- Aleister Crowley, from "Essays on Intoxication"
There are endless ways that psychoactive drugs could be creatively combined to combat addiction and a million other things. But the drug warrior says that we have to study each in isolation, and then only for treating one single board-certified condition.
I just asked New York Attorney General Letitia James how much she was getting paid to play Whack-a-Mole. I pointed out that the drug war created the gangs just as liquor prohibition created the Mafia.
Anyone who has read Pihkal by Alexander Shulgin knows that the drug warriors have it exactly backwards. Drugs are our friends. We need to find safe ways to use them to improve ourselves psychologically, spiritually and mentally.
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