Claire Brosseau should be fighting for her right to take care of her own health, not for her right to assisted suicide
Drug Prohibition is the 6,000-pound gorilla in the room when it comes to the MAID act
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 3, 2026
The MAID act is the Medical Assistance in Dying act in Canada. It was passed in 2016. To my astonishment and dismay, no one who discusses the act (or who discusses assisted suicide in general) will even mention drug prohibition, the government policy that makes assisted suicide necessary in the first place. This omission becomes hugely worrisome in the case of the severely depressed. Scientists already recommend brain-damaging shock therapy for the depressed without even mentioning the fact that drug prohibition outlaws precisely the drugs that could make that shock therapy unnecessary. Assisted suicide laws now seek to further normalize drug prohibition -- to render it even more invisible -- by giving the suicide the right to kill themselves.
Why are we fighting for a right for the depressed to kill themselves without at the same time denouncing drug prohibition? Better yet, why are we not putting all our energies into fighting drug prohibition, rather than just assuming that it is a given in North American life?
Americans have been taught to superstitiously believe that drugs are bad. Drugs are not bad or good. They are inanimate objects. Their widespread misuse tells us something about society, not about drugs.
As a depressed person myself, one who has been turned into a ward of the healthcare state with dependence-causing meds -- one who now lives chiefly for ending the drug prohibition that has denied me the right to heal for a lifetime now -- I write letters all the time to the pundits in the assisted suicide debates, trying to make them see that the discussion of this topic must include a discussion of drug prohibition, front and center. Instead, I seem to be the only person in the world who notices the glaringly obvious connection. Just like brain-damaging shock therapy, assisted suicide would not be necessary if we had the right to take care of our own health -- and therefore it seems bizarre and terrifying to me that we are discussing assisted suicide for the depressed without also discussing the drug prohibition which renders it necessary in the first place!
Those who do so are basically counseling that I myself should commit suicide, given that drug prohibition has outlawed all the drugs that work for me and I too have deep and abiding depression because of that fact. In my case, though, I see the obvious connection with drug prohibition and so have vowed to live on, to find my happiness in speaking out against the evils of drug prohibition rather than devoting the final years of my life to obtaining a right to end it. In so doing, I would be surrendering to the prohibitionist enemy, by basically telling them: "Fine, I'll get out of your way quietly without pointing out that you are the villain of the piece! My lips are sealed! I won't squeal."
I write many emails on this topic to pundits involved in these issues. Most go unanswered. I did recently receive a response to my concerns from Udo Schüklenk, Professor and Ontario Research Chair in Bioethics at Queen's University.
I will avoid quoting the professor directly but his response to my original email may be inferred from my reply below. Basically, the professor agreed that drug prohibition was a causative factor, but argued that MAID was necessary given the world in which we live.
NOTE: In the following letter to Professor Schüklenk, I criticize what I see as the mainstream disdain for "happy" drugs. This is not meant as a criticism of the professor himself, however, who, in fact, assures me that he does not hold that pejorative view of such substances.
Thanks for the feedback!
These are fraught issues so please do not take anything amiss in my response. I am writing against mainstream ideas in general, not yours in specific (whether they be mainstream or no).
I was basically "fired" as a patient by my psychiatrist last year because I brought up the subject of psychiatry's dependence-causing meds (like Effexor, far harder to kick than heroin 1 for long-term users), and he took it personally and claimed I was questioning his integrity.
Unfortunately, to be honest on these topics may always risk giving offence, because our conclusions presuppose some of our most fundamental beliefs concerning what life is all about and how we should protest injustice, and so forth.
Drug prohibition literally fries the brain. The FDA encourages brain-damaging shock therapy for the severely depressed while our government refuses to let us use godsend medicines that could cheer us up in a trice, and without brain damage!
First, it is true that ending MAID would not make the depressed eligible for "happy" drugs.
But first I must say that this characterization of a wide variety of drugs as "happy drugs" betrays a puritanical bias. We feel there is something wrong with unwonted happiness. Such puritanism is normalized and weaponized by reductive materialism, which tells us to search for "real" cures, the kind of approach that led to the creation of modern antidepressants which have proven to be extremely dependence-causing, apparently thanks to the way that they muck about with brain chemistry. Ironically, Dr. Schpancer of Psychology Today now tells us that no one knows why these drugs "work," assuming that they do so, thus putting the lie to the scientific bona fides upon which these drugs were marketed. These twin biases of puritanism and materialism have brought us to the pass where materialists like Dr. Robert Glatter can publish an op-ed piece in Forbes in 2021 questioning whether laughing gas could help the depressed – laughing gas, a substance that gives some users a glimpse of heaven itself! Happiness has many uses when leveraged by psychologically obvious protocols. It is little wonder that materialists can't "cure" depression when they mistrust happiness itself.
It is also worth noting here that cocaine use did not make Freud feel drugged-out and unrealistically happy. In fact, Freud said he did not even feel like he was on a drug when he used the alkaloid of the much-villainized coca plant of the Incas. But he did notice that he had a new mental focus and a sort of natural feeling of endurance.
North Americans are so bamboozled by Drug War lies that we literally would prefer suicide to drug use.
The real problem here is that it was a category error to place scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine in the first place. It is a sort of pharmacological colonialism to do so, in that it holds holistic-acting medicines to materialist standards, thereby giving researchers the excuse they need to say that one-time panaceas have no beneficial uses whatsoever. In reality, the efficacy of drugs should be determined by the experience of a unique user, not by the ability of materialist science to assimilate the working mechanism into existing reductive theory.
My key point, however, is that someone has to bring up the fact that drug prohibition is the root of the problem that creates the need for assisted suicide in the first place: and how? By denying the depressed an endless list of potential "medicines" (as opposed to "happy drugs") which could have enormous potential to make them want to LIVE!
Someone has to hold drug prohibition responsible for the evils that it causes. Until we do so, the real problem will never even be addressed, let alone fixed.
And the subject of assisted suicide is just one of many areas in which North Americans refuse to hold drug prohibition responsible for the evils that it causes.
Drug prohibition has destroyed inner cities around the globe by incentivizing gun violence – and yet community groups continue to protest violence without even mentioning the drug prohibition that created it in the first place – indeed, they are so bamboozled as to blame drugs themselves for the problems that drug prohibition has brought about.
Drug prohibition has rendered shock therapy necessary for the severely depressed, and yet the groups that protest shock therapy refuse to protest drug prohibition. I take this personally having had family members treated disastrously with this "scientific" cure, which smacks to me of the excessive blood letting of yore.
Drug prohibition has censored science almost completely, to the point where Laura Sanders in Science News describes depression as a tough nut to crack: whereas depression would not even be a "thing" in North America had the coca plant remained legal.
It is not enough that many people "know" these things. Someone has got to start pointing them out loudly and clearly.
But the way I see it, MAID is being advanced in what Whitehead might have called "willful ignoration" of the role of drug prohibition in rendering it necessary in the first place.
If Claire Brosseau were my sister, I would be struggling to end drug prohibition on her behalf and urging her to live on by channeling her dismay and sadness into a struggle, not for the right to assisted suicide, but rather to her far more basic and established right to take care of her own health as she sees fit. I would overcome my legal fears and seek to supply her with cocaine and laughing gas and the sorts of phenethylamines about which Alexander Shulgin wrote in Pihkal. I would work with the few remaining shaman in Latin America to learn more about the many psychoactive medicines of which Richard Schultes became aware but of which North Americans remain in willful ignorance, thanks to drug law and the puritanical and materialist assumptions with which it is excused if not explained. As for breaking the law, I have bent over backwards, as they say, to obey outrageous drug laws in the past, but at some point it becomes immoral to obey such laws – especially when the price of that obedience is the unnecessary death of a loved one.
In such a case, I would feel a duty to disobey – and, if arrested, to parlay my arrest into a cause célèbre for the ending of drug prohibition – and thus to remind the world that there are far more stakeholders in the drugs debate than the white North American young people whom we refuse "on principle" to teach about safe use.
PS I think the slightly disparaging attitude evinced by your use of the word "happy" goes a long way toward explaining why our professional scientists and philosophers are not discussing drug prohibition in connection with assisted suicide. They feel in some sense "above" medicines that simply "work." Their world has been censored since childhood from all positive references to drugs, and so they see them as disreputable and hedonistic. Meanwhile, they see almost no downsides to Big Pharma drugs, because they purport to flatter materialist theory in their supposed methods of action.
NOTE: The point of the above postscript is to suggest that the term "happy" is implicitly pejorative when used by most mainstream pundits on this topic. I do not mean to imply that Udo shares that jaundiced viewpoint. In fact, he has assured me of the contrary and I greatly appreciate his willingness to discuss these sorts of seemingly forbidden issues.
I will gladly respect the police once we remove them from Gestapo duty by ending the war on drugs. Police should also learn to live on a budget, without deriving income from confiscating houses and dormitories, etc.
Researchers insult our intelligence when they tell us that drugs like MDMA and opium and laughing gas have not been proven to work. Everyone knows they work. That's precisely why drug warriors hate them.
The drug war is a whole wrong way of looking at the world. It tells us that substances can be judged "up" or "down," which is anti-scientific and blinds us to endless beneficial uses.
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda
(There would be no Hindu religion today had the drug war been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.)
Proof that materialism is wrong is "in the pudding." It is why scientists are not calling for the use of laughing gas and MDMA by the suicidal. Because they refuse to recognize anything that's obvious. They want their cures to be demonstrated under a microscope.
Irony of ironies, that the indignant 19th-century hatred of liquor should ultimately result in the outlawing of virtually every mind-affecting substance on the planet EXCEPT for liquor.
Psychedelics and entheogens should be freely available to all dementia patients. These medicines can increase neuronal plasticity and even grow new neurons. Besides, they can inspire and elate -- or do we puritans feel that our loved ones have no right to peace of mind?
If MAPS wants to make progress with MDMA they should start "calling out" the FDA for judging holistic medicines by materialist standards, which means ignoring all glaringly obvious benefits.
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.
@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?
Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.
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