Just say no to drugs and yes to brain-damaging shock therapy
The insane world of healthcare in the age of drug prohibition
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
April 29, 2026
Back in late January of this year, I went on record as the only philosopher in the country to point out that assisted suicide for the depressed cannot be discussed ethically without also discussing the drug prohibition which makes it necessary, at least in the minds of the depressed1. In other words, I pointed out that you cannot talk ethically about assisted suicide for the depressed without at least mentioning the fact that our government outlaws all substances that inspire and elate. I was sharing this insight in response to a New York Times article by "global healthcare reporter" Stephanie Nolen about the attempts of depressed Canadian Claire Brosseau to qualify for state assisted suicide, a story in which nobody mentioned the fact that drug prohibition had outlawed drugs that could help make Brosseau wish to live2. Surely, I felt, I merely needed to point out this glaring omission on the part of the principals in Claire's case and they would speak out against drug prohibition as a violation of Claire's right to heal, the more so in that failing to do so could lead to Claire's unnecessary death by convincing her that she was truly out of hope.
In fact, I wrote to Claire herself, urging her to stop advocating for her totally unprecedented right to be killed by the state and to advocate instead for her time-honored right to heal, to advocate instead for her right to feel relief, to advocate instead for an end to drug prohibition.
Well, it's been a frustrating but eye-opening three months -- because I found that no one connected with Claire's case (not even Claire herself) saw any connection whatsoever between drug prohibition and assisted suicide for the depressed. I've written to at least 20 of the mainstream "players" in the online debate over assisted suicide for the depressed in the last three months, and I have been either ghosted or gaslighted by them all. And so I asked myself, where do I go from here? I was basically making the seemingly modest claim that drug use is better than dying, and yet people were disagreeing with me, if only implicitly. How am I supposed to argue after that? Do I have to start listing the downsides of being dead, with footnotes referencing academics who have done studies on the subject to support those conclusions? I really felt like the mainstream was gaslighting me on this topic. But I soon realized what the real take-home message was from this politically correct silence about my claims. I realized that Americans truly were brainwashed by Drug War propaganda into believing that drugs can have no positive uses -- otherwise they would cry "foul" when the state began killing people who might otherwise have been encouraged to live with the help of outlawed medicines.
It's a tough subject to write about. What do you say when the most powerful and obvious arguments fail to convince?
Fortunately, I have at least one option remaining to me. If I can't convince the "experts" to acknowledge common sense, at least I can play the role of a Socratic gadfly by posting some politically incorrect comments in response to their mainstream essays on sites like Mad in America. I say sites LIKE Mad in America, but actually this is the only site I know where I have the ability to post my comments prominently in response to brand-new mainstream essays. This ability came about after I purchased a year's subscription to the site under the mistaken belief that they would actually publish my essays on these topics. This was before site and organization founder Robert Whitaker started gaslighting me about the perfectly obvious relevance of drug prohibition to the case of Claire Brosseau, whom, if she dies, will have been sacrificed on the Christian Science altar of America's superstitious attitudes toward drugs. But I decided to keep the subscription as long as it guaranteed me the right to turn up the heat on the mainstream with some straight talk about drug benefits in the comments section.
By the way, this setup seems too good to be true, so I will try not to be surprised when my ability to comment has been restricted or withdrawn by Robert and company.
In the meantime, however, let's see how many chains I can rattle with the following comments posted today in response to a new MIA essay by Psychologist Richard Sears entitled “It Was Like They Crushed a Beautiful Flower”: Families Speak Out on the Harms of ECT.
This is the state of healthcare in the U.S.: We prefer to damage the brain of the depressed rather than let them use substances that could inspire them with joy and purpose.
My response to “'It Was Like They Crushed a Beautiful Flower': Families Speak Out on the Harms of ECT”, by Richard Sears, published April 28, 2026 on the Mad in America website.3
Thanks for highlighting the downsides of what I personally view to be a pseudoscientific and barbaric treatment. My usually cheerful mother always lowered her voice and frowned whenever she discussed her brother's ECT sessions. I was struck by my uncle's gloominess even as a kid, and I only later learned that I had been seeing him after he had been treated with shock therapy. If that was success, I would hate to see failure.
I have a unique take on this subject, however, not just because I am a chronic depressive myself but because I have been studying American drug attitudes from a philosophical point of view over the last eight years. I have come to believe that we cannot discuss the propriety of treatments like ECT without discussing the propriety of the drug prohibition which helps render such treatments "necessary" in the first place, at least in the minds of the severely depressed and their families.
In "Diary of a Drug Fiend," Aleister Crowley described his first use of cocaine as follows:
The depression lifted from my mind like the sun coming out of the clouds.
Humphry Davy said the following of his first use of laughing gas:
I now had a great disposition to laugh... My emotions were enthusiastic and sublime.
And the users of the phenethylamines synthesized by chemist Alexander Shulgin in the 1990s gave such testimony as:
A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like.
More than tranquil, I was completely at peace.
I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing.
When I consider the above citations, while recognizing as well that psychoactive substances have inspired entire religions (for the Vedic people, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Inca, various Native American tribes, the Greek mystery cults, etc.), I am filled with a sense of outrage, a feeling of what I consider to be righteous anger at how drug prohibition has outlawed my right to heal, while shunting me off instead onto Big Pharma meds that, as Julie Holland testifies, can be harder to kick than heroin, a view that I can confirm from a futile year-long attempt to get off Venlafaxine, after which I experienced depression far more intense than that for which I had started treatment in the first place well over 40 years ago.
So now, when I see ECT and even assisted suicide for the depressed being discussed without any reference to drug prohibition, I feel I have to speak up. This is not a criticism of you personally, Richard, for in my opinion, nearly everyone in the behavioral healthcare field writes in apparent ignorance of the power of outlawed drugs to inspire and elate.
Sadly, I seem to be about the only person in America who sees this as a problem. I don't know if you've heard of the case of Claire Brosseau. She is the depressed Canadian activist who is demanding her right to assisted suicide. In other words, she is asking the state to kill her using drugs. And what state is that? It is the same state that will not let her use drugs that could help make her wish to live!
I have therefore written to all principals in Claire's case -- including to Claire herself -- insisting that assisted suicide for the depressed cannot be ethically discussed without discussing the drug prohibition which helps render it necessary in the first place by outlawing all substances that are known to inspire and elate.
To my amazement and horror, no one seems to agree with me. Instead, I am told that Claire already "tried drugs" and that they did not work. But "drugs" is not an objective category of substances but rather a catchall pejorative for a wide variety of substances of which politicians disapprove (a category growing bigger every day thanks to drug synthesis and the discoveries of ethnobotanists). Such arguments also reckon without the effects of drug prohibition, which will have severely limited Claire's access, even to illegal drugs. Moreover, strategic use of drugs for beneficial purposes is scarcely imagined possible in America; how can we expect Claire to know how to use drugs in that way, especially when she's living life inside the mental fog of severe depression?
But Claire would have to be an alien from Mars to be unsusceptible to the positive effects of all psychoactive drugs. Our minds are biochemical machines that are made in such a way as to respond to psychoactive medicines. She herself says she loved "drugs" in the New York Times story about her case first published in December 2025. What Claire really needs is the help of a kind of professional for which we do not even have a name yet in drug-hating America: a pharmacologically savvy empath who will suggest strategic usage patterns of a wide variety of medicines, such that Claire can continue to live with the help of strategically applied motivation from a variety of psychoactive substances (assuming we can bring ourselves to accept the modest proposition that drug use is at least better than death itself). If Claire wins her right to be killed by the state, she will be helping to further normalize the demonstrably deadly policy of drug prohibition. She will also be setting a bizarre and dangerous precedent for chronically depressed people like myself. I can already envision a dystopian future in which the TV ad voiceovers say: "Depressed? Ask your doctor if assisted suicide is right for YOU."
So in a way, it's not surprising that no one recognizes the relevance of drug prohibition to the debate about ECT, given that most people do not even consider drug prohibition to be relevant to the debate over assisted suicide for the depressed. Of course, when I say "no one," I mean no one among the movers-and-shakers on such topics. I dare say if we took a vote among the chronically depressed, we would see a different reaction -- although American media has been suppressing talk about beneficial drug use for so long now that even the chronically depressed may believe the lie that there is no hope left for them besides brain damage or suicide.
I think it's time that we recognize that the chronically depressed like myself are stakeholders in America's drug debate and that drug prohibition has outlawed our right to heal. I live with the proof of that fact every day. I hope that someday the experts in the fields of psychology and psychiatry will recognize this disempowerment as well (even though it's not necessarily in their financial interests to do so) and demand the end of drug prohibition in the name of restoring the right to heal to the depressed.
News flash: certain mushrooms can help you improve your life! It's the biggest story in the history of mycology! And yet you wouldn't know it from visiting the websites of most mushroom clubs.
Drug-designing chemists have no expertise in deciding what constitutes a cure for depression. As Schopenhauer wrote:
"The mere study of chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher."
"Just ONE HORSE took the life of my daughter." This message brought to you by the Partnership for a Death Free America.
In a free world, almost all depressed individuals could do WITHOUT doctors: these adult human beings could handle their own depression with the informed intermittent use of a wide variety of psychoactive substances.
I'm told antidepressant withdrawal is fine because it doesn't cause cravings. Why is it better to feel like hell than to have a craving? In any case, cravings are caused by prohibition. A sane world could also end cravings with the help of other drugs.
The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.
We've got to take the fight TO the drug warriors by starting to hold them legally responsible for having spread "Big Lies" about "drugs." Anyone involved in producing the "brain frying" PSA of the 1980s should be put on trial for willfully spreading a toxic lie.
Everyone's biggest concern is the economy? Is nobody concerned that Trump has promised to pardon insurrectionists and get revenge on critics? Is no one concerned that Trump taught Americans to doubt democracy by questioning our election fairness before one single vote was cast?
Healthline posted an article in 2021 about the benefits of getting off of antidepressants. They did not even mention the biggest benefit: NO LONGER BEING AN ETERNAL PATIENT -- no longer being a child in the eyes of an all-knowing healthcare system.
"When two men who have been in an aggressive mood toward each other take part in the ritual, one is able to say to the other, 'Come, let us drink, for there is something between us.' " re: the Mayan use of the balche drink in Encyc of Psych Plants, by Ratsch & Hofmann
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