Homepage of the Drug War Philosopher, Brian Quass
blog icon orange rss icon with stylized radio waves bird icon for twitter bird icon for twitter substack icon


back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow


Suicide and the Drug War

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 25, 2022



Today is National Suicide Prevention Day, but no one's talking about the 6,000-pound gorilla in the room. For the fact is that the Drug War has outlawed all the godsend psychoactive medicines that could actually help to prevent suicide.

The coca leaf has been used for millennia by the Indians of Peru to combat fatigue and keep their society together in peace and harmony. Re-legalize the leaf and the suicide crisis would disappear overnight. But Drug Warriors have tarred the leaf's reputation by conflating its effects with those of the cocaine 1 2 alkaloid that the leaf contains. This is like demonizing peaches because they contain prussic acid. By re-legalizing the coca leaf, we would not only cut down on suicides, but we would end the civil wars in South America that our Drug War has caused and is causing this very minute in Mexico.

Learn more. Read: Potter, Carol. "Coca: Divine Plant of the Incas." Scribd.com. January 01, 2017. https://www.scribd.com/read/369871777/Coca-Divine-Plant-of-the-Incas.

Laughing gas could end the suicide crisis overnight, by giving the depressed temporary relief from sorrow -- and, as importantly, something to look forward to in their darker moments: namely, the fact that they can use laughing gas 3 occasionally to take a break from gloomy introspection. Yes, there are legitimate safety concerns with all substances, but that is precisely why we need to start educating people about safe use, rather than conducting the fearmongering smear campaigns that the Drug Warrior always launches against psychoactive medicine.

MDMA 4 (aka ecstasy) brought peace, love and understanding to the dance floor. It could work wonders in preventing suicide, and is already being fast-tracked for psychotherapy. It should have been legalized 40 years ago, but the self-serving DEA ruled against its own legal council in 1985 in order to keep the drug illegal, clearly so that the DEA could keep its relevance and its workload. (Ecstasy was blamed for a handful of deaths, but these deaths were all caused by the Drug War itself, which discourages education about substances and demonizes them instead.)

And what about the shrooms that grow at my very feet? Psilocybin is a therapeutic godsend for depression, and yet the government says I cannot use this gift from Mother Nature, thus violating the natural law upon which America was founded.

And what about ayahuasca? It has spawned new religions. Surely it could help prevent suicide as part of a therapeutic regimen of some kind.

And yet the world is so bamboozled by Drug Warrior lies that we can actually have a Suicide Prevention Day in which nobody even mentions the Drug War! Why not? Because we have been fed the unscientific lie that certain substances (namely "drugs" as hypocritically defined by racist and warmongering politicians) are bad in and of themselves, without regard for how, when or why they are used. But, of course, there are no substances of that kind. Even the deadly Botox has positive uses.

The Drug War not only encourages suicide by denying godsend medicine, but it even forces children to suffer severe pain. Why? Because many countries outlaw the use of morphine 5 in hospice because they'd rather fight a War on Drugs than to keep children from suffering intense pain.

When will this madness end? Only when America wakes up to the true evil of the anti-patient and unscientific "War on Drugs."

In short, we have no right to complain about suicide if we're not willing to complain about the Drug War.


You have no right to complain about suicide 6 if you're not willing to complain about the War on Drugs.



1 in 4 American women are chemically dependent on Big Pharma 7 8 drugs for life, drugs which cause emotional flat-lining in long-term users. They are eternal patients. And the Drug Warrior has no problem with this. For the Drug Warrior does not want us to stop using drugs, he or she wants us to start using the RIGHT drugs -- the ones that benefit Wall Street and the healthcare industry while giving jobs to law enforcement by outlawing the stuff that actually works when used wisely. Of course, the Drug Warriors make sure that there is no "wise use," since they're all about slandering drugs, not educating about them.









Notes for essay entitled Suicide and the Drug War:

1: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
2: “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)
3: Forbes Magazine's Laughable Article about Nitrous Oxide DWP (up)
4: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
5: Three takeaway lessons from the use of morphine by William Halsted, co-founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School DWP (up)
6: Why Americans Prefer Suicide to Drug Use DWP (up)
7: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
8: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)




read more essays here





Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




Drug War censorship is supported by our "science" magazines, which pretend that outlawed drugs do not exist, and so write what amount to lies about the supposed intransigence of things like depression and anxiety.

Judging from research articles, they do not even teach the many obvious benefits of drugs in med school.

Uruguay wants to re-legalize psilocybin mushrooms -- but only for use in a psychiatrist's office. So let me get this straight: psychiatrists are the new privileged shaman? It's a mushroom, for God's sake. Just re-legalize the damn thing and stop treating us like children.

Mariani Wine is the real McCoy, with Bolivian coca leaves (tho' not with cocaine, as Wikipedia says). I'll be writing more about my experience with it soon. I was impressed. It's the same drink "on which" HG Wells and Jules Verne wrote their stories.

Americans outlaw drugs and then insist that those drugs did not have much to offer in any case. It's like I took away your car and then told you that car ownership was overrated.

The problem with blaming things on addiction genes is that it whitewashes the role of society and its laws. It's easy to imagine an enlightened country wherein drug availability, education and attitudes make addiction highly unlikely, addiction genes or no addiction genes.

ME: "What are you gonna give me for my depression, doc? MDMA? Laughing gas? Occasional opium smoking? Chewing of the coca leaf?" DOC: "No, I thought we'd fry your brain with shock therapy instead."

The FDA approves of shock therapy and the psychiatric pill mill, but they cannot see the benefits in MDMA, a drug that brought peace, love and understanding to the dance floor in 1990s Britain.

Endless drugs could help with depression. Any drug that inspires and elates is an antidepressant, partly by the effect itself and partly by the mood-elevation caused by anticipation of use (facts which are far too obvious for materialists and drug warriors to understand -- let alone materialist drug warriors!).

"Arrest made in Matthew Perry death." Oh, yeah? Did they arrest the drug warriors who prioritized propaganda over education?


Click here to see All Tweets against the hateful War on Us






back navigation arrow forward navigation arrow
Book Cover

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

This book features 150 annotated images, designed to force brainwashed Americans to confront the fact that drug prohibition is wrong. Here is what author Richard Parrish II says of the book's compiler: "The drug prohibition philosopher provides first-hand, principled, persuasive, and insightful arguments against the current drug prohibition regime..."

Purchase Your Copy
Book Cover

Diary of a Drug Fiend

This is the only full-cast recording of Aleister Crowley's 1922 classic paeon to common sense. It is the first book -- and so far almost the only book -- to stake out a philosophy of drug use that is compatible with human freedom, one in which we learn to use drugs as wisely as possible for the benefit of humanity. This recording was produced by the Drug War Philosopher and your purchases help support his effort to push back against the tragically counterproductive policy of drug prohibition, in the name of human freedom and of humanity's right to heal.

Purchase Your Copy



No cookies, no ads paid for by amoral and immoral billionaires (or trillionaires).


Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

The Partnership for a Death Free America is a proud sponsor of The Drug War Philosopher website @ abolishthedea.com.


Copyright 2026, Brian Ballard Quass Contact: quass@quass.com

tombstone for American Democracy, 1776-2024, RIP (up)