The immorality of assisted suicide in the age of drug prohibition
by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
February 24, 2026
When I first learned that North Americans like Claire Brosseau were demanding the right to assisted suicide on account of their depression, I was stunned. I simply could not understand how such westerners could "make that call" without realizing the obvious: namely, that it is drug prohibition which is keeping them from using drugs that could make them want to live! I could not understand how activists like Claire were not calling for an end to drug prohibition rather than demanding their right to die with the help of the state: the same state that was refusing to let them heal! Now that I am coming to my senses after that blow, like a boxer shaking off the effects of a left hook, I realize that assisted suicide for any reason is morally reprehensible insofar as the option is chosen in willful ignorance of the option-limiting policy of drug prohibition.
How can we decide on a person's quality of life without taking their mental state into account? And if drug prohibition prevents us from improving that mental state, how can we make a fair decision about "allowing" that patient to die?
Westerners believe they can pass judgment on the value of a paralyzed life by considering only the physical elements of that existence. They pay short shrift to the ability of the human mind to rise above challenges -- so much so that they outlaw all the drugs that could help a disabled person leverage that mental power to new heights of ecstasy and insight.
This mental power arises naturally in some. After having been paralyzed by a stroke, French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby dictated an entire book about his life through the strategic blinking of his left eye. (Had his left eye itself been inoperative, Bauby might well have been considered to be braindead.) We have a moral duty to use any and all drugs necessary to prompt the many less naturally motivated patients to rise above their paralyzed condition as well, not so that they too can write their memoirs, but so that they too can rise above their condition and gain a sort of philosophical perspective on their troubles with the help of the attitude improvement vouchsafed by the strategic use of a wide variety of motivating drugs.
Make no mistake, I occupy the high ground in this argument. I am merely making the common-sense claim that we should use all available medicines to help the paralyzed patient -- whereas the prohibitionists believe that we should use only those drugs of which politicians approve, and to hell with the mental state of the depressed paralytic -- even though the mental state of the patient is ultimately all that really matters for them in life.
As an Elizabethan poet once wrote:
My mind to me a kingdom is;
Such perfect joy therein I find
That it excels all other bliss
Which God or nature hath assign'd.
We are morally guilty of torturing patients when we knowingly deprive them of drugs that could improve their mental states and so improve their ability to tolerate their pathologies, whether we consider those pathologies to be physical or psychological.
Now drug warriors have nitrous oxide in their sights, the substance that inspired the philosophy of William James. They're using the same tired MO: focusing exclusively on potential downsides and never mentioning the benefits of use, and/or denying that any exist.
Drug War propaganda is all about convincing us that we will never be able to use drugs wisely. But the drug warriors are not taking any chances: they're doing all they can to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe. This is the same FDA that signs off on Big Pharma drugs whose advertised side effects include death itself.
Americans heap hypocritical praise on Walt Whitman. What they don't realize is that many of us could be "Walt Whitman for a Day" with the wise use of psychoactive drugs. To the properly predisposed, morphine gives a DEEP appreciation of Mother Nature.
It is far better to "treat the symptoms" than to irreversibly modify brain chemistry in one particular way based on the theories of a financially-motivated biochemical determinist working for a pharmaceutical company.
Trump is the prototypical drug warrior. He knows that he can destroy American freedoms by fearmongering.
This hysterical reaction to rare negative events actually creates more rare negative events. This is why the DEA publicizes "drug problems," because by making them well known, they make the problems more prevalent and can thereby justify their huge budget.
The FDA says that MindMed's LSD drug works. But this is the agency that has not been able to decide for decades now if coca "works," or if laughing gas "works." It's not just science going on at the FDA, it's materialist presuppositions about what constitutes evidence.
Drugs are not the enemy, ignorance is -- the ignorance that the Drug War encourages by teaching us to fear drugs rather than to understand them.
America arrests people whose only crime is that they are trying to be all that they can be in life... in such a way that psychiatrists are not getting THEIR cut.
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.
When I first learned that North Americans like Claire Brosseau were demanding the right to assisted suicide on account of their depression, I was stunned. I simply could not understand how such westerners could "make that call" without realizing the obvious: namely, that it is drug prohibition which is keeping them from using drugs that could make them want to live! I could not understand how activists like Claire were not calling for an end to drug prohibition rather than demanding their right to die with the help of the state: the same state that was refusing to let them heal! Now that I am coming to my senses after that blow, like a boxer shaking off the effects of a left hook, I realize that assisted suicide for any reason is morally reprehensible insofar as the option is chosen in willful ignorance of the option-limiting policy of drug prohibition. 
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