The Food & Drug Administration announced today it will convene a public meeting in October to review the psychiatric and behavioral side effects of Chantix. In 2009 the FDA required a “black box” label warning of hostility, agitation depression and suicidal thoughts after dozens of suicides and hundreds of reports of suicidal behavior were connected to the anti-smoking drug.
FDA Reviews Psychiatric Side Effects of Chantix (Boston.com)
FDA Reviews Psychiatric Side Effects of Chantix (ABC News)
FDA Reviewing Psychiatric Side Effects of Pfizer’s Chantix (Wall Street Journal)
My husband’s god son completed suicide while using Chantrix to quit smoking. He was only 26 years old and he left behind a wife and two children. He never had any history of a psychiatic diagnosis or treatment in his life. That medication and the people who marketed it are evil. As bad as smoking is, there are worse things than nicotine addiction: a broken clinical trial system, capitalist greed, and a haste to get potentially harmful medications to the market without long term safety studies.
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I did have a client who swore that the Chantix worked great for her. But, as someone who had the adverse withdrawal effects of the smoking cessation drug, Wellbutrin, misdiagnosed as “bipolar.” When my doctor tried to prescribe Chantix to me in 2010, I told him I’d research the drug and decide if it’d work well for me. The medical wall of silence toting moron told me not to research it, so I listened to the long list of ADRs on a commercial, and decided not to try it. It strikes me the medical community may believe it’s their right to turn all those utilizing the legal, but not medically controlled, “drugs” into their Guinea pigs for psychotropic experiments.
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