It's time once again to talk about the nasty weed, tobacco. I began this column last August and soon after was prescribed the quit-smoking drug Chantix. I had spent the week prior smoking more than I ever had, after somebody else's junior high-style gambit to force hands landed square in the middle of my life.
I was wretched, didn't want to smoke anymore but couldn't seem to shake the damn little marmoset off my back. I would do anything ...; and anything came my way in the form of a pill engineered to block pleasure receptors activated by smoking.
Here is a snippet of what I wrote about it last October:
—¦the pill has visited me with some strange effects. In detail, I can tell you that my Chantix odyssey has been a burst in creativity, sleeplessness and the kind of energy that is just shy of scary."
I went on to refer to writing with a vengeance, a brain buzz and a ramped-up internal engine. Seems because I was neither suicidal nor homicidal, I got off easy. I didn't write openly about the degree to which I was disturbed by Chantix. It permeated every waking and sleeping moment (when I could sleep) and truth tell it was not shy of scary, it was scary. The boundaries between sleeping and waking dissolved and at times I wasn't sure if I was asleep or not. Despite its success in keeping me from smoking, the potential sacrifice of the remaining shreds of my mental health just wasn't worth it. I quit.
On Feb. 1 this year, the FDA issued a public advisory that Chantix "may" be linked to mood changes, behavior changes, suicidality or actual successful suicide.
Finding the data on the heels of this meek admission has been difficult, but most outlets consistently cite the FDA as having received 430 reports of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, with 34 of those cases being successful suicides.
A plucky little news outfit in Texas made a Freedom of Information Act request to the FDA in November and was given a computer disk with no fewer than 5,157 complaints on it. The complaints were from Chantix users and consisted of mentions of anger, aggression, amnesia, hallucination and homicidal thoughts.
There isn't even any point in mentioning the dreams; evidently everyone has what in the vernacular have come to be known as "Chantix Dreams."
In FDA speak, this is all called post-marketing adverse events. How is that for euphemism?
I said it before and I'll say it again: we are all part of clinical trials these days. Whether a substance is approved by government agency or not is immaterial. We take experimental cancer drugs, cholesterol lowering statins and quit-smoking pills. We feed our babies from plastic bottles and microwave our Styrofoam. We eat genetically modified foods grown from genetically modified seeds and sprayed with proprietary chemicals, without which the seed would not sprout in the first place (thank you Monsanto).
Carcinogens and human tissues are decidedly less sexy without George Clooney to promote them, eh? The logic of the chemistry and technology that has catapulted us ostensibly forward in the past 50 years has demonstrated a continued failure of predictability. Our compounds and circuit boards and nanorobotics are born in laboratories and then set upon us, usually in the name of profit.
Sure, Pfizer can claim a medical noblesse oblige of sorts in its quest to assist the remaining stupid ones to quit smoking. That would be easier to swallow if the pill were covered by insurance and if Pfizer weren't banking on Chantix to provide blockbuster sales. (Blockbuster sales, by the way, are defined annually in the neighborhood of $1 billion.)
Instead, statins cause muscle weakness, quit smoking pills make you crazy and experimental cancer drugs ravage bodies in the name of tumor shrinkage. Still, as a species we fall short of anticipating the failures and we focus on the possibilities. I suspect that we will focus on the possibilities right into the greenhouse.
Speaking of smoke and mirrors, all this bluster leaves the question of whether I still smoke. I do. I could equivocate and tell you how much less I smoke now (true), how much less I spend (true) and how much better I feel when I hike local mountains (true).
But that would bring it in to the realm of the gray and we all know I'm not that. So, black it is. I'm smoking. Wanna step outside with me?
Despite appearances to the contrary, sanguine I am not. suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.
