chemical affliction

"We can never speculate as to what may happen with a drug once it goes into widespread use..."

quick quiz: are those the words of a responsible federal agency, or a two-bit drug dealer?

hint: it's a trick question.

the answer, of course, is "both."

that's your food and drug administration at work, ladies and gentlemen. how 'bout a big hand for the nice people selling us out so transnational pharma can keep raking in their billions?

yay, FDA!

but wait! the same description also fits the nice people at pfizer, the narco-traffickers responsible for "chantix," a drug that can cure your nicotine addiction by helping you kill yourself.

isn't that great? they get your money, and as a gift with purchase, you get a decorative toe tag.

random rhetorical question: if it's not the FDA's job to speculate what might happen when a drug hits the market, whose job is it? do they expect the nice people running big pharma do that? really?

fun trivia: almost half of people with depression are smokers. chantix is a psychotropic drug, the side effects of which can have a profound, often disastrous effect on depressed people.

fun fact: the people at pfizer never tested chantix on people with depression. nor was it tested on patients with histories of panic disorder, psychosis or bipolar disorder.

fun corollary: people suffering from those conditions are disproportionately more likely to attempt suicide than, say, billionaires with fresh tax cuts in their wallets. go figure.

would it surprise you to learn that the people a FDA and pfizer insist they did nothing wrong in bringing this drug to market? sorry, silly question. no one involved will ever admit "mistakes were made," or anything remotely resembling responsibility. the merest hint of same would cost them $ megamillions, maybe more, in legal complications.

instead, after hundreds of suicide attempts (over 100 successful), and more than 5,000 reports of "severe psychiatric symptoms," associated with chantix, pfizer and the FDA are kicking around the idea of maybe studying the drug a little more.

just to be, you know, safe.