Quit Cigs & Kill Yourself

It appears that quitting smoking may make you want to kill yourself. Well . . . no shit, Sherlock.

I saw this Whiney Boy (he had nightmares and thoughts of suicide, oh my!) on CNBC this morn followed by the PR gal from Pfizer, maker of Chantix, a drug used to help people quit smoking. No surprise to me that people who quit smoking may feel like killing themselves. It is, they say, addictive. And in so many parts of the country, few people are shunned so badly as smokers. Being made a pariah may tend to harm one's self-esteem.

Sad part is that while Whiney Boy gets his ten minutes of fame, Pfizer will have to spend bucks defending its drug.

By the by, neither Whiney Boy nor the gal from Pfizer could definitively say if the suicide rate amongst Chantix users is any higher than the normal suicide rate or the suicide rate of people caught in the throes of tobacco withdrawal. The figure mentioned, I believe, was that there were 34 suicides within a population of five million who were taking Chantix. If my math's right that's about one suicide in every 147,000 people taking the drug. Seems pretty low to me. High enough for another Black Box Warning, tho, evidently.

Glad I followed Grandma Ethel Myrtle's advice, "If you don't start smoking, you'll never have to quit."