They want to recycle the old drug Chantix to stop people from vaping

https://www.futurity.org/e-cigarettes-varenicline-3223502/

If there was ever a drug that I never saw work as intended and caused a slew of horrible side effects……it was Chantix.

So of COURSE they want to bring it back to help people stop vaping. The suicidal ideation and the neuropsychiatric issues with Chantix were awful. People who had no psychiatric issues at all suddenly landed in inpatient hospitals with plan and intent to end their lives. There are more documented cases of completed suicide than they want to admit thanks to Chantix. Some people became psychotic, and were never the same after taking Chantix.

So what does the FDA do? They dust off the old drug, call it by its generic name Varenicline, and decide to target the vaping crowd.

Two problems with this. First, it did very little to help people stop smoking cigarettes. Most who tried it went back to smoking. Second, the FDA and the government have yet to find a way to regulate and make money off of vaping, so here is their big chance. They want to corral the vaping community back onto the government payment dole.

Vaping has been around for about 15 years now, and the Royal College of England has not been able to find any correlation to vaping related lung illnesses that compare to the damage that smoking tobacco can do. Is it 100% safe? We do not know. Is it significantly safer than smoking cigarettes? Yes. The carcinogens in cigarettes are not present in vaping.

So why are they going after vaping and not targeting the original audience of cigarette smokers with this dusted off old drug? Because many smokers already tried it and it didn’t work. They need a new audience. Many vapers never smoked, they just went to vaping first. They didn’t fail the Chantix drug 15 years ago.

If you vape and want to stop, you simply lower your nicotine amounts over time until you are at 0% nicotine and then stop vaping. I will save the benefits of nicotine for another post, such as the usefulness it has in preventing Parkinson’s disease, protection against deadly covid (nicotine patches on covid patients had better outcomes). The key to remember is that nicotine itself is not the boogeyman they want you to believe it is, but smoking cigarettes made by big tobacco and the government are certainly harmful. Nicotine gets the bad rap, but in reality it is the chemicals added to tobacco that cause the most problems.

Stay away from Chantix/Varenicline. Your mental health is precious, that drug is not only potentially unsafe but is wildly unsuccessful in 100% smoking cessation.