Because nothing says “Good Idea” like giving folks with PTSD a drug that causes hallucinations and suicidal thoughts, the VA helped enroll PTSD-suffering veterans in the Chantix trials.
You don’t have to be a genius to guess what happens next.
I wish I had something to say, more than this, but I don’t really know what it would be. The way that our government and big business are always in the process of colluding against us…
I don’t know how we get back from that. I really don’t.
And I am so sorry that we continue to send folks off to war just so that we can bring them home and call them liars and fakers and crazy people, while we do fucked up things to them.
A person should have a right to be safe in his own body. If you can’t have that, what have you got?
Tiny Cat Pants 
“a drug that causes” – Also in fairness, it’s more like “can cause” in some patients, not “will cause” in all patients. However, most of the randomized trials of the drug *specifically* excluded patients with a recent diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder, so you would expect that they should have been much more cautious with this group, especially after the FDA started communicating the potential problem in November of last year. I’d be interested in whether they had a data safety monitoring board in place and what their take was (a DSMB can stop a trial). Will read more about this, though.
I hope we do, because this sounds unwise to me.
“nothing says “Good Idea” like giving folks with PTSD a drug that causes hallucinations and suicidal thoughts”
Best line ever, B.