Chantix Sucks

“Jane Doe” contacted me recently and asked that I post this so that no one could identify her in any way.  I figured calling her Jane Doe would accomplish that?  Here’s what she wrote:

Chantix helped me quit smoking but I blame it for having poisoned the happiness of my marriage. I have written letters to Pfizer about the problems it caused me and they responded by sending me the number of a call center in India.

I took the drug beginning in March 2009. I was just over 50 and had been smoking for over 30 years. I was a terrible smoker and because I worked at home I had never had to learn to go without for any length of time as office workers did. Quitting was a wrench.

I had been married for over 20 years and my family and friends always made fun of me for how crazy I remained about my husband well into middle age. But while I was taking the Chantix I fell in love with somebody else.

One of the first things I noticed about Chantix was the vivid, detailed dreams it gave me, but they were good dreams at first. Later on they turned sick and hateful. I’ll get to that. But the dream I associate most with the Chantix is one I still have: I’ve started smoking again, which is associated with feelings of guilt, failure and shame. I wish I could stop having the dream but probably it’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed quit. When I wake up and realize it isn’t true, that I haven’t had a cigarette in years now, I’m always sick with relief.

The other thing that was most noticeable about Chantix is that it made me, for lack of a better word, boy-crazy. At my age!

The drug increases the libido, to say the least. At first this just meant my poor husband had a hard time keeping up with me. He did his best for me, poor bastard. But it was never fulfilling for me because what I really wanted was this other man I had met in connection with my work.

Before I took the Chantix I had always noticed in a sedate middle-aged kind of way that this man was attractive. I would even blush and stammer a little when I spoke to him. But after I had been on the drug a month or so, and after I had stopped smoking, it became an obsession. I had this idea that I had to stay strong and keep off the cigarettes so I could be worthy of him.

I was in La-La Land! I wanted to be “his girl” and I didn’t think he’d like a woman who smoked. I go back over my thinking now and wonder how I squared it all with reality, but I never saw any real impediment to our being together. What I was going to do with my husband I can’t imagine.

I never stopped loving my husband, I love him now, but when I was craziest in love with this other guy I found my husband increasingly obstreperous. When my cell phone would ring and I would see his name pop up it would make me want to scream with disappointment.

I was too modest about my own attractions to confront the dreamboat man directly but I expect I made myself pretty clear anyway. I hung around him too much and manufactured work reasons to call him and tried too hard to find things to ask him about when I was able to be near him. There was one time I was so overt I think I scared SHIT out of him, and after that he avoided me whenever he could, which broke my heart but it didn’t stop me.

I took Chantix a full month before I quit smoking and kept taking it though only one a day, not two, for several more. It was about three months into this that I discovered abruptly that I had fundamentally changed, I didn’t recognize myself anymore.

For one thing I was still obsessed with the man, and for another the obsession had made me secretive and cagey – I had no one to tell about it except, for God’s sake, my husband, and I wasn’t going to do that. But another weird thing was that for the first time in my life I was shopping for clothes, wearing lots of makeup and paying a hairdresser to make me beautiful. Or, you know, try.

Anyway I got scared and quit the Chantix. I had tried earlier, because of the dreams, which as I said earlier had turned nasty. They were still vivid, and every night I’d hope I’d dream this time about my dreamboat making love to me. But instead it would be Great-Uncle Mortimer or somebody, totally unappetizing stuff. I woke up one time really appalled and tried to quit the drug, but I’d start longing for a cigarette in the afternoons and take the Chantix again for fear of caving in.

This time I meant it and quit Chantix cold turkey. Result: I stopped being able to sleep. At first I’d sleep only four hours and wake irrevocably up, then two, then one – then I stopped being able to sleep at all. All one long holiday weekend I didn’t sleep though I took over-the-counter sleeping pills washed down with glasses of wine. Nothing worked.

On the fourth day I was so frayed and twitchy I gave in and took half a Chantix. I began vomiting and didn’t stop for seven hours. It wasn’t ordinary vomiting but wrenching stomach pains to which vomiting was the only relief, so that after everything was out of my stomach I’d drink water so I could vomit more. But that would only stop the pain a few minutes and I ended up in the emergency room.

Nothing was done for me there. The cure was natural: my body was so completely worn out I finally went to sleep. That was two years and two months ago and I’ve never taken another Chantix or smoked another cigarette.

After that I started “coming down” from Chantix. It reminded me of when I was in college decades ago, learning why people like me shouldn’t smoke marijuana. I was never any good at dope. It made me stupid and paranoid, but what I hated worst was that I’d be walking along minding my own business a few days later and suddenly flash back to being stoned. Coming down from Chantix I’d feel like I did back then, sort of helpless because I couldn’t get back straight.

That wore off and as it did I began to see I’d been, as I put it to myself, mistaken in my thinking. I mean about the dreamboat. He didn’t have anything to do with me. Worse, he didn’t want anything to do with me.

But God damn it, I still wanted him. I still had my little problem. I still have it after two years.

I know it’s insane. I love my husband. My family members have all died or moved away from me and my husband is all the security, all the home I have in this world. I don’t want to lose him.

But every time I see the dreamboat man I’m in love again. There’s nobody else in any room he’s in. My other lasting side-effects: I still have no sense of smell, and I still have that damned dream. But those I could live with. This one drives me nuts.

I saw a psychotherapist for a while and she tried to talk me out of it. Didn’t work. Then I was able to take a few months away from my job and I didn’t see the dreamboat for a while and I thought I was cured. But one day I walked into a lunch joint and there he was sitting at a table and everything started over again.

Since then I’ve learned all about him – he’s got a wife and children, church membership, all that for God’s sake. And if he didn’t, I’ve still got the husband. It’s never going to happen.

So here I am in the same situation I was before, except that now I’m never content with it. It used to be just me and my husband and we were complete in ourselves, our own little world. Now I’m always looking over his shoulder to catch a glimpse of the other guy. I’m glad I don’t smoke anymore but on another level quitting has ruined my happiness.

Or Chantix has. The thing that pisses me off most is that Pfizer never answered my letter except to give me the number for the call center in India. I called it but nobody could even vaguely understand what I was talking about.

I am not going to sue Pfizer because I don’t want to tell this story anywhere my husband can hear it. But somebody needs to stop them before they destroy more lives.