Kick the butts!

Today, there are so many new and controversial drugs that are coming out to help with some of the addiction issues that people have. I think this is a good idea, but there are a lot of drawbacks and I don't really approve of people using medicine as a way out. I feel that people should use their own will power to get over certain things. I guess sometimes it takes something drastic to make a person motivated to quit something though. My mother didn't quit smoking until her foot went blue one day and she went cold turkey.

One of these new drugs is called Chantix. It was released in 2006 and so far more than 6 million prescriptions have been written. This pill is supposed to help people quit smoking, although in studies it has been shown that less than half of the participants using Chantix did not quit in the end. This drug has a lot of unpleasant side effects. When my friend took this she felt extremely nauseous if she didn't take it after eating a large meal and she said it taste bad. She stopped smoking for a few months and ended up relapsing, so I guess that shows that the studies were right. There is not a huge chance for success, but the odds are better than the success rate for people who quit cold turkey, which is 1 out of 10.

There is also a new drug called varenicline. This pill is used for addiction to alcohol and a small but promising new study at Yale university experimented with this drug using 20 regular drinkers for the test subjects. They had people that took varenicline, people that got the placebo, and people who took nothing. Their study showed that after given one drink the people taking varenicline only had .5 more drinks while the others had 2.5 more drinks. The studies for this drug also showed that people smoked less while taking the pill. Their are more significant drawbacks than Chantix however. This drug blocks the dopamine receptor in the brain so not only did people taking this get no pleasure in smoking and drinking, but they also had a decrease pleasure in daily activities. A lot of subjects had thoughts of suicide, hopelessness, and also experienced hallucinations. This is the only recent drug that has had negative side effects though.

In the end people shouldn't believe that there is a cure for everything. You can't replace a bad drug with a "good" drug and expect to be perfectly fine. Every drug has a side effect and you have to make the decision if it's worth it or not. Nothing is a cure-all and we shouldn't be treating medication like it's the only thing that will work. Getting over addiction can be hard with any drug, but just stay focused, surround yourself with the people that you love, and keep your body healthy. Don't just take a pill and call it a day.

-Katie Cyr (week 5)

Note: There is a lot of good information in the article that I read for this blog. I wasn't able to include all the information due to length issues, but feel free to click the above picture to read it for yourself. I found it to be very interesting and enjoyed reading it actually.