It’s taken 20 years but Barack Obama has once and for all quit. Not Trinity United Church of Christ, but smoking, a habit he picked up around the same time he joined the controversial ministry.
To do so, he has been chewing Nicorette, the smoking cessation gum. And he’s been chewing it longer and in larger amounts than is on the label.
Is Obama’s off-label use bad or dangerous? According to the dictates of Tabloid Medicine, of course it is.
However, Tara-Parker Pope puts his Nicorette consumption in proper perspective:
“Mr. Obama has said he started using the nicotine gum Nicorette about nine months ago. That’s six months longer than the three months recommended on the gum package label. And Mr. Obama is not the only quitter who is still seeking a nicotine fix months after giving up cigarettes. A small percentage of the people who use nicotine replacement products like gums or lozenges end up hooked on a new habit, say doctors who specialize in smoking cessation…..”
However…
“The problem is not that people use it too much,'’ noted Lynn T. Kozlowski, interim dean of the school of public health and health professions at the University at Buffalo. “The greater problem is that they use it too little. People use it for a week, and then they are back smoking cigarettes.”
well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/obamas-new-addiction/
Then there is the individual variation in nicotine dependence shaped by genetics. A paper entitled: "Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms, Clinical Trials, and Tobacco Research: The Search for the Smoking Gun," explored the associations between genetic variations, nicotine usage, and the potential effects on smoking cessation techniques according to a press release from the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
This explains differences in Nicorette uses and variations in response to Chantix.
Someone might want to send that paper to Senator Grassley and Alicia Mundy of the WSJ both of whom seem eager to blame side effects of Chantix on a FDA-Pfizer coverup instead of “genetic variations at the receptor level, the drug metabolism level, or both.”
Read ASCO Article
That would be intellectually honest
