Calls for e-cigarettes to be banned while Champix remains on sale

Michael Siegel asks quite fairly why Champix, known to have links with psychotic, suicidal episodes and worse, is freely available, when certain anti-smoking groups have called for the banning of e-cigarettes, which have no documented safety record or pending lawsuits on behalf of users.

He shows links between the US anti-smoker groups and pharmaceutical giants including Pfizer, which manufactures Champix. He also addresses the ideology of anti-smokers (popularly tagged 'quit or die'). Your quitting aid mustn't even look like a cigarette or it doesn't count:

The ideology is simply this: nothing that looks like cigarette smoking can possibly be a good thing, even if it saves lives. People need to quit smoking the way we say they should quit smoking. There is a right way and a wrong way to quit smoking. The right way is our way and the wrong way is any other way. If it looks like smoking, it's still smoking, even if there are no adverse health effects and the individual has achieved smoking cessation. 

 His logic is persuasive:

If anti-smoking groups want to argue that any smoking cessation product on the market has to first be unequivocally proven safe, then fine. They can argue that e-cigarettes should be removed from the market but they must also call for Chantix to be pulled from the market for the same reason.

Alternatively, if they believe that the burden of proof is on others to demonstrate that Chantix is unsafe before pulling it from the market, then that's fine too. But then they must apply the same reasoning to electronic cigarettes and ask that these products remain on the market until such time as they are demonstrated to be unreasonably unsafe.

More on Champix here.