Rhino
New member
The statistics come from the Institute For Safe Medication Practices, and TIME printed a very important disclaimer with that list.
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It's far too easy to take statistics out of context if you aren't familiar with their use and how they are collected and controlled. In the case of many of the drugs used on that list, it wasn't the drug causing the violence, but rather the violence that caused the drug to be used.
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I also wonder who wrote the list. The item for Varenicline (Chantix) seems to be suggesting Xyban as a safer alternative. It's actually spelled Zyban, not Xyban, and it's bupropion. For anyone not familiar with the name bupropion, it's more commonly known as Wellbutrin, an antidepressant that some others have attempted to link to violence in the past as well. Maybe they misspelled Zyban in an attempt to hide that connection. It might also explain why they said "...that number for Xyban is 3.9 and just 1.9 for nicotine replacement." Zyban is not a nicotine replacement, and never has been. It has only one use, and that is to reduce the urge to smoke, so there can't be two different numbers or two different purposes. The FDA changed the labeling for both Chantix and Zyban back in 2009 to reflect reports of irritability and violent behavior, but they didn't list them as side effects. That's because they've never been confirmed in in any sort of clinical trial or medical study, and because irritability and violent behavior isn't all that uncommon in people who are trying to quit smoking, whether they're using medication to help them or not.
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You can find all sorts of claims about links between medications and violence out there. The problem is that most of the people making the claims don't have the slightest idea how to read and interpret the data properly. Statistical analysis isn't a skill you can pick up in a few weekends reading a book or a few web sites. I spent many months with a statistics professor in college who was an absolute nazi about perfection and impiricability, and I still consider myself a relative novice at it. Just as the paragraph from the TIME article noted, the mere presence of the two conditions together does not denote causality. If that were true, you could conclude that rigor mortis was a leading cause of death because it's found in 100% of dead people. But if you really want to see how easy it is to misinterpret data or statistics, try tracing it back to the source.
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As I stated earlier, the TIME article came from Institute For Safe Medication Practices. It was a research paper authored by Thomas J. Moore, Joseph Glenmullen and Curt D. Furberg, and was printed in the journal PloS One in December of 2010. Now, from reading the TIME article, you would assume the research was on links between the medications and violence, right? Wrong.
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They weren't studying links between medicines and behavior. They were studying reports. There weren't any patients involved whatsoever. They never saw, much less examined, a single solitary soul. And the authors weren't doctors either. The reports came from the FDA MedWatch system, which the Institute For Safe Medication Practices manages. It's an entirely voluntary reporting system on suspected drug reactions, and anybody can use it. You don't have to be a doctor. So if you think your smoking cessation medication caused you to get your dog pregnant, go ahead and report it to MedWatch. Maybe you'll be in TIME magazine next year, and we can have yet another thread on these eeeeeeevil psychotropic drugs.
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