It’s already known for whittling down waistlines – and now Ozempic looks set to have the same effect on wine consumption. Research recently published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry found semaglutide, the weight loss medication also sold under the brand name Wegovy, reduced cravings in people with alcohol use disorder.
The study by California’s USC Institute for Addiction Science divided 48 participants into two groups and found those injected with semaglutide drank less in each sitting than those offered a placebo. It is not the first research to link the jabs – originally designed as a diabetes treatment – to lower incidence of substance abuse. In October it was suggested in the journal Addiction that Ozempic might help opioid users too – among 500,000 people analysed with a history of opioid use disorder, the 8,000 who were separately prescribed semaglutide had a 40 per cent lower rate of opioid overdose.
Which is promising news for everyone whose lives are blighted by food, booze and drugs, of course, as well as the pharmaceutical industry (annual weight loss drug sales are already estimated to reach £119 billion a year by 2033). But there may be another winner here, it struck me, and one that doesn’t need more power or influence: Big Tech. Because if addiction is at least in part driven by a need to escape discomfort, trauma and loneliness, and semaglutide means substances no longer provide this solace, won’t we turn to other ways to zone out – and isn’t the biggest of these the internet? Is the latest research edging us ever closer to a dystopian world in which none of us is capable of lifting our nose from a phone screen?
Last year California State University estimated around 10 per cent of American adults are addicted to social media – a snip compared with the almost half of 16- to 18-year-olds who professed to feeling the same in the UK in 2023. My double-digit-a-day screen time, inability to focus for more than five minutes and compulsive need to refresh my Instagram feed suggest I am among the afflicted. My use appears inversely proportional to my alcohol consumption – I stopped drinking, then started, and am currently off booze again – and I suspect this relationship might explain why both the increasingly abstemious Gen Z and so many of the sober influencers I follow seem to spend so much time online. And while social media addiction won’t cause cancer or diabetes, it can lead to increased feelings of isolation, anxiety and shame, dull our enjoyment of life and sabotage our productivity.
Some of those taking it for weight loss are said to have lost interest in other compulsive behaviours aside from eating, from biting nails to shopping
But surprisingly, it seems that instead of driving us towards ever more scrolling, semaglutide might actually help us stop. Early evidence suggests semaglutide may curb behavioural addiction. As well as activating receptors for the hormone GLP-1 in the gut, suppressing hunger, semaglutide also binds to GLP-1 receptors in the brain, ‘throughout areas that are important for feeding behaviour, but also for addictive-like behaviours’, explains Professor Elisabet Jerlhag Holm, an addiction researcher at the University of Gothenberg. ‘We think GLP-1 receptor agonists like semaglutide can bind to areas that regulate reward and addiction.’
In her lab, she explains, ‘we have shown that semaglutide, when fluorescently marked and given to alcohol dependant rats, binds to one of these regions called the nucleus accumbens’. Although the impact of semaglutide on behavioural addictions has yet to be studied on humans, anecdotally, some of those taking it for weight loss are said to have lost interest in other compulsive behaviours aside from eating, from biting nails to shopping.
Jerlhag Holm’s study on rodents published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology in 2020, meanwhile, found GLP-1 reduces sexual interaction in some male mice. Her department is currently applying for funding for further studies and her opinion is that semaglutide will ‘most likely’ curb behavioural as well as substance addictions, ‘because there are so many similarities. It has been shown the same regions are affected and dysfunctional. It’s very logical, this step towards behavioural addiction’.
Of course, we’re not at the hotfoot-it-to-Boots-before-we-feel-the-compulsion-to-scroll-again stage, not least because smartphones and social media are not even classified as an addiction – the only behavioural addictions the NHS currently recognises are to gambling and gaming. ‘Then you have to do the studies,’ says Jerlhag Holm. ‘That takes years. Clinical trials are time consuming and expensive. After that we can have an indication that it might work or might not work.’ So there’ll be no ‘short term’ solution, she says: ‘That’s the boring side of science.’
Even if Ozempic were prescribed for social media use, should we accept it? I worry that its impact on the brain could make us collectively more despondent, unable to find pleasure in anything. Jerlhag Holm says this is ‘unlikely’ because semaglutide does not alter the levels of the reward neurotransmitter dopamine ‘per se’ and ‘only reduced dopamine in reward systems would cause anhedonia (a reduced ability to feel pleasure)’.
Nonetheless, the full implications of taking semaglutide long term are still unknown, and I am dubious mass medication is a sensible solution to our need for escape online. Even if it did relieve us of the compulsion to scroll, it seems unlikely it would prevent the anxiety that drives us to pick up our smartphone – or, for that matter, a drink or doughnut – in the first place.
Perhaps tackling the root causes of our behaviour should be our first port of call – either that or pressurising the social media companies to curb the addictive and damaging culture of comparison and narcissism they have created for profit. Failing that, when we’re all reliant on injections to stop staring at our screens, they can at least foot the bill.
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