By Sophia Liao ’25
I remember watching my first Ozempic advertisement on TV as a kid. I barely remembered the content of the advertisement, but for some reason, the famous Ozempic jingle that went along with the commercial stuck with me. Fast forward to now: celebrities all over social media, from the Kardashians to Amy Schumer, are making headlines with their usage of Ozempic. Ozempic went from being just another medication to a nationwide trend with broad ethics and aesthetic obsession.
In 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the drug Ozempic to treat Type 2 diabetes. Just a year later, in 2018, the Ozempic craze began — not fueled by diabetic patients whom the medication was designed for, but instead by ordinary people with the sole goal of exploiting one of Ozempic’s side effects: weight loss. Since then, people have become so attached to the weight loss aspect of Ozempic that they have gone to extreme lengths to obtain it, even if that meant denying the drug from the people the medication was originally intended for.
Ozempic is an injection of an active ingredient called semaglutide, which regulates insulin, a naturally occurring hormone that controls the amount of glucose in the blood. By imitating this hormone in our bodies, semaglutide is able to quell our appetite by telling our body that we feel full. A weekly injection into the arm, thigh, or stomach is all it takes for patients to begin managing their obesity and lose weight.
The New England Journal of Medicine published a 2021 study stating that weekly injections of semaglutide over 68 weeks could cause a 14.9% weight loss in overweight and obese people.
The stunning effect of Ozempic has made it the go-to drug for anybody — no longer just diabetic people — searching for an easy way to lose weight. Celebrities like Elon Musk have publicized their usage of a semaglutide drug nearly identical to Ozempic called Wegovy, tweeting how Wegovy helped him to get “fit, ripped, and healthy.”
While Wegovy has been approved by the FDA for weight loss, long-lasting shortages have caused people to view Ozempic as an alternative capable of fulfilling their weight loss goals. Regardless, both Wegovy and Ozempic’s surge in demand indicates consumers’ lack of accountability for managing their weight loss without the drug. Rather than develop healthy eating and exercise habits, Ozempic users take the easy way out.
It is crucial that people recognize that since Ozempic does not cause long-term weight loss, actual lifestyle changes have to be made to achieve and maintain the weight lost from the drug. If a patient does not make these key lifestyle adjustments, they are at risk of developing a dependence on the drug, which can have major health implications further down the line.
Anybody looking to start taking Wegovy or Ozempic has to have a prescription from a doctor first. Those who do not fall under the diabetic category and are seeking out the medication have most often resorted to finding doctors who will prescribe Ozempic to them off-label, meaning prescribing medicine for a different function than its original. This is often the avenue celebrities will take to get their hands on Ozempic when they do not qualify for a prescription.
Off-label prescriptions are problematic because the side effects of the drug in individuals who did not meet the criteria of the target user have not been investigated. Thus, when a non-diabetic patient takes Ozempic, they are at risk of suffering from understudied and potentially dangerous unknown side effects.
Additionally, doctors are susceptible to prescribing Ozempic purely out of motivation for profit rather than the actual needs of the client. Every off-label prescription takes crucial, sometimes life-saving medication away from somebody in need. For instance, 57-year-old mechanic Shane Anthony, who was diagnosed with diabetes, could not get his hands on his Ozempic medication for four whole months. “It infuriates me… it’s like, you people don’t need it. The diabetics, we need it to stay alive.” Other patients in Anthony’s shoes must either take a lower dosage of what’s available, drive to a different pharmacy that has it available, or stop taking the medication altogether. Considering these factors, doctors have to be more selective with whom they are prescribing Ozempic to, and should never leave somebody like Anthony, a person in need of the medication, without it.
The Ozempic craze has certainly revealed the destructive nature of society’s tendency to pursue quick fixes. So many people are enticed by the weight loss effect of Ozempic that they have lost sight of its intended purpose and are no longer taking accountability for managing weight loss without depending on the drug. While there are exceptions to those who are able to lose weight through the traditional methods of healthy dieting and exercise, such as genetic predispositions and medical complications, no one should be using Ozempic except people with Type 2 diabetes. Doctors who engage in off-label prescriptions worsen this issue, by giving non-diabetic patients the opportunity to obtain Ozempic. The Ozempic crisis, immoral and unethical, is indicative of society’s desire for quick-fixes and doctors’ complicity in perpetuating the problem.
