Ozempic Is Cheaper Than Ever. That’s Bad for Society.
For some reason, YouTube is convinced that my husband is a fat Latino.
Apparently, watching hours-long videos of classical music, the occasional pickleball championship, and indulging in a daily dose of Major League Baseball highlights must mean you’re Spanish-speaking and bemoaning your size (never mind that the last time he spoke Spanish was third grade). The result? Chopin’s Nocturnes are usually preceded by “O-o-o Ozempic” jingles.
I’ve fed him well during our first year of marriage. But not that well.
Nevertheless, the pharmaceutical companies assure us that he must be among the 74 percent of Americans who are overweight or obese. For you, señor? We’ve tracked down the cheat code.
After years of fad diets, embarrassing dance workout videos, and (for a little while) trying on body positivity for size, there’s an easy way out: the miracle drug. All it takes is sticking a needle in your stomach — actually, no, as of this year, all you need to do is pop a pill. Suddenly, you’ll be the size of your dreams. (READ MORE: We Unlocked the Secret to Beating Obesity. It’s Time to Act Like It.)
Surely, you think, this miracle answer to America’s obesity epidemic (and our own slight pudginess) is years down the road. Surely, we’re not at a point where, as Free Press co-founder Suzy Weiss put it, we’ll treat weight as something “we set and forget. Like a thermostat for your body.” Except we are. Some 12 percent of Americans (and their insurance companies) are shelling out thousands of dollars a year for the glorious freedom of not being hungry. Good news for them, that freedom is about to get a whole lot cheaper.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Novo Nordisk is planning to cut its prices for Ozempic and Wegovy in the United States by up to 50 percent. For just $675 a month, you too will be able to fit back into the jeans you wore in high school.
This is capitalism in action. Novo Nordisk isn’t interested in getting undercut by its rival Eli Lilly, and we, the consumers, benefit. If that price isn’t low enough for you, the Trump administration will give you an Ozempic shot for just $200 a month for your first two months or 30 Wegovy pills for just under $150.
That sounds good. Almost too good.
From a physical perspective, pharmaceutical companies and journalists insist that it’s not. While, as Weiss points out, some 44 percent of skinny-wannabes experience nausea and 30 percent end up with diarrhea, and maybe it’s not “ideal to become a forever patient reliant on pharmaceutical mega-companies whose products rely on the global supply chain working and various regulatory organizations doing their job,” still, most of us have done more for the sake of our waistlines.
It seems worth it to be a bit skeptical of any brand-new drug that promises to fund pharmaceutical companies until Christ’s Second Coming — particularly when those companies are playing into our deep discomfort with our physical form that vanity and ultraprocessed, chemically engineered food have produced. Predictably, there are horror stories, but the response from doctors (like Dr. Michael Camilleri, a gastroenterologist at the Mayo Clinic) usually amounts to, “They may just be really unlucky.”
All that to say, there’s probably a great argument to be made that GLP-1s are unhealthy and cause more problems than they solve. Unfortunately, I’m not the right person to make that argument. My quibble with the drug has more to do with philosophy than medicine. (READ MORE: Child Abuse With a Prescription Label)
There are people who legitimately use GLP-1s to manage medical issues. The drug was initially intended for people who suffer from Type 2 diabetes, and it’s proven effective in a few other medical use cases as well. Obviously, they should treat it like any other medication: weigh the risks and benefits, and move on. The rest of us — especially those of us who are eager to use it to circumvent our own lack of willpower — use it at the risk of developing into practical transhumanists who ignore the power of our own passions.
A quick primer for those of us not obsessed with achieving immortality: Transhumanism is, most simply put, the belief that we should use technology to perfect our biology. Transhumanism would have us genetically test embryos to ensure we could craft the perfect family or urge us to employ technology to extend our lives indefinitely. The idea that we could use a powerful drug to satisfy our vanity (and, crucially, not because we need it) is, practically speaking, transhumanist. (RELATED: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 169: Tech Bros Aim to Genetically Modify the ‘Perfect’ Baby)
It’s not that the growing number of Americans experimenting with GLP-1s are the same people pushing programs to merge humans with AI to produce “immortal software-based humans” — I imagine that most of them would find those kinds of transhumanist experiments to be a bit absurd — they are, however, unwittingly buying into the same kind of mindset that produced them. Is your biology demanding that you eat too much? Just take this drug. It’s a cop-out to deal with a base passion. (RELATED: Dear Globalists, AI Won’t Defeat Christianity)
In the past, we had to develop a habit of self-control to deal with our baser passions (i.e., our desires to eat, drink, and be merry in excess). As it turns out, exercising self-control at the dinner table makes it easier to exercise self-control when faced with a bottle of wine, a risqué ad, or an infinite chain of TikTok videos. Outsource virtue at the dinner table to a drug, and virtue elsewhere becomes more difficult — not that the owners of TikTok and Pornhub mind.
The point here, of course, is that drugifying skinny has the dangerous side effect of outsourcing the practice of virtue. The result will be a society that increasingly forgets how to deprive itself of the unhealthy. Skinny isn’t worth that.
READ MORE by Aubrey Harris:
We Could Be Doing Something About Our Birth Rate Problem. But We Aren’t.