The New Yorker:

GLP-1 drugs, which have helped some people curb drug and alcohol use, may unlock a pathway to moderation.

By Dhruv Khullar

Mary started drinking regularly in the early nineties, when she was thirteen. Her father had recently married a Danish woman and moved the family to Denmark, which has one of the highest teen-drinking rates in Europe. (Sixteen-year-olds are allowed to buy beer.) As Mary got older, her alcohol consumption accelerated—she could drink eighteen beers in a sitting—and a cycle of inebriation and hangovers blurred her days. She tried rehab, Alcoholics Anonymous, and a medication called Antabuse, which provokes nausea in combination with alcohol. None of them worked for her. Mary (a pseudonym) got married, had a child, and became a social worker; her alcohol tolerance increased so much that, when she binged, her friends barely registered that she was buzzed. She remembered a close friend who also drank heavily telling her, “I don’t get it. Why do you say you have an alcohol addiction?”

“The difference between you and me,” Mary replied, “is that I think about alcohol all the time—when to drink, how to drink, where to drink, how much to drink.”

Last year, at a bar, Mary noticed that the same friend had hardly sipped her drink. She told Mary that she’d started taking Ozempic for weight loss. “If I have more than two beers now, I go outside and barf,” the friend said. Mary was perplexed. Ozempic, or semaglutide, originated as a diabetes medicine; more recently, as an obesity treatment, it has made its manufacturer, Novo Nordisk, one of Europe’s most valuable companies. What did it have to do with drinking? The next day, Mary saw an advertisement on Facebook: a nearby clinical trial was studying semaglutide’s effects on alcohol addiction. She enrolled.

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