Who's Afraid of Ozempic?
The role of the blockbuster drug in American culture
For Public Discourse this week, I wrote about some of the cultural and political fights over Ozempic; here’s an excerpt below.
I’ll be back with more original Side Effects work next Friday; in my next piece I plan to examine the New England Journal of Medicine’s disconcerting approach to “carceral health care,” and how their perspective relates to political upsets like the New York State prison guards’ strike. In the meantime, hope you enjoy:
Ozempic has hit a strange cultural nerve. At the 2023 Academy Awards, host Jimmy Kimmel joked that “everybody looks so great. When I look around this room, I can’t help but wonder, ‘Is Ozempic right for me?’” The audience laughed nervously. As with liposuction or Botox or anything that suggests a lack of unmediated beauty, Hollywood is skittish about admitting its affinity for the diabetes-turned-weight-loss drug.
Ozempic, one of a few brand-name variations of a class of medications known as GLP-1 agonists, has become a shorthand term for them all; I’ll be using it in that vein here. Few newly trim—or even shockingly thin—stars have admitted to taking Ozempic; comedian and actress Amy Schumer recently slammed her fellow celebrities for denying it. In a curious example of “authenticity culture” devouring itself, Schumer saw fit to demand that a group of professional pretenders confess to slimming down via artificial means. The subterfuge can go only so far; new Ozempic-related cosmetic procedures have become commonplace among California’s plastic surgeons; apparently swift weight loss comes with its own aesthetic problems.