The anecdotes are increasingly impossible to ignore: Many people taking the new obesity drugs, whether Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy or Eli Lilly & Co.’s Zepbound, aren’t just eating less, they’re drinking and smoking less, too.
Now data is rolling in, giving shape to the role these drugs could play in treating addiction. The need is gargantuan. About 1 in 6 people in the US are addicted to either alcohol or illicit drugs, according to the most recent survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Heavy drinking contributes to more than 178,000 deaths a year in the US, while more than 80,000 people died from a drug overdose last year.
But pharmaceutical companies don’t seem interested. That’s perhaps not surprising given the already massive payday they’re reaping for these treatments as obesity medicines. Bloomberg Intelligence expects that global obesity drug sales could cross $93 billion in 2030. In comparison, the opioid and alcohol dependence treatment Vivitrol had sales of $400 million in 2023.
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Right now, academic and government researchers seem to be the only ones studying GLP-1 drugs in treating addiction, whether that’s to alcohol, tobacco, cannabis or opioids. Recently, Novo Nordisk took a baby step forward when it said it would study reductions in alcohol consumption as part of a clinical trial testing semaglutide’s ability to prevent liver damage in heavy drinkers. But by and large, pharma companies have prioritized diseases that offer easier regulatory and commercial paths than addiction does.
