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What If Ozempic Is Just a Good Thing?

The media has made the drugs about body politics and our obsession with thinness. They’re telling the wrong story.

Clune has a history of heroin addiction (he wrote, to my mind, one of the great heroin-addiction memoirs) but successfully wrestled his demons into submission through a stay in rehab, diligent attendance at Narcotics Anonymous, exercise, and an enigmatic, epiphanic experience of grace. In October, the sociologist and writer Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote an essay for the New York Times “Opinion” section in which she says, “If GLP-1 drugs only treated diabetes and did not promote weight loss, they would still be medically groundbreaking. In the New York Times, Aaron Carroll, a physician, wrote about overcoming his own resistance to trying the medicine for weight loss, and in the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus published a long reported essay about her initially ambivalent experience taking Ozempic in which she confessed, “As my weight loss began to show … I realized that I had internalized the sense that being heavy was a failing for which I was personally responsible.” In early summer, the New York Times published a story with the headline “New Obesity Drugs Come With a Side Effect of Shaming” and then reprised the topic during the holidays: “Plates are full.

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