January 28, 2025 - 7:00am

Whenever I think of weight-loss drugs, I think of Darren Aronofsky’s harrowing Requiem for a Dream. In the film, a middle-aged woman uses amphetamines to try and quickly lose weight for an appearance on a game show. In her desperation, she ups her dosage but soon develops psychosis, hallucinating that she is being attacked by her refrigerator and openly mocked by the TV host. It’s desperately sad, and a warning about how easily a well-intentioned decision can turn into a full-blown addiction.

Semaglutide drugs which suppress appetite, such as Ozempic and Wegovy, are a long way from the unregulated speed abused in the film. Yet pharmacists are right to call for tougher regulation around the online sale of weight-loss jabs and pills. The easy accessibility of these drugs, and the aggressive advertising used to promote them, means that they risk becoming a lifestyle product rather than a regulated medicine. Instead of helping diabetes patients or those who need to lose weight for life-saving surgeries, they are being used as a quick fix for the otherwise healthy to get “beach-body” ready or, worse, enabling those with eating disorders.

Buying these drugs is shockingly simple. For example, there are dozens of providers selling Wegovy, where all you need to do is fill out an online questionnaire. For most, there is no verification process to check whether the customer is lying about their height, weight and BMI. Some sites such as Superdrug Online Doctor may ask customers to upload photos as evidence, but these can be easily edited or the numbers on the scales staged. Given the well-documented side effects, some of which can be incredibly serious (such as pancreatitis), it seems baffling that anyone can access these drugs without clinical supervision or even a face-to-face consultation.

What is most frightening — other than the potential for those with eating disorders to worsen their self-harm — is how, if taking the drug becomes normalised by the slim and healthy, this will pervert people’s body image and self-esteem even further. Botox and fillers have become so commonplace that, in some circles, people fear they will appear strange if they haven’t indulged — and unless people are honest about their “tweakments”, it’s easy to feel embarrassment or shame that they are seemingly ageing faster than their peers.

The same may happen with weight-loss jabs. It might become all too easy to see these drugs as just another form of “self-care”, something you do before a wedding or after pregnancy or just because. I had a baby four months ago, and as I discuss the pressure to “bounce back” with other mums, I can see how tempting it might be to take something that is not only proven to work but is seemingly so straightforward — with none of the self-discipline of dieting or the invasiveness of a tummy tuck needed. Yet I can also see how normalising the drug could lead to toxic, paranoid mind games, such as female friends growing suspicious when one says she doesn’t feel like eating dinner or the all-consuming self-comparison when wondering if someone has dropped a dress size through willpower or a private prescription.

These drugs can be marvellous, but they are not a magic bullet. They do nothing to address the root causes of obesity, they only work by dysregulating our very delicate digestive systems, and they do not give patients any behavioural or psychological skills to help with their eating habits. They are also not necessarily a long-term solution: on average, patients regain two-thirds of their weight loss 12 months after stopping the drug. All these factors exacerbate the risk of becoming dependent on the drug, and its openness to abuse: they should therefore not be as easy to buy as something off Amazon.


Kristina Murkett is a freelance writer and English teacher.

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