This headline and article in The Atlantic about Ozempic really caught my attention.
Did Scientists Accidentally Invent an Anti-addiction Drug?
I’m well aware there’s a dieting frenzy going on in the world right now with everyone and their mother talking about,and many taking ‘Ozempic’. What I was recently made aware of, is the potential for this drug to benefit those with addictive personalities and to help so many people struggling with addictions of all types. Could this drug be a major game changer?
Ozempic, also known as semiglutide, is a drug meant for adults with type 2 diabetes used to improve blood sugar, along with diet and exercise, and reduce the risk of major cardiovascular events such as heart attack, stroke, or death in adults with type 2 diabetes and known heart disease. BUT….and it’s’ a really big BUT….it seems this drug is doing things no one saw coming that could really help people with their addictions.
So I asked my friend David Gerber, the Founder of Sober At Home, who has worked for decades in the addiction industry to join me on my radio show to talk about it and find out what if anything he’s seeing or hearing about this.
Are people who’ve been taking Ozempic or Wegovy really stopping drinking? smoking? shopping? gambling? picking their skin?
If this subject is of interest to you or someone you know please take a few minutes to listen to this podcast of my live interview with David Gaerber on The Debbie Nigro Show. Below is the transcript of the interview.
David is the Founder of Sober At Home, which provides confidential substance abuse & addiction group counseling services online. People can get help from their licensed addictions counselors & specialists at a reasonable price from the privacy of their own home. No insurance required.
The Debbie Nigro Show airs weekdays on 1490 WGCH and ‘live’ on the digital livestream on WGCH. com. Interviews show up here as podcasts after.
Feature Image by Alexander Lesnitsky from Pixabay
PODCAST INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
0:00:00
And now, back to the Debbie Nigro Show.
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0:00:03
Science!
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0:00:18
Hey, did scientists accidentally invent an anti-addiction drug when they came out with Ozempic for weight loss and diabetes. Hi everybody, I’m Debbie Nigro. That was the headline in a publication called The Atlantic that really got my attention. And I know a lot of people are talking about this drug that is out there that people are like, oh, I’m taking it for weight loss, it’s working, people are getting shots. Wigovy, those are the brand names. Not intended to be an anti-addiction drug, but could it be possible that the accidental side effect is that people are stopping drinking, smoking, shopping, gambling, nail biting, I don’t know. I wanted to ask somebody who I value as an expert in this department, David Gerber, who you’ve heard on the show before, worked for decades in the addiction industry. He’s got a company called Sober at Home. He’s been on the show before, but I mean, he does know this whole side of it. I wanted to know what he was seeing, if anything, about Ozempic related to his world. Hey, David, welcome to the show.
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0:01:28
Hey, Debbie, thanks. Good to be back.
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0:01:30
Yeah, man, I missed you. Hi. Doing your good work always.
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0:01:34
I heard your last segment on bears. I want to tell you, I had a bear in my garage. I just shooted it away.
1
0:01:38
No.
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0:01:39
I did.
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0:01:40
True story.
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0:01:41
Oh, we can talk about bears another time because I do want to know your bear shooing tactic.
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0:01:46
You must have had some pots and pans.
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0:01:48
No, no, no.
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0:01:49
I said, get out of here, bear, and it said, okay.
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0:01:52
Seriously? Seriously. Oh, my gosh. My biggest fear is running into a bear and not remembering what they said to either be quiet or make noise. You know, that’s where I go with my head these days. Alright, so as we move through the summer, people are now noticing when they’re taking their clothes off, ah, jeez, I should have lost some weight. There’s a frenzy going on of people wanting to take this Ozempic to get in shape, get into bathing suit shape, you know, get thinner faster. And I read about the side effect. You know about the drug, first of all, Ozempic? You heard about that?
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0:02:23
Yes, of course. It’s sweeping the country for people who want to lose weight and lose weight quickly.
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0:02:28
Right. Then you saw that I posted the article which I’m having you weigh in on, which is, Did Scientists Accidentally Invent an Anti-Addiction Drug? Did you see that article? Did you hear that news? Are you seeing something about this? Are people talking in your world about this?
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0:02:44
for quite a while actually and you know it’s a rare case where you know patient anecdotal you know anecdotal information is now driving the science. They’ve done some studies in rats and mice on the impact of ozempic and reduced alcohol intake in rats and mice but they haven’t really seen that or studied that in humans. So we’re hearing this anecdotal information from people that are saying, ìHey, I’ve lost my taste for alcohol.î And now the science is trying to catch up to say, ìHey, is this actually something that we can use to help people reduce alcohol and potentially other drug intake?î
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0:03:33
Okay. So nobody has personally told you as an addiction expert, spending all your life helping people, what a good man you are, that they’ve seen this happen by accident. You haven’t had a direct conversation with anybody about that?
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0:03:50
So I haven’t had any clients that have reported it. Again, you’re talking about a population that is either type 2 diabetics or people that are trying to use it off-label for weight loss. And one of my concerns is that as we start to look at some of these medications for reducing alcohol and other drug use, we fail to take into account the reason and the purpose of why people are using with substance use disorders. So my concern is that for maybe someone who is a casual user of alcohol or may feel like they need to cut down on alcohol, Ozempic and Wegovy have been found to basically reduce people’s taste for it. It’s a whole other story when you’re talking about people that are using substances to medicate pain, co-occurring disorders, mental health disorders, and trauma. So I don’t know, and the research is still out, as to whether it’s going to be effective with the substance use disorder population.
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0:04:59
Well, when I was reading the article, and let me just take another second or two on what got my attention, a girl was telling a story, okay, in the article. And she used to have an alcohol addiction. She has an addictive personality. Would you assume that people who you know are addicted to things have addictive personalities in general
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0:05:19
It’s in many cases. Yes
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0:05:21
Okay, so she talks about how she got sober in her early 30s in this article and when she did she replaced Drinking with food with shopping and those are the things she was thinking about constantly instead of the alcohol So she was talking about having She would spend you know like five hundred dollars on organic groceries And then like they’re all go bad in a refrigerator right because she was going to an extreme, so I’m thinking from other anecdotal stories, I’ve read like that she talks about now starting to take the drug right with Govi and Just used to shit all the thoughts quieted down She lost the way, but she was really surprised that you know she said of going in and buying a million things, she really didn’t buy those extra impulse things. She only bought the like four things she went to get. So I’m thinking as I read these stories, and you must be thinking the same thing, there’s something in this drug that affects a portion of the brain for people who are, you know, have addictive personalities. Would that be your assumption?
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0:06:24
Yeah, so one of the things that researchers are hypothesizing now is that Ozempic and Wachovia are impacting dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is known as the pleasure neurotransmitter in the brain that makes us happy. So for example, Deb, if you and I are long lost friends and we meet for the first time in an airport and we’re coming closer together and we start to feel that rush of pleasure because we haven’t seen each other in a long time. That’s the release of dopamine. What researchers are thinking is that Ozempic and Wegovy are dulling the release of dopamine which is making things like drinking, like shopping, like gambling, less pleasurable. And that’s what may be contributing to why people are using it less or are losing their desire for it altogether.
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0:07:25
So very good assumption about the dopamine. I think I also read that this drug only works as long as you’re taking it.
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0:07:36
Correct.
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0:07:37
Right. So we’re getting the benefits and you know for people that are looking for weight loss, we’ve seen studies that indicate that people can lose as much as 15% of their body weight after using it for a little over a year. called the ozempic face and ozempic butt where we’re getting this extra skin that you know we look really kind of flabby and to boot if you’re not on this medication it stops sending those signals to the brain around appetite and cravings and so we have a tendency to go back and we regain the weight that we’ve lost. So depressed.
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0:08:34
That’s so uncool. Very uncool.
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0:08:37
There’s a lot of people that can’t tolerate the side effects. A number of people who start taking it experience nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, and in more serious cases people can have pancreatitis and problems with their kidneys and gallbladder. So it’s not a medication to be taken lightly and it’s important to understand that if we’re taking it just simply to lose weight, there are all these side effects and if you’re taking it to reduce alcohol and our other drug use, my recommendation is we need to check our motivation levels. If we’re using it because we think the medication is going to help us to stop Then we’re using it for the wrong reason if we’re interested in stopping or committed to reducing alcohol and other drug intake Then the medication may be a very important tool in the toolbox to help people that are struggling
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0:09:30
Yeah, I know the human mind. I tell you it’s the us against us problem that we all struggle with, right? Jay? Yes. But just to continue the conversation about the conclusions people are drawing. CNN Health did a little story on this about what’s going on with the clinical trials and how they’re not sure what’s going on because the drug makers aren’t going to run trials to find out about these sidebar things that we’re discussing right now but they did say that they had a number of patients describe these things happening where they all of a sudden don’t feel the need to drink as much or don’t desire and they’re stopping and that this drug somehow you know one of them or one of the mechanisms of them reduce the rewarding effects on the brain of alcohol in terms of the neurotransmitter we’re talking about, which is the dopamine again. So they’re saying the impact could go beyond alcohol and smoking. They’re studying whether semaglutide can have an effect on fentanyl use disorder, you know, nail biting, online shopping, right? They’re just, they don’t yet have the clinical data necessary to draw the conclusions, and that’s from an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Boehl Center for Alcohol Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, who’s running the trials. You know those people, by any chance?
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0:11:01
No, I don’t know those people, but when you say that they’re not running these trials, I think when you start looking at the craze across the country for people to get their hands on Ozempic and Wigovi and really creating supply chain issues for people with type 2 diabetes. People are really crazy about using this drug, this medication to help them with all kinds of things. So I think that what we’re going to see is that the people’s use and demand for it will drive the clinical trials. The other thing to keep in mind is that there are all kinds of people that are purchasing medications off-brand, off-label, online and they may not be getting the same actual drug that comes from your pharmacy. So that runs the risk of people getting tainted or less effective drugs and I think that danger may also provide a driving force between getting some clinical trials done to its effectiveness and ultimately approval for weight loss and potentially alcohol and other drug use.
1
0:12:15
Okay, I made a mistake. There aren’t many clinical trials underway, but these guys who I just mentioned are doing one. They’re looking at some of glutide’s effect on alcohol and cigarette use and the people who are running that are the Department of Psychiatry and the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. They’re running the trials. They wrote an email to CNN. It says, It does seem very clear from people reaching out about our trials, in particular several treatment providers, that many patients are experiencing some significant secondary benefits from being on these treatments. So, you know, they said it’s a relatively unprecedented situation to see this extent of anecdotal clinical data emerging prior to any human work being published. So that’s what I wanted to clarify, and you may want to talk to them.
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0:13:06
Well, I think, you know, one of the studies that I’ve seen is reduced alcohol use in extremely obese patients, and we’re still looking at this as a diabetes medication. So I think you know we’re switching gears now and looking at it maybe not necessarily primarily as a drug for type 2 diabetes but it’s opened the doors for trials and research into its impact on reducing alcohol and other you know uh… behaviors that you know people are trying to limit and control again i i i caution you know for you know we we have a lot of drugs we have a lot of medications for people that are using opiate and fentanyl and you know the the effectiveness you know if you said uh… you know i can be my own best friend of my own worst enemy and i think the effectiveness of any of these drugs are in in some ways dependent on our desire to actually quit.
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0:14:06
Okay, we basically covered the gist of it. And I really thank you for, I just wanted your opinion. I know that you spend decades understanding the world of addiction. Again, I root for you. Tell everybody about your company right now, Sober at Home.
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0:14:22
Sober at Home is an online company to help people that are struggling with alcohol and drug addiction. It’s an online group-based program. If you’d like more information about Sober at Home, please reach out to us. We’re at SoberAtHomeInc.com. If you are a family member, a loved one, or struggling, or you want help for someone else, we have free question and answer sessions every Tuesday and Thursday. Reach out to us at SoberAtHomeInc.com.
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0:14:50
Thank you so much David Gerber, always a pleasure. More to come guys. What is berberine? That’s relevant to this subject. Tick-Tockers say it’s nature’s Ozempic. Next!
