Yesterday was a tipping point

Awareness of GLP-1s for addiction is breaking through to the mainstream.

There was an explosion in media coverage yesterday on GLP-1s for addiction.

It was driven by the study this week in the Journal Addiction that reported a 40% drop in opioid overdoses and a 50% drop in cases of alcohol intoxication among people who received GLP-1RAs. (Addiction Editor Keith Humphreys is also on our scientific advisory board.)

The study was covered on ABC News, Good Morning America, Popular Science, the New York Post and many, many others.

This morning Maia Szalavitz published a piece in the New York Times on GLP-1s and addiction. I was a source and connected Maia to Steve Klein at Caron Center who became the center of her story— Steve has a remarkable personal journey that we will be publishing in more depth here soon.

Now what?

Awareness itself changes lives— as you can see in these subreddits, r/Dryzempic and r/glp1recovery, people sharing success stories with each other is transformative and many patients are getting GLP-1s for their substance use disorders through compounding services, if they can’t get them from their doctor or can’t afford them off-label. Without insurance coverage for these treatments, GLP-1s will be totally inaccessible to most people with substance use disorders— they are simply too expensive.

The essential next step is to bring a GLP-1 through the large substance use disorder trials required for the FDA to give approvals. This will lead insurance companies, Medicare, and Medicaid to cover the medications.

At CASPR, our organization, we are focused on two things:

• Bringing a GLP-1 to scale for addiction, by running large trials and getting a GLP-1 approved. Here’s our coalition.

• Policy solutions that can permanently drive more activity in addiction medicine development— the field has been virtually abandoned by the pharmaceutical industry. We are already advancing a few efforts in DC and will be publishing our full policy agenda in the coming weeks.

If these two things happen, we will achieve both a near-term breakthrough in the form of GLP-1 access and a long-term solution to lack of innovation in addiction medicine that has left so few people with effective treatment.

We’re going to give it everything we’ve got.