Why are celebrities so thin? Probably Ozempic. And if, like Ice Spice or Jesse Plemons, a celebrity claims their weight loss is due to another method, there’s an orchestrated media pressure for them to prove they’re not just on Ozempic. Being gaunt and raw-boned in the Ozempic fashion has become trendy.

It’s very profitable to sell a needle full of skinniness, which makes me a little anxious because commodifying Ozempic as some miracle fat-remover is a little dangerous. At the same time, reducing Ozempic to a mere set of chemical interactions is also useless, since those interactions are only intelligible as abstractions, like a lack of hunger. I can’t experience Ozempic for you — and I’m pretty sure you can’t experience it for yourself either. Drug use is a spectacle. We can watch it affect our surfaces, but we can’t follow it into our bodies. 

On the surface, I’m a latticework of caffeinated tubes. I self-administer a 100-milligram dose of caffeine about two or three times a day, and so do many of my friends. Our bodies are pretty much inseparable from the social relationships that control the production and consumption of our preferred substance. Abstractly, I imagine all my jitteriness, caffeine-related or not, as participation in the shared nervous system of global caffeine circulation. Even when I’m not high on coffee, I’m part of that interplay. 

In my view, other forms of drug-use are similarly mapped. For instance, someone swallowing a pill of Ritalin, a stimulant prescribed to improve focus and attention, has a mental image of the altered state they expect to experience. Maybe they watched 22 Jump Street, or read a Tao Lin novel, but regardless, when they take that pill, they’ll conceive of their drugged body through those preconceptions.

That’s what’s happening with Ozempic, which, by the way, isn’t a particularly complicated synthetic drug. The active ingredient is a slight modification of a hormone found in the venom of the Gila monster reptile, and the drug works by overclocking some natural bodily functions, like gastric emptying — the process that controls how fast the food leaves the stomach — and insulin production — which regulates blood sugar levels. But you can’t just reduce your sensations to that particular level of objecthood — which is frustrating, because the drug is actively re-engineering your organs, and subtly reshaping your biology in ways you can’t easily control. 

Ozempic has an agency over the biological function of your body, even if that agency remains completely sub-perceptible. That’s how drugs work. You can imagine tiny peptides — chains of amino acids organized into proteins — sorting themselves into your brain’s various slots, but you can’t intuitively understand from those interactions why you’re passing on a mid-afternoon snack you would have otherwise eaten. 

It makes sense that your connection to food would be manipulated, since Ozempic stabilizes hunger regulation, but a 2024 study in JAMA Network Open suggests that your dopamine and serotonin responses are similarly controlled. If you’re curious, that’s why Ozempic might have potential in addiction-targeting therapies — because it’s easier to stifle an opioid craving by dampening the sensation of reward your brain experiences when you eventually get the rush of the hit. This could have legitimate applications in harm reduction, particularly as Ozempic is easy to self-administer.

Ozempic is, however, expensive. Currently, its most palpable cultural effect is the stark inequality of access. In Canada, a month’s worth of doses costs between $200 to $300, while the cost of producing that batch may be only five dollars — a 98 per cent reduction from the market price. 

The routine of consuming Ozempic then becomes a constant financial exercise fuelled by inelastic demand — meaning people are less likely to stop using it despite price increases. This creates a powerful regulatory situation, where it’s hard to move on and off Ozempic when access is so limited. It’s essentially a form of social grouping: to present your body as a skinny body, you need to have some advantage in these pre-given conditions wherein Ozempic is accessible in the first place. For diabetics, this could be a serious issue, as Ozempic might be crucial to the construction of a healthy body.

This brings me to my point: Ozempic is a set of relationships. It’s difficult to disentangle the experience of Ozempic’s effect on the brain from the person-to-person relationships, beliefs, and social standards that judge certain bodily presentations as natural and others as artificial. Ozempic moves through your bloodstream on a register you can’t perceive, yet this subtle materiality experts extreme agency over how your body functions and how you experience it. 

So, understanding the precise hormonal changes instigated by an Ozempic injection can only take us so far, because there’s always the optics of cultural mediation. Try it this way: what kind of person are you on Ozempic? Which pleasures and displeasures become available?

Ozempic is one way to mobilize your organic material. Your body is more complex than your ability to manipulate a small part of its nervous system. Ozempic can adjust the specifics of how that self interacts with basic biological functions. So, you’ll definitely be different after using Ozempic, but you might not necessarily be ‘better’ — and that’s okay.