The Drug That Mutes Craving — and Could Crash the Consumption Economy

Drugs like Ozempic were developed to treat type 2 diabetes and, more recently, obesity. But increasingly, they appear to be doing something more profound: altering not just how people eat, but how they behave.

While originally praised for metabolic benefits, a growing number of clinical observations and patient reports suggest broader behavioural effects. Users are describing losing interest not only in food, but also in alcohol, nicotine, online shopping, scrolling screens, and other high-reward activities. Research indicates that the medicine reduce activity in the brain's mesolimbic dopamine system — the same circuit that drives addiction, impulsivity, and compulsive behaviour.

Rewiring reward and wanting less

In animal studies, these drugs reduce the need of alcohol, cocaine, and other substances. Early human trials suggest similar effects, and researchers are now exploring their use in treating substance use disorders. The key idea: the drugs dampen the urge to seek rewards ("wanting") while leaving the enjoyment ("liking") untouched.

This sets them apart from many psychiatric medications, where antidepressants often stabilize mood or increase serotonin levels. These so called ”GLP-1” drugs act upstream, modulating the motivational circuits themselves. That opens up not only new treatment possibilities, but also - maybe the most interesting part - new ethical territory.

The ethical terrain isn't just personal. These drugs prompt us to examine the collective ecosystems of desire we all live within — and the institutions, technologies, and market logics that keep them humming. Desire, in this view, is no longer a purely individual phenomenon, but a cultural infrastructure, produced and sustained by systemic cues. When those cues lose their grip, the entire scaffolding of incentive and identity starts to loosen.

The implications stretch far beyond health. Our whole economies run on desire — trigger it, satisfy it, repeat. If it is possible for desire to be medically reduced, what happens with the business models built on constant stimulation?

Already, users describe becoming indifferent to sugar, alcohol, even luxury goods. Some report less social anxiety, reduced compulsive behaviours, and more intentional decision-making. If demand drops for fast fashion, processed food, and short-term dopamine hits, the ecological consequences might be significant.

Given this, these GLP-1 drugs, designed to treat measurable metabolic dysfunctions, may also unintentionally act as dampeners of overconsumption.

A new psychiatric paradigm?

Could this make existing treatments for depression, binge eating, impulse disorders, or even addiction less relevant? What if one class of drugs can suppress the underlying drive?

It's both promising and unsettling. We may be witnessing the beginning of a shift from mood stabilisation to motivation modulation. But this also means intervening at the core of how people engage with the world.

That core is not just chemical. It’s personal, cultural, even existential. Who are we without our cravings, our impulses, our obsessions? When a person loses interest in drinking or scrolling, are they becoming more authentic — or simply less driven?

Much of modern desire is engineered. Social platforms, ultra-processed foods, and advertising ecosystems exploit dopamine pathways by design. From this angle, this might function less as suppressors and more as correctives. They quiet what capitalism has overstimulated.

Yet deciding which desires are "natural" or "artificial" is fraught. The line between treatment and enhancement blurs when medication changes the fundamental structure of motivation.

Desire is never just chemistry. It’s shaped by norms, narratives, social structures and systems of reward. When pharmacology begins to dull the appetite for dopamine, it indirectly challenges the social scripts that define success, happiness, productivity. It confronts the very architecture of modern subjectivity: the idea that more is always better, faster is always desirable, and craving is a sign of aliveness.

The Business Model Problem

Here's where it gets really interesting: what happens to an economy built on engineered desire when desire itself becomes optional? Consider the industries most dependent on impulse and craving. Fast fashion thrives on the dopamine hit of new purchases. Social media platforms monetize our compulsion to scroll. The processed food industry has spent decades engineering products to trigger "bliss points" that keep us coming back. If the use of these drugs become widespread, these business models face an existential threat. Not from regulation or moral awakening, but from consumers who simply stop wanting what they're selling.

So what if consumers begin using these drugs as a tool to break habits incompatible with their own values or planetary limits?

The Great Decoupling

For decades, we've tried to solve overconsumption through willpower, education, and environmental awareness. We've asked people to voluntarily resist systems engineered to be irresistible. It hasn't worked particularly well.

GLP-1 drugs offer something different: biological resistance to biological manipulation. They might represent the beginning of a great decoupling — breaking the link between engineered stimulation and compulsive response.

This could accelerate trends already emerging in the economy. The rise of "conscious consumption," the growth of repair and reuse markets, the preference for experiences over stuff. What took decades of cultural change might happen in years through pharmaceutical intervention.

The environmental implications could be staggering. If people buy less, travel less, consume less — emissions could drop not through policy or technology, but through reduced demand. The new economy everyone talks about might emerge not from design, but from diminished appetite for linear consumption.

Such shifts would ripple beyond carbon emissions. They would touch everything from mental health systems to supply chain designs. But perhaps most radically, they would demand a shift in how we measure value: from extraction to regeneration, from volume to depth, from craving to care. The "new economy" may not need just different metrics — it may need different metaphysics.

Capitalism's Adaptation Problem

Of course, capitalism adapts. It always has. The question is: can it adapt to customers who fundamentally want less? Some possibilities emerge. Markets might have to shift toward quality over quantity, durability over disposability. The experience economy could grow as material desires fade. Healthcare and wellness sectors might boom as people redirect spending from impulse purchases to long-term wellbeing.

But there's a deeper challenge. Our entire financial system depends on growth, which depends on increasing consumption, which depends on escalating desire. If these drugs break that chain, we're not just looking at disrupted business models — we're looking at a potential restructuring of economic assumptions.

This might accelerate the need for post-growth economics that environmental economists have long advocated. Not by choice, but by biochemical necessity.

⚠️ Caution

GLP-1 receptor agonists such as Ozempic may reduce appetite and weight, but can also affect broader reward mechanisms in the brain.

Known side effects include: Nausea, constipation, fatigue. Potential muscle loss due to rapid weight reduction. Changes in mood and emotional tone, including apathy or depressive symptoms. Decreased interest in previously pleasurable stimuli (food, alcohol, screens, shopping).

Rare but serious risks include: Inflammation of the pancreas (pancreatitis). Gallbladder complications. Possible long-term effects on motivation and emotional regulation (under study).

Not recommended as a cultural solution. May unintentionally suppress cravings essential to joy, spontaneity, or connection. For existential discomfort, consider slower methods: relationships, movement, boundaries, poetry.

Continued research required. Values realignment not included.

The Ultimate Irony

Here's the twist: the pharmaceutical industry that created these drugs might be undermining the very consumption patterns that fund it. GLP-1 medications are expensive, profitable products. But if they succeed too well, they could reduce demand for countless other products and services.

It's the ultimate example of capitalism potentially disrupting itself. The same profit motive that engineered our desires might now be engineering their suppression.

As we stand at this crossroads, we're not just deciding about a class of medications. We're potentially choosing between two fundamentally different economic futures: one driven by stimulated desire, another defined by biochemical moderation.

If we medically disarm desire, we’re not just treating individuals — we’re rewriting the architecture of capitalism itself.

Epilogue

If It Works, What Then?

Of course, all of this hinges on a big “if.” If these drugs really do dampen desire at a larger scale, we may enter territory far more politically sensitive than medicine usually reaches.

What happens if a medication, quietly and unintentionally, starts making people less responsive to advertising, less attached to consumer identity, less dependent on distraction? If that starts to impact growth, emissions, and even ideological allegiance, we shouldn’t expect a neutral response.

After all, when psychedelics in the 1960s began catalyzing values incompatible with industrial capitalism and war, they weren’t simply regulated - they were outlawed. Not because they didn’t work, but because they might have worked too well.

Could the same happen here? Will GLP-1 drugs be celebrated as medical breakthroughs — or targeted as threats to economic orthodoxy? Could populist leaders paint them as part of a “degrowth agenda,” or frame their psychological effects as subversive?

If the logic of craving is embedded not just in business models but in political identities, then anything that alters craving — even by accident — becomes a political force.

We might be witnessing not the end of consumption, but the beginning of a new contest over who controls desire.