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Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 August 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the past couple years, demand has gone wild for drugs like Ozempic – and its cousins, Zepbound, Wegovy, and Mounjaro. For people who had never been able to lose weight before, suddenly the numbers on the scale were plummeting. And everybody wanted to get their hands on them.

Now, in most industries, if a product goes viral like this, it’s a golden ticket. And thanks to government-granted monopolies designed to encourage innovation, the big drug companies behind these blockbuster injections are currently the only ones allowed to make them.

In theory, anyway.

But, what if that explosive demand backfired, opening the door to legal knock-offs? You’ve maybe seen them - copycats advertised as the same thing as Ozempic. So, what’s the difference? And just how legal are they? On today’s show - a drug that’s changing peoples lives is also challenging the traditional way we buy and sell medicine.

This episode was hosted by Sydney Lupkin and Jeff Guo. It was produced by James Sneed. It was edited by Marianne McCune, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Gilly Moon and Debbie Daughtry. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:06.1	About a year ago, I got an email from a guy named Phil, an email that really stuck with me.
0:11.9	He wanted to tell me about a drug that saved his life and how then that drug was suddenly taken away and ultimately how far he was willing to go to get it back.
0:22.0	Phil is a chemistry teacher. He is a lot of things, actually. He is a dad. He's a trivia
0:27.5	buff. He loves spending time on Reddit.
0:30.1	Okay. All right. I'm recording. Perfect.
0:32.3	He's someone who, for most of his life, has struggled with addiction. It started with
0:37.2	prescription painkillers. He got through
0:39.0	that. And then COVID hit, so I started drinking pretty much on a nightly basis. And if it wasn't that,
0:46.7	it was food. And so I was pretty numb at that point. I mean, 300 pounds, drinking alcohol every night.
0:54.5	Phil says when you're in the grip of addiction, it's like there's this person that you know you can be, a good person, a decent father, a kind husband.
1:04.6	And then every day you have to look at yourself in the mirror and count the ways you've fallen short.
1:11.1	Yeah, it just makes you feel like, you know, something that isn't even alive is stronger than you.
1:18.5	Like there's just this will inside you that's working against you and it sucks.
1:23.1	You know, it's just, it sucks.
1:25.8	We're not using Phil's last name because even though these struggles are
1:28.9	behind him, he's afraid that sharing his story could put his job in jeopardy. People that aren't
1:33.9	addicts, like, you know, it's a nightmare. It really, it's a nightmare to work against yourself.
1:43.5	Know that you're working against yourself and continue to do it anyway.
1:48.0	By the beginning of 2023, Phil's health was really going downhill.
1:52.6	The doctor said he was pre-diabetic, so they put him on this new drug that was getting popular, called OZempic.
1:59.8	It was for type 2 diabetes and was supposed to help
	...

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