Weight Loss Drugs for Curing Addiction? with Nicholas Reville

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 14 January 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The amount of overdose deaths in the U.S. is staggering. And while addiction is a disease, there’s no specific medical treatment or cure for it. Our guest this week points out that weight loss drugs and GLP-1s, or glucagon-like peptide-1s, which are used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity, can be effective for helping people reduce cravings and consumption of drugs, alcohol and compulsive behaviors like gambling. Nick Reville is the cofounder and executive director of the Center for Addiction Science, Policy, and Research (CASPR). He joins WITHpod to discuss how he found his way into this research area, lessons learned from other health crises, innovations geared towards eliminating addictions at a widescale level and more.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey there with pod listeners. Before we get into today's episode, I've got some news. And you may know this because I've been talking about a bit. I have a book coming out. It's called The Sirens Call, how attention became the world's most endangered resource. Attention, I think, is the substance of life. It's also the most sought after and competed for commodity in our current version of capitalism.
0:23.6	And there's a fundamental tension that that has produced in us, a sense of alienation,
0:28.4	a sense of being sort of extracted and exploited like people are, you know, drawing oil out of our brains.
0:34.8	And the book is about that. So the book comes out on Tuesday, January 28th.
0:38.4	And the heads up I wanted to give you here is that I'm going to go on tour and I'm going to
0:41.8	be in a whole bunch of cities starting on the 29th of January. I'm going to be in D.C.
0:47.5	and I'm going to a few events in New York and then Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. I'll be in Boston. I'll be in Chicago and Houston. I'll be out in the West Coast.
0:54.8	I'll be on Seattle and Los Angeles and San Diego and Rancho Mirage. And that's not exclusive.
1:02.2	We're going to be adding other dates as they come in, I think. Possible I get to New Orleans as well.
1:07.7	Anyway, I wanted to tell you this so that you can buy tickets because they are selling
1:11.4	out pretty fast to these events and you can find all the information you need both to pre-order
1:16.2	the book or to buy tickets on the tour at sirenscallbook.com, sirens, plural, sirenscallbook.com.
1:23.9	Hope I get to see a bunch of you out there.
1:31.2	I think that the evidence that's come out around cravings really creates this level of granularity as you think about it,
1:38.7	the specificity where you say, okay, there can be all kinds of things that lead to a craving.
1:43.9	So there could be, you know, depression, anxiety, there can be all kinds of things that lead to a craving. So there could be, you know,
1:44.9	depression, anxiety, some life disruption, trauma, all kinds of stuff that triggers a craving.
1:51.2	Once you have some kind of a dependence on a drug, it can just be the use of the drug that leads
1:55.0	to the craving. It can be, you know, some people, I think it's biological. They have their first
1:59.4	sip of alcohol and they're like, this is it.
2:01.6	This is my thing.
2:03.1	Alcohol is my thing and they just can't stop.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NBCNews, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of NBCNews and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.