Welcome to Ozempictown, USA (No, It’s Not Hollywood)

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When you think about ozempic and other similar drugs, it's likely one group of people comes to mind. TikTok is all over it, and so are some celebrities.

Speculations surrounding celebrities who've slimmed down dramatically. Not everyone who needs them can get them, and some who don't need them for medical use may be the problem.

Eli Lilly, the company behind two similar drugs, zep Bound and Manjarro, even aired an ad during the Oscars criticizing celebrities for contributing to shortages.

For the smaller dress attucks for vanity. But that's not the point.

So you might think that places like Hollywood or New York City would have the highest concentration of people on these drugs, places packed with the rich and famous, influencers, people with money to spend on their appearance. That's exactly what Marie Ellis thought.

When I first got on to how can seeing all this? I was like, what is this? Is this for real or is this just for people in Hollywood.

She's an accountant in Kentucky, and she says she struggled with weight loss her whole life until she tried Mount Jarrow.

So I've been on about a year and a half and I've lost eighty one pounds.

And Marie isn't the only one.

My sister in law was doing the same thing. I mean she was dropping six to ten pounds every time.

Schwade in.

You can eat whatever you want to. I mean, my husband has not changed anything and lost forty pounds.

Marie and her husband and her sister in law are just a few of the people in her community who have taken these drugs. It turns out the epicenter of the weight loss shot boom wasn't a wealthy, image obsessed enclave like Hollywood or Manhattan's Upper East Side, but right

Driving down the main road into Bowling Green, there's like a McDonald's, a taco bell, and then another McDonald's, and it's just like fast food place after fast food place.

Madison Muller is a healthcare reporter at Bloomberg with a focus on weight loss drugs. She visited Bowling Green twice to report this story.

In like the month between the trips that I took to Bowling Green, there were more advertisements for the weight loss shots. There's like fast food places and then assigned for a weight loss shot on the other side of the road.

Madison's been reporting on these drugs, known as glp ones, for over a year now, and she says Bowling Green is not the place she would have expected to find when she started crunching the numbers to identify the location of Ozepic Town, USA. How did you go about pinpointing where the capital actually is?

So we got data from an analytics firm called Purple Lab, and so we looked at different zip codes across the US to try to figure out which ones had a really high concentration of weight loss drug users. And there were a few different hot spots, like there was one in Huntsville, Alabama, and a couple of other places. Bowling

And what they found was that around four percent of residents in the Bowling Green area had a prescription for a weight loss drug. That's quadruple the rate in the Miami area or Brooklyn, New York. And it's a conservative estimate since some people get off brand versions of the drugs. So what is it about this city that makes it so right for people to use these drugs?

Yeah, so the obesity rates there are pretty high, and people there also have the means in many cases to afford these drugs, which are quite expensive. They're like one thousand dollars a month. A lot of big employers there were also covering the drugs, so those conditions sort of made it like the perfect place for these drugs to

Madison and her colleagues wanted to know what it's like to live at the very center of America's weight loss drug craze, but the idea that they were at the heart of it all took some people by surprise.

Like I remember we went to a place called Posh Salon, and it was funny seeing the women in the salon sort of laugh about ozembic because they're like, what are you talking about? Bowling Greens the capital of you know, ozempic in the US. But then they were all like, actually, yeah, the more that we think about this, everyone we know is on these drugs, including Nikki Wilson, the owner of the salon, who lost like twenty pounds and then stopped

Care to talk about like everybody would us.

We know.

Also I was yeah, the shots, I wasn't like I'm working out and I'm doing it diet.

She told them she was on one of the weight loss shots and says that a lot of her clients ended up going on the shots as well as a result.

Yeah, I have a lot of clients that they would too, so one of my guns. She came in yesterday she saw us fourteen parents.

Wow.

Madison also visited a local doctor in Bowling Green, doctor Suman. Shekar she's been practicing family medicine there for the past decade and when she.

Moved to Bowling Green, she was very struck by the number of people with obesity and the number of patients that she was seeing across the board, kids to elderly people, and then the consequences of obesity, so like heart disease and other issues developing in pretty young people.

It is much easier to educate a forty year old than like a.

Ten to fifteen year old.

We have seeing a lot of hypotensive and obese patients in that age.

Group, and for a long time she didn't really have that many tools that were effective to help that. Besides diet and exercise, in some of the older weight laws, drugs that weren't as effective, and so she thinks it's a good thing that a lot of patients now are coming in and actually ask her about ozembic because they're hearing about it on TV or on social media. And she's glad that people want to do something about their help.

Almost what we put some off auditions autobies. Once they're coming go in and asking go zimbik, it's they're thinking about all this. It's a good and positive thing that the wrong to lose weight. They are inclined dus betterment.

Of their help.

Like Candy Gray, she's the executive director of a senior living home in Bowling Green.

She has a really sort of heartbreaking story because she lost many family members to heart disease and strokes.

Within four weeks time. I had lost two brothers to massive heart attacks. Wow, and both of my parents had died of strokes. So that was when, honestly, I took a good long book in the mara and said, Okay, I've got to do something different.

That was sort of her turning point. That's why she decided to go on ozembic.

What was her experience like on the drug.

Yeah, she lost a lot of weight and she had a really good experience, no side effects.

The compliments were rolling in.

They say, honey, you really lost the weight. What'd you do?

It's like, oh, I took him shots like everybuddy else.

She was like, I have no shame in telling people that I used these weight loss drugs, because you know, she thinks that they should be destigmatized.

Obesity is a disease. Treating obesity it's really no different.

How much did it change her eating and drinking habits broadly, and beyond that, maybe social habits as well.

Candy is a very social person and was telling us that Southern culture really revolves around eating.

He think about it. How many of our social events and I know you know this, they're all surrounded around thoo.

And so that was something that was difficult to navigate at first. But she didn't want to give up her social life. She has kids, she has friends, you know, her and her husband go out to Friday night dinners with their friends. It's something that she wasn't willing to give up. So she just figured out how to tailor her experience to the weight loss drugs.

Do we still do our every Friday night dinners with our friends Absolutely if we can. Am I eating half of what I used to eat before?

Yes, But if eating half of what they used to is good for their health for businesses in Bowling Green, there could be some undesired side effects.

One of the main things we were really interested in figuring out in Bowling Green is are these drugs changing the economy?

Coming up the surprising ways that Ozepictown, USA's economy has been transformed by these drugs.

We keep hearing from analysts and from different companies that these drugs are going to change everything. And the CEO of Nova Noordis told us that he's getting calls from scared food CEOs who are like asking him about the drugs that his company's making.

Given these dire warnings, Bloomberg Health reporter Madison Muller told me she'd expect it to see restaurants going out of business and empty gyms in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

But the gym's doing fine. The restaurants were all bustling. What you do see is this kind of side economy developing.

A side economy. Take, for example, the local GNC a place where you can buy vitamins and supplements.

They have all of these supplements right at the front of the store for people that have side effects from the drugs, and the GNC's general manager told me that all of those supplements are extremely popular.

She has people coming in all the time asking about them.

And then there are new businesses.

There's a lot of medical spas that have been popping up in the last couple of years to offer these shots and to offer compounded versions.

That are cheaper.

So it's like this side economy is sort of developing around ozempic, and if anything, it's actually like boosting some of the businesses there.

Candy Gray, who went on ozempic after losing several family members to obestie related health problems. She turned to one of those new alternatives, a telehealth company offering a copycat drug.

The first six months I took brand it ozmpic, and the end I no longer qualified for my insurance to pay for it.

She says that off brand version costs her about two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and that's a pretty common occurrence in Bowling.

Green, says Madison, there's a lot of people that went on these drugs, and even in the course of the couple of months that we were going to Bowling Green and talking to people there, their insurance has stopped covering it. Med Center Health where doctor Shakhar works. That health center was paying for the drugs for m employees but stopped in January, and they're one of the largest employers in

The four percent of Bowling Green area residents with these drug prescriptions, that doesn't account for all those knockoffs and compounded versions that people get through medical spas or telehealth services. As Madison told us in an episode last month, those versions aren't as regulated as the brand name medications, but they can often be a lot cheaper and easier to get.

The problem with that is that there is variability in how good the medications are, how safe they are.

Some of them are fine, some of them are not.

Madison, what's the takeaway as you see what would the consequences be if more towns, more cities became like Bowling Green.

The takeaway from this story is that it's not just Bowling Green. Like we zoomed in on Bowling Green to sort of show what's happening there, but just covering this beat for the last you know, year plus. There's so many themes that we were seeing and hearing in Bowling Green that I have heard from patients all over the US and likely are playing out in other cities across the US.

And Madison says those voices from Bowling Green offer a window into what we may hear more of the good and the bad from side effects. My wife's frustrated because at night she wants to have dinner.

To get now it's like that's says Sick.

To access and affordability.

I called every pharmacy in Balling Green. I could not find it anywhere.

Nowhere to the way these drugs can transform what's possible for people like Candy Gray.

For the first time last year, I went to Colorado and was able to hike seven miles, got to seed spots and do things that I never would have probably been able to do before.

This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gera. This episode was produced by Julia Press. It was fact checked by Jessica Beck and edited by Aaron Edwards and Rebecca Greenfield. It was mixed by Blake Maples. Our senior producers are Kim Gittleson and Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. The Cold Beamster Boor is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Please follow and review The Big Take wherever