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The Booming Market for Backdoor Ozempic
The Booming Market for Backdoor Ozempic
Off-label Ozempic, a diabetes drug that also helps users lose weight, is being sold at med spas across the U.S. (Illustration: Dura Lee for The Free Press)
It’s not just celebrities. Women around the country are going to great lengths to procure ‘liquid gold’ in our bottomless appetite to be thin.
By Olivia Reingold
02.16.23 — Culture and Ideas
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The Free Press
The Free Press
The Booming Market for Backdoor Ozempic

It’s noon on a Wednesday, when most people would be eating lunch. But not Kate Barone, an Atlanta-based salon owner who is 5 feet 1 with blonde hair down to her waist. She recently got down to 90 pounds from a high of around 120 on semaglutide, the active ingredient in the blockbuster diabetes drug Ozempic.

She said she’s off the injections for now while…

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Olivia Reingold
Olivia Reingold is a staff writer at The Free Press.She has cocreated and executive produced Matthew Yglesias’s podcast, Bad Takes. She got her start in public radio, regularly appearing on NPR for her reporting on indigenous communities in Montana. She previously produced podcasts at Politico, where she shaped conversations with world leaders like Jens Stoltenberg.
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