Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: When you think about ozempic and other similar drugs, it's
Speaker 2: likely one group of people comes to mind. TikTok is
Speaker 2: all over it, and so are some celebrities.
Speaker 3: Speculations surrounding celebrities who've slimmed down dramatically. Not everyone who
Speaker 3: needs them can get them, and some who don't need
Speaker 3: them for medical use may be the problem.
Speaker 2: Eli Lilly, the company behind two similar drugs, zep Bound
Speaker 2: and Manjarro, even aired an ad during the Oscars criticizing
Speaker 2: celebrities for contributing to shortages.
Speaker 4: For the smaller dress attucks for vanity. But that's not
Speaker 4: the point.
Speaker 2: So you might think that places like Hollywood or New
Speaker 2: York City would have the highest concentration of people on
Speaker 2: these drugs, places packed with the rich and famous, influencers,
Speaker 2: people with money to spend on their appearance. That's exactly
Speaker 2: what Marie Ellis thought.
Speaker 4: When I first got on to how can seeing all this?
Speaker 4: I was like, what is this? Is this for real
Speaker 4: or is this just for people in Hollywood.
Speaker 2: She's an accountant in Kentucky, and she says she struggled
Speaker 2: with weight loss her whole life until she tried Mount Jarrow.
Speaker 4: So I've been on about a year and a half
Speaker 4: and I've lost eighty one pounds.
Speaker 2: And Marie isn't the only one.
Speaker 4: My sister in law was doing the same thing. I
Speaker 4: mean she was dropping six to ten pounds every time.
Speaker 2: Schwade in.
Speaker 4: You can eat whatever you want to. I mean, my
Speaker 4: husband has not changed anything and lost forty pounds.
Speaker 2: Marie and her husband and her sister in law are
Speaker 2: just a few of the people in her community who
Speaker 2: have taken these drugs. It turns out the epicenter of
Speaker 2: the weight loss shot boom wasn't a wealthy, image obsessed
Speaker 2: enclave like Hollywood or Manhattan's Upper East Side, but right
Speaker 2: in Marie's own backyard. Today, on the show Welcome to Ozempictown, USA,
Speaker 2: we take a look at Bowling Green, Kentucky, the area
Speaker 2: with one of the highest constin trations of prescriptions for
Speaker 2: weight loss drugs in the United States, and unpack what
Speaker 2: it can tell us about how these drugs could transform
Speaker 2: communities across the country. This is the big take from
Speaker 2: Bloomberg News. I'm David Gurak. A decade ago, Bowling Green
Speaker 2: had farms on the outskirts of town, today, it's a
Speaker 2: city of seventy four thousand people, the third largest in Kentucky.
Speaker 2: It's the birthplace of Duncan Hines, the namesake of those
Speaker 2: fudgy brownie mixes. One of the city's biggest employers is
Speaker 2: the GM factory that churns out corvettes, and according to
Speaker 2: the city's official website, it has more restaurants per capita
Speaker 2: than anywhere else in the country.
Speaker 3: Driving down the main road into Bowling Green, there's like
Speaker 3: a McDonald's, a taco bell, and then another McDonald's, and
Speaker 3: it's just like fast food place after fast food place.
Speaker 2: Madison Muller is a healthcare reporter at Bloomberg with a
Speaker 2: focus on weight loss drugs. She visited Bowling Green twice
Speaker 2: to report this story.
Speaker 3: In like the month between the trips that I took
Speaker 3: to Bowling Green, there were more advertisements for the weight
Speaker 3: loss shots. There's like fast food places and then assigned
Speaker 3: for a weight loss shot on the other side of
Speaker 3: the road.
Speaker 2: Madison's been reporting on these drugs, known as glp ones,
Speaker 2: for over a year now, and she says Bowling Green
Speaker 2: is not the place she would have expected to find
Speaker 2: when she started crunching the numbers to identify the location
Speaker 2: of Ozepic Town, USA. How did you go about pinpointing
Speaker 2: where the capital actually is?
Speaker 3: So we got data from an analytics firm called Purple Lab,
Speaker 3: and so we looked at different zip codes across the
Speaker 3: US to try to figure out which ones had a
Speaker 3: really high concentration of weight loss drug users. And there
Speaker 3: were a few different hot spots, like there was one
Speaker 3: in Huntsville, Alabama, and a couple of other places. Bowling
Speaker 3: Green was one of the highest. We could also see
Speaker 3: that Kentucky as a state has the highest concentration of
Speaker 3: weight loss drug users, so we figured that that was
Speaker 3: a good place to look.
Speaker 2: And what they found was that around four percent of
Speaker 2: residents in the Bowling Green area had a prescription for
Speaker 2: a weight loss drug. That's quadruple the rate in the
Speaker 2: Miami area or Brooklyn, New York. And it's a conservative
Speaker 2: estimate since some people get off brand versions of the drugs.
Speaker 2: So what is it about this city that makes it
Speaker 2: so right for people to use these drugs?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the obesity rates there are pretty high, and
Speaker 3: people there also have the means in many cases to
Speaker 3: afford these drugs, which are quite expensive. They're like one
Speaker 3: thousand dollars a month. A lot of big employers there
Speaker 3: were also covering the drugs, so those conditions sort of
Speaker 3: made it like the perfect place for these drugs to
Speaker 3: really take off. And for most people, these drugs work
Speaker 3: pretty quickly, relatively speaking, and so they tell their cousin,
Speaker 3: they tell their friends, they tell their whoever, and then
Speaker 3: it just sort of spreads like wildfire.
Speaker 2: Madison and her colleagues wanted to know what it's like
Speaker 2: to live at the very center of America's weight loss
Speaker 2: drug craze, but the idea that they were at the
Speaker 2: heart of it all took some people by surprise.
Speaker 3: Like I remember we went to a place called Posh Salon,
Speaker 3: and it was funny seeing the women in the salon
Speaker 3: sort of laugh about ozembic because they're like, what are
Speaker 3: you talking about? Bowling Greens the capital of you know,
Speaker 3: ozempic in the US. But then they were all like, actually, yeah,
Speaker 3: the more that we think about this, everyone we know
Speaker 3: is on these drugs, including Nikki Wilson, the owner of
Speaker 3: the salon, who lost like twenty pounds and then stopped
Speaker 3: taking it. But her clients noticed her weight loss asked
Speaker 3: her what she was doing I don't.
Speaker 5: Care to talk about like everybody would us.
Speaker 3: We know.
Speaker 5: Also I was yeah, the shots, I wasn't like I'm
Speaker 5: working out and I'm doing it diet.
Speaker 3: She told them she was on one of the weight
Speaker 3: loss shots and says that a lot of her clients
Speaker 3: ended up going on the shots as well as a result.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I have a lot of clients that they would too,
Speaker 5: so one of my guns. She came in yesterday she
Speaker 5: saw us fourteen parents.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Madison also visited a local doctor in Bowling Green, doctor Suman.
Speaker 2: Shekar she's been practicing family medicine there for the past
Speaker 2: decade and when she.
Speaker 3: Moved to Bowling Green, she was very struck by the
Speaker 3: number of people with obesity and the number of patients
Speaker 3: that she was seeing across the board, kids to elderly people,
Speaker 3: and then the consequences of obesity, so like heart disease
Speaker 3: and other issues developing in pretty young people.
Speaker 6: It is much easier to educate a forty year old
Speaker 6: than like a.
Speaker 4: Ten to fifteen year old.
Speaker 6: We have seeing a lot of hypotensive and obese patients
Speaker 6: in that age.
Speaker 3: Group, and for a long time she didn't really have
Speaker 3: that many tools that were effective to help that. Besides
Speaker 3: diet and exercise, in some of the older weight laws,
Speaker 3: drugs that weren't as effective, and so she thinks it's
Speaker 3: a good thing that a lot of patients now are
Speaker 3: coming in and actually ask her about ozembic because they're
Speaker 3: hearing about it on TV or on social media. And
Speaker 3: she's glad that people want to do something about their help.
Speaker 6: Almost what we put some off auditions autobies. Once they're
Speaker 6: coming go in and asking go zimbik, it's they're thinking
Speaker 6: about all this. It's a good and positive thing that
Speaker 6: the wrong to lose weight. They are inclined dus betterment.
Speaker 4: Of their help.
Speaker 2: Like Candy Gray, she's the executive director of a senior
Speaker 2: living home in Bowling Green.
Speaker 3: She has a really sort of heartbreaking story because she
Speaker 3: lost many family members to heart disease and strokes.
Speaker 7: Within four weeks time. I had lost two brothers to
Speaker 7: massive heart attacks. Wow, and both of my parents had
Speaker 7: died of strokes. So that was when, honestly, I took
Speaker 7: a good long book in the mara and said, Okay,
Speaker 7: I've got to do something different.
Speaker 3: That was sort of her turning point. That's why she
Speaker 3: decided to go on ozembic.
Speaker 2: What was her experience like on the drug.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she lost a lot of weight and she had
Speaker 3: a really good experience, no side effects.
Speaker 1: The compliments were rolling in.
Speaker 4: They say, honey, you really lost the weight. What'd you do?
Speaker 7: It's like, oh, I took him shots like everybuddy else.
Speaker 3: She was like, I have no shame in telling people
Speaker 3: that I used these weight loss drugs, because you know,
Speaker 3: she thinks that they should be destigmatized.
Speaker 7: Obesity is a disease. Treating obesity it's really no different.
Speaker 2: How much did it change her eating and drinking habits broadly,
Speaker 2: and beyond that, maybe social habits as well.
Speaker 3: Candy is a very social person and was telling us
Speaker 3: that Southern culture really revolves around eating.
Speaker 7: He think about it. How many of our social events
Speaker 7: and I know you know this, they're all surrounded around thoo.
Speaker 3: And so that was something that was difficult to navigate
Speaker 3: at first. But she didn't want to give up her
Speaker 3: social life. She has kids, she has friends, you know,
Speaker 3: her and her husband go out to Friday night dinners
Speaker 3: with their friends. It's something that she wasn't willing to
Speaker 3: give up. So she just figured out how to tailor
Speaker 3: her experience to the weight loss drugs.
Speaker 7: Do we still do our every Friday night dinners with
Speaker 7: our friends Absolutely if we can. Am I eating half
Speaker 7: of what I used to eat before?
Speaker 2: Yes, But if eating half of what they used to
Speaker 2: is good for their health for businesses in Bowling Green,
Speaker 2: there could be some undesired side effects.
Speaker 3: One of the main things we were really interested in
Speaker 3: figuring out in Bowling Green is are these drugs changing
Speaker 3: the economy?
Speaker 2: Coming up the surprising ways that Ozepictown, USA's economy has
Speaker 2: been transformed by these drugs.
Speaker 3: We keep hearing from analysts and from different companies that
Speaker 3: these drugs are going to change everything. And the CEO
Speaker 3: of Nova Noordis told us that he's getting calls from
Speaker 3: scared food CEOs who are like asking him about the
Speaker 3: drugs that his company's making.
Speaker 2: Given these dire warnings, Bloomberg Health reporter Madison Muller told
Speaker 2: me she'd expect it to see restaurants going out of
Speaker 2: business and empty gyms in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Speaker 3: But the gym's doing fine. The restaurants were all bustling.
Speaker 3: What you do see is this kind of side economy developing.
Speaker 2: A side economy. Take, for example, the local GNC a
Speaker 2: place where you can buy vitamins and supplements.
Speaker 3: They have all of these supplements right at the front
Speaker 3: of the store for people that have side effects from
Speaker 3: the drugs, and the GNC's general manager told me that
Speaker 3: all of those supplements are extremely popular.
Speaker 1: She has people coming in all the time asking about them.
Speaker 2: And then there are new businesses.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of medical spas that have been popping
Speaker 3: up in the last couple of years to offer these
Speaker 3: shots and to offer compounded versions.
Speaker 1: That are cheaper.
Speaker 3: So it's like this side economy is sort of developing
Speaker 3: around ozempic, and if anything, it's actually like boosting some
Speaker 3: of the businesses there.
Speaker 2: Candy Gray, who went on ozempic after losing several family
Speaker 2: members to obestie related health problems. She turned to one
Speaker 2: of those new alternatives, a telehealth company offering a copycat drug.
Speaker 7: The first six months I took brand it ozmpic, and
Speaker 7: the end I no longer qualified for my insurance to
Speaker 7: pay for it.
Speaker 2: She says that off brand version costs her about two
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty dollars a month, and that's a pretty
Speaker 2: common occurrence in Bowling.
Speaker 3: Green, says Madison, there's a lot of people that went
Speaker 3: on these drugs, and even in the course of the
Speaker 3: couple of months that we were going to Bowling Green
Speaker 3: and talking to people there, their insurance has stopped covering it.
Speaker 3: Med Center Health where doctor Shakhar works. That health center
Speaker 3: was paying for the drugs for m employees but stopped
Speaker 3: in January, and they're one of the largest employers in
Speaker 3: Bowling Green. So this is something that's happening across the US,
Speaker 3: but we're seeing it really acutely in Bowling Green, where
Speaker 3: there is such a high concentration of people on these
Speaker 3: drugs and the lack of availability and accessibility is making
Speaker 3: people seek out alternatives from other places.
Speaker 2: The four percent of Bowling Green area residents with these
Speaker 2: drug prescriptions, that doesn't account for all those knockoffs and
Speaker 2: compounded versions that people get through medical spas or telehealth services.
Speaker 2: As Madison told us in an episode last month, those
Speaker 2: versions aren't as regulated as the brand name medications, but
Speaker 2: they can often be a lot cheaper and easier to get.
Speaker 3: The problem with that is that there is variability in
Speaker 3: how good the medications are, how safe they are.
Speaker 1: Some of them are fine, some of them are not.
Speaker 2: Madison, what's the takeaway as you see what would the
Speaker 2: consequences be if more towns, more cities became like Bowling Green.
Speaker 3: The takeaway from this story is that it's not just
Speaker 3: Bowling Green. Like we zoomed in on Bowling Green to
Speaker 3: sort of show what's happening there, but just covering this
Speaker 3: beat for the last you know, year plus. There's so
Speaker 3: many themes that we were seeing and hearing in Bowling
Speaker 3: Green that I have heard from patients all over the
Speaker 3: US and likely are playing out in other cities across
Speaker 3: the US.
Speaker 2: And Madison says those voices from Bowling Green offer a
Speaker 2: window into what we may hear more of the good
Speaker 2: and the bad from side effects. My wife's frustrated because
Speaker 2: at night she wants to have dinner.
Speaker 6: To get now it's like that's says Sick.
Speaker 2: To access and affordability.
Speaker 4: I called every pharmacy in Balling Green. I could not
Speaker 4: find it anywhere.
Speaker 2: Nowhere to the way these drugs can transform what's possible
Speaker 2: for people like Candy Gray.
Speaker 7: For the first time last year, I went to Colorado
Speaker 7: and was able to hike seven miles, got to seed
Speaker 7: spots and do things that I never would have probably
Speaker 7: been able to do before.
Speaker 2: This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gera.
Speaker 2: This episode was produced by Julia Press. It was fact
Speaker 2: checked by Jessica Beck and edited by Aaron Edwards and
Speaker 2: Rebecca Greenfield. It was mixed by Blake Maples. Our senior
Speaker 2: producers are Kim Gittleson and Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor
Speaker 2: is Elizabeth Ponso. The Cold Beamster Boor is our executive producer.
Speaker 2: Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks so much
Speaker 2: for listening. Please follow and review The Big Take wherever
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Speaker 2: We'll be back tomorrow