Last year, at a bar, Mary noticed that the same friend had hardly sipped her drink. She told Mary that she’d started taking Ozempic for weight loss. “If I have more than two beers now, I go outside and barf,” the friend said. Mary was perplexed. Ozempic, or semaglutide, originated as a diabetes medicine; more recently, as an obesity treatment, it has made its manufacturer, Novo Nordisk, one of Europe’s most valuable companies. What did it have to do with drinking? The next day, Mary saw an advertisement on Facebook: a nearby clinical trial was studying semaglutide’s effects on alcohol addiction. She enrolled.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter