Dhruv Khullar

In fact, for some people, these so-called moderation molecules, they could have an alter ego as a desire dampener.

Maybe some people lose interest in drugs or alcohol or food because they lose interest in pretty much everything, a condition known as anhedonia.

It's also true that addiction is often a lifelong battle.

But many people who start on a GLP-1, they come off it within months, whether because of side effects or costs or access.

And even people who do manage to stay on the medications might ultimately develop a tolerance to them, such that their cravings for a drug ultimately return.

And yet it is hard not to get excited about the potential for GLP-1s to treat addiction when you consider how little progress we have made.

Every year, tens of thousands of Americans die of an opioid overdose.

Since the turn of the century, alcohol-related deaths have more than doubled, and it has been 20 years since the FDA last approved a medication for alcohol use disorder.

The winding path of GLP-1s from Gila monster peptide to diabetes medication to obesity drug to potential addiction treatment, it is a story of hope.

But it is also a story with a lesson.

The hope is that more people will gain the power to bring their wants and their motivations and their behaviors into greater harmony, and they will live many more years in good health as a result.

The lesson is about the unpredictability of medical progress.

Discoveries like this one remind us why scientific curiosity, especially the kind that can seem obscure or impractical, why it matters so deeply.

Because we don't know where the next big innovation will come from.

We might not even recognize it when we first see it.

But now, GLP-1s are forcing us to reconsider not just the modern science of addiction, but ancient wisdom about restraint.

For thousands of years, we have seen moderation as a moral achievement.

Aristotle argued that the path to a life well lived runs through moderation.

Courage rests somewhere between cowardice and recklessness, generosity between stinginess and extravagance.

He's often quoted as saying, it is best to rise from life as though from a banquet, neither drunken nor thirsty.