 Feast and famine Until recently, the US was suffering an official shortage of Wegovy and other GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. Ironically, that made it easier to get hold of them, the psychiatrist Scott Alexander notes: When the regulators declare a drug to be in short supply, it becomes “semi-legal” to make off-patent versions. Since Wegovy and the rest cost around $1,000 a month, and the off-brand equivalents around $200, it meant that millions more could access them. But in December, the shortage was declared over — and no one knows what will happen next. “Many people have to stay on GLP-1 drugs permanently, or else they risk regaining their lost weight,” says Alexander. “But many can’t afford $1000/month. What happens to them?” The compounding pharmacies that make the off-label versions are trying to find loopholes: Things like hinting to doctors that their patients need extremely specific dosages or drug combinations that the pharma companies don’t provide, and which the compounding pharmacies can. Patients are stocking up or, in some cases, “turning amateur chemist,” ordering the drugs’ precursor chemicals from China and making them at home. But it marks an end to a two-year “fun experiment in semi-free-market medicine,” says Alexander, in which about 2 million people took cutting-edge drugs “with barely a fig leaf of medical oversight, and it went great.” Follow the money Last year, New York Magazine’s The Cut published an article by an author who said she had given $50,000 in a shoebox to a stranger, having fallen for a scam which, she implied, had left her near-destitute. Oddly, the author was a financial advice columnist. The finance writer Patrick McKenzie was surprised: “Very few customers routinely withdraw $50,000 in cash,” he notes, and very few banks would allow it of a customer they did not know well, no questions asked, because it is “likely they are being scammed or otherwise victimized.” This surprise led him into a year-long investigation of the article. McKenzie FOIA’d police reports into the scam; he worked out exactly which bank branch it must have taken place at; he pestered The Cut’s owners for statements. He found out that the scam did take place, but that the context had been somewhat fudged: The author, far from being a struggling freelancer, was a scion of a rich family, thus explaining the surprising withdrawal: “It no longer looks like a surprising lapse in procedure, when someone attempted to empty their entire savings account,” he writes. “It looks like trivial cash management of a well-off, presumptively sophisticated client, whose household, resources, and probable financial future were thoroughly known to the bank.” In memoriam Kevin Drum, one of the big names of the internet’s first wave of bloggers, died of cancer this month. Other big-name bloggers took a moment to remember him, among them Matthew Yglesias and Helen Lewis. Ben Dreyfuss, who worked with him, told a particularly moving story (behind a paywall): Drum was forced out of Mother Jones, where he blogged, after a series of twitterstorms, including one over a piece he wrote about how most people don’t like subtitles in movies. “Who cares if he likes subtitles or not? I hate subtitles,” says Dreyfuss. But “Twitter read it and lost its shit.” These rows spilled over into the company Slack, and eventually Drum was forced out. Drum — who never badmouthed Mother Jones publicly afterwards — was the outlet’s most popular columnist, Dreyfuss says, bringing in up to a third of all traffic. But he refused taking a salary commensurate with that popularity — journalism was a second career for him, having made his money through tech — instead insisting that the company “ take the money and put it into paying the fellows more and giving them a better stipend or lower premium for healthcare.” Those same junior colleagues were the ones who forced Drum out for his problematic takes.
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