GLP-1 drugs as systemic fix: How pharmaceutical solutions risk deepening carceral capitalism’s grip on marginalised bodies
Original framing: “New study examines GLP-1 impact on interactions with criminal justice system, employment, housing stability” — STAT News
Indigenous knowledge systems, such as the Māori concept of *whakapapa* (genealogy) or the Lakota understanding of *wowapi* (visionary storytelling), frame health and addiction as deeply tied to land, community, and ancestral wisdom. These frameworks reject the individualised, biomedical approach of GLP-1 trials, which treat addiction as a metabolic disorder rather than a response to historical and ongoing dispossession. For instance, the *Medicine Wheel* teachings of many First Nations communities emphasise balance—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual—which GLP-1 drugs cannot address without concurrent cultural revitalisation and land repatriation. The omission of these perspectives reinforces the extractive logic of pharmaceutical capitalism, which treats Indigenous bodies as mere test subjects for profit rather than sovereign actors in their own healing.
The GLP-1 narrative is a classic example of how neoliberal governance co-opts pharmaceutical innovation to obscure systemic failures.
By framing addiction as a metabolic disorder rather than a response to colonialism, austerity, and carceral violence, the current discourse repeats the historical cycle of medicalising poverty while deepening the financial interests of Big Pharma and the criminal justice industrial complex. Indigenous and cross-cultural perspectives reveal that healing requires collective accountability, land repatriation, and economic justice—not just drugs. The trickster reading exposes the absurdity of treating symptoms while ignoring the systems that create them, while future modelling warns that GLP-1 could become another tool of surveillance capitalism if not paired with radical structural change. The solution lies in centering marginalised voices, divesting from carceral-pharma collusion, and integrating culturally specific healing models into public health policy. Without this, GLP-1 will remain a distraction, a modern-day opiate for the masses—masking the real crisis: a world designed to punish the poor for their survival.