Is It Good That Roxy Jacenko Has Spoken About ‘Overdosing’ On Ozempic?

Unless you’ve been dodging every celebrity headline for the last calendar year, it’s likely you’ve heard of the drug Ozempic. It was developed as a medication for people with Type 2 Diabetes by managing blood glucose levels, helping your body produce more insulin when needed. However, Hollywood got their mitts all over it once they released it could also help you lose weight, extremely quickly.

The Kardashians have been accused of using Ozempic, while Chelsea Handler and Amy Schumer have admitted they were prescribed it by their doctors – with Amy sharing that it made her incredibly unwell so she stopped taking it pretty damn quick.

It became a drug so woven into celebrity culture that Jimmy Kimmel even cracked a joke about it while hosting the Oscars. “Everybody looks so great,” he opened. “When I look around this room, I can’t help but wonder ‘Is Ozempic right for me?'”

Besides the jokes and accusations of use, there’s a darker side of Ozempic that barely anyone has spoken about. That is until Roxy Jacenko piped up.

Roxy Jacenko recently. Image credit: @roxyjackeno Instagram.

Roxy, if you don’t know already, is one of Australia’s most successful PR girlies. She ran her own agency, Sweaty Betty PR, for a number of years and became a bit of a Sydney socialite while doing so. She’s since been on a bunch of reality TV shows – including SAS Australia – and has had a bit of a complicated home life after her husband (and the father of her two children) was sent to prison for insider trading.

Things took another turn in 2016 when Roxy was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had treatment and is now on ongoing medication to keep her in remission. But it’s the post-cancer medication that she believes is behind her “15kg weight gain” – something she was keen to shed as soon as possible.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Roxy explains that she asked her doctor straight-up for a prescription of Ozempic. A request he refused. 

“I went to my doctor and I begged him and he said, ‘Roxy go and look in the mirror’. He made me walk into his room and look at myself in the mirror and he said, ‘I am not giving you a prescription, you don’t need it”, she said.

Roxy Jacenko mirror selfie. Image credit: @roxyjacenko Instagram.

But Roxy was determined to get her hands on it, and so she went looking elsewhere. “You would be blown away by the number of people who will give you scripts for that stuff,” Roxy claims.

She eventually secured a script, but due to supply issues (because the drug is so in demand) she couldn’t find a chemist in Sydney with stock. So Roxy paid someone $2,500 to drive and collect the medication for her from hours away. 

This was likely the first sign that she had developed an unhealthy relationship with the drug. 

Roxy was also prescribed with a much heavier dose than medically recommended when you start on Ozempic. “The only one I could get was a 1-milligram pen. So basically you start on 0.25 and after a number of weeks or months you can transition yourself onto a higher dosage,” Roxy explains. “I took the 1ml because it was it was all I could get. I was like a junkie. I was like a proper junkie.”

This amount of the drug in her system is classified as an overdose. Roxy’s body went into shock, causing her to vomit and shake uncontrollably. She then called an ambulance and was rushed to hospital.

It was when she was in hospital that Roxy truly thought she was “going to die”. And that feeling is why she’s talking about this situation at all.

Roxy is urging those who are considering going on a weight loss drug like Ozempic to consider the potential side effects and the long-term effect it can have on your body. From Roxy’s perspective, she believes “it is not worth the ramifications”.

While I can see the benefits in Roxy talking about this, shedding some light on a drug that’s had overwhelming positive PR up until now, I can’t help but think this could be drawing more attention, more eyeballs and more impressionable people to Ozempic. 

There will be hoards of people who may have heard of Ozempic in relation to international celebrities but assumed the drug wasn’t accessible or was even unapproved within Australia. Those people now know that it’s possible to get a prescription – even if it’s not from their usual doctor – and that while it could land them in great pain in the hospital, it could also see them shed a few kilos with “minimal effort”. 

I’m not sure if that exposure is serving awareness in the way Roxy hoped it would. 

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Image Credits: @roxyjacenko Instagram