A new $13.3 million study in Pittsburgh will research whether GLP-1 drugs can reduce alcohol and opioid abuse – as well as a host of other social ills, including crime, unemployment and homelessness.
GLP-1s have long been used to treat diabetes and more recently as a means to treat obesity and weight loss. They have also shown signs of reducing other cravings, including for drugs and alcohol.
“There’s already a lot of research that GLP-1s can help with addiction and we are building on that research,” said Diana Martínez Heredia, a data scientist with Allegheny County’s Department of Human Services, who is helping to lead the study.
The study will recruit 1,200 residents over the course of two years, starting in 2027, from four different sites in Allegheny County. Half of them will receive a weekly GLP-1 injection and half a placebo. The participants will otherwise continue with any other treatments they are receiving, according to the study’s authors.
This is a much larger trial than some of the early studies that looked into the impact of GLP-1s on addiction, according to Antoine Douaihy, who leads the addiction medicine program at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine and UPMC’s Western Psychiatric Hospital. Douaihy said he will oversee the study’s four sites.
The previous research on GLP-1s’ effects on addiction, Douaihy said, is limited. One half-year study included only 88 participants; another nine-week study had fewer than 50.
“They are small studies,” Douaihy said. “Their designs are methodologically not very strong.”
By partnering with Allegheny County, Douaihy said, the new study will also look at whether any reduction in alcohol or opioid use also helps people stay employed, find housing and avoid jail, according to Martínez Heredia. ”Most of these trials are looking just at substance use and whether people use less or not,” she said.
The study is being administered by the Center for Addiction, Science, Policy and Research, a nonprofit focused on improving addiction treatment. Nicholas Reville, the executive director, said the secondary impacts of GLP-1s could have implications beyond the physical and mental health benefits for people struggling with addiction.
“The downstream effects are even larger,” he said. “The crime, kids being put into foster care, employment loss, tax revenue, incarceration. If you want to really transform society, if you can solve addiction, it would change everything.”
It cost Allegheny County nearly $100 million to treat 12,700 people with substance abuse problems in 2025.
Reville believes GLP-1s can be more effective than existing treatments for addiction because they are becoming so widely accepted and “appealing to patients,” he said. “This is the first drug class that people with substance use disorders are eager and excited to take.”
Martínez Heredia said the county’s Department of Human Services has become a leader in how it integrates data from residents across various social service areas, which made the county an attractive site for the new study. “We have information from the behavioral health system. We have information from the justice system. We have information of people receiving benefits,” she said. “And what that allows us to do is to see a holistic vision of recovery.”
The $13 million will go to paying the researchers, hiring staff, providing incentives for participants as well as the medical supplies. “A lot of it goes to paying for the medication,” Martínez Heredia said. “It’s a very expensive medication.”
Because the intervention being studied is a medicine rather than a program, the researchers hope it will be easier to replicate. “If it works in Pittsburgh,” Reville said, “it should work almost everywhere.”
Oliver Morrison is the health and environment reporter at Pittsburgh’s Public Source and can be reached at oliver@publicsource.org.
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