A new study found that the well-known link between impulsivity and violent behavior was 62% weaker in current Ozempic and Wegovy users compared to people who’d stopped taking them
Ozempic and Wegovy are approved for weight loss and diabetes. A new study from Rutgers University, published this month in the journal Criminology, found a connection nobody set out to look for: people currently taking these drugs showed a substantially weaker link between impulsivity and violent behavior than people who had previously taken them and stopped.
The research team, led by Daniel Semenza, director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at the Rutgers School of Public Health, analyzed a 2025 survey of 7,521 U.S. adults, focusing on 821 people who had used a GLP-1 medication at some point. Participants answered questions about impulsivity, alcohol use, and whether they had engaged in violent acts, including assault and armed robbery, over the previous year.
What the comparison showed
Among people who had previously used a GLP-1 drug but stopped, impulsivity and violent behavior tracked together the way decades of prior criminology research would predict: people who scored higher on impulsivity measures were meaningfully more likely to report violent behavior. That relationship is one of the most consistently replicated findings in the field.
Among current GLP-1 users, that relationship was about 62% weaker. “The strongest finding in the study was that the well-established link between impulsivity and violent behavior was substantially weaker among current GLP-1 users compared to former users,” Semenza said. The connection between alcohol use and violence was also reduced, though by a smaller margin, in current users compared with former users.
Semenza was careful about what this does and doesn’t mean. “GLP-1 users, the likelihood that being highly impulsive is lower for translating into violence than it would be for people who aren’t on drugs,” he said, describing it as the drug not eliminating someone’s underlying impulsive temperament, but weakening the specific link between feeling an impulse and acting on it violently.
Why this isn’t entirely surprising biologically
This finding sits alongside a growing body of separate research on GLP-1 drugs and the brain’s reward and impulse circuitry. These drugs were originally built to act on the gut, but GLP-1 receptors are also present in brain regions involved in reward, motivation, and impulse control, the same regions implicated in everything from food cravings to substance use to compulsive behavior. Earlier research has already linked GLP-1 use to reduced cravings for alcohol, nicotine, and other substances, and to lower rates of substance use disorder relapse in large population studies, including a 600,000-veteran study that found reduced overdose and addiction-related outcomes across multiple drug categories.
Some neuroscientists have described the apparent effect as functioning somewhat like cognitive behavioral therapy at a chemical level, not erasing an impulsive personality, but creating a brief window between the impulse and the action where the urge can be overridden rather than acted on immediately.
The caveats that matter as much as the finding
This is an observational study built from a single survey snapshot, not a randomized controlled trial, and Semenza and his coauthors are explicit that it does not prove the drugs cause reduced violence. People who remain on GLP-1 medications long-term may differ from people who stop taking them in ways the survey can’t fully capture, including underlying health, access to consistent healthcare, or other behavioral factors that weren’t measured.
It’s also worth noting what the study didn’t find: GLP-1 use wasn’t associated with lower baseline impulsivity itself. People on the drugs weren’t reporting feeling less impulsive in general. What changed was specifically how often that impulsivity translated into a violent act, a narrower and more mechanistically interesting finding than a blanket claim that the drugs make people calmer.
What would need to happen next
Confirming whether this is a real causal effect of the drugs, rather than a pattern explained by who tends to stay on GLP-1 medications versus who stops, would require longitudinal studies tracking the same individuals over time, ideally with randomized assignment, which is difficult to do ethically and practically for a drug already approved and prescribed for other reasons. For now, GLP-1 drugs remain approved specifically for diabetes and weight management. Researchers are clear that it’s far too early to think of them as a tool for violence reduction.
What this study adds is another data point in an expanding pattern: a class of drugs built to act on metabolism keeps turning up associations with brain systems that have nothing to do with blood sugar or body weight, cravings, addiction relapse, and now the gap between feeling an impulse and acting on it.
Sources:
Semenza, D.C., et al.
GLP-1 receptor agonist use and the impulsivity-violence and alcohol-violence relationships among U.S. adults.
Criminology, June 2026. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.70058
