Mounjaro and Ozempic in Guyana: President says demand outpaces rules

"Outpacing regulations": what President Ali said

In a healthcare policy address reported on 25 April 2026, President Irfaan Ali flagged the rising use of tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro, in Guyana. According to HGP Nightly News, he said the drug works well for its approved use but that off-label use for cosmetic weight loss is straining both supply and oversight, and that demand is outpacing the ability of the Government Analyst – Food and Drug Department (GA-FDD) and the Medical Council to monitor it¹. He signalled that the Ministry of Health will move toward stricter "prescription-only" enforcement so that people with diabetes are not priced out or left short, and announced a public awareness campaign about self-administering hormonal treatments from unregulated sources¹.

A generic semaglutide in the registration queue

Less than three weeks later, Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony said a generic version of the semaglutide drug Ozempic would reach the local market in about two months. Guyana Times reported on 13 May 2026 that a manufacturer had applied for registration and that the Food and Drug Department was processing the submitted dossier². The minister was explicit about access: "This is not a non-prescription item; you have to get a prescription," adding that "it requires proper medical use, and it must be under medical supervision" and that the ministry would be "doing that monitoring as well"². We found no public notice confirming that the registration has since been granted.

How Guyana got here: unregistered pens and fake batches

The legal problem is not new. In June 2024 the GA-FDD issued a consumer alert, based on World Health Organization information, that falsified batches of Ozempic "may possibly be on the local market"³. WHO had flagged three falsified batches detected in Brazil, the United Kingdom and the United States between October and December 2023, warning that such pens may lack the active ingredient or contain an undeclared one such as insulin⁴. The GA-FDD added that "Ozempic (semaglutide) is not registered here" and therefore should not be sold locally³. That matters because the department's position is that all drugs must be registered with it before they can be legally sold in Guyana⁷.

What the law says about weight-loss injections

Guyana's Food and Drugs Act, Chapter 34:03, defines a drug by what it is sold or represented for, including "restoring, correcting or modifying organic functions"⁵. Section 4 makes it an offence, unless regulations allow it, to advertise any drug to the general public as a treatment, preventive or cure for a condition in the First Schedule, which lists both obesity and diabetes; section 10 bans labelling or advertising a drug in a false or misleading way⁵. On its face, that wording reaches promotion of weight-loss injections to the public, including on social media. On the dispensing side, section 20 of the Pharmacy Practitioners Act, Chapter 32:07, treats "the dispensing of prescribed pharmaceuticals without the prescription" of a registered medical practitioner as professional misconduct⁶. A prescription-only policy, in other words, already has a legal foothold; the President's point was enforcement.

The evidence behind the demand

The demand has a scientific basis. In STEP 1, adults with obesity lost a mean 14.9 % of body weight at 68 weeks with semaglutide versus 2.4 % with placebo¹⁰. In SURMOUNT-1, tirzepatide produced mean losses of 15.0 % to 20.9 % at 72 weeks across doses, against 3.1 % with placebo¹¹. In SELECT, semaglutide cut major cardiovascular events by 20 % (hazard ratio 0.80) in people with established cardiovascular disease and overweight or obesity but no diabetes¹². In December 2025 WHO issued conditional recommendations for long-term GLP-1 therapy in adults with obesity, while warning that global demand "has fueled the spread of falsified and substandard products"⁹.

The safety picture is also clear. Gastrointestinal events were the most common in both STEP 1 and SURMOUNT-1¹⁰¹¹. In March 2026 the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said several countries had reported adverse events of varying severity amid increasing reports linked to GLP-1 misuse, including rare but serious acute pancreatitis, gallbladder disease and intestinal obstruction. It warned that using these medicines "for exclusively aesthetic purposes, without a comprehensive clinical assessment or medical indication" exposes people to unnecessary risk and may divert resources from patients with clear medical indications, the same concern the President raised⁸¹.

Why supply matters in Guyana

In March 2026 the Health Minister put the number of people with diabetes at around 20,000, with about the same number with hypertension¹⁴. A nationally representative study of Guyana's 2016 national survey, published in 2020, measured diabetes prevalence at 18.1 %, with 24.1 % among rural women¹⁵. When a drug class serves both metabolic disease and cosmetic demand, the second can crowd out the first, which is why both PAHO and the President framed the issue as one of access as well as safety¹⁸.