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The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned adverts promoting prescription oral weight loss medicines to the public for the first time.

The ASA said the adverts by two pharmacies, Simple Online Pharmacy and Pharmacy Online, promoted oral GLP-1 treatments through paid social media ads and website content and invited people to join waiting lists, register their interest and pre-order treatment.

The ad for Simple Online Pharmacy, which was seen on June 1 this year, promoted oral GLP-1 treatments before any GLP-1 medicine had been authorised in the UK.

“The first oral GLP-1 tablet for weight management was licenced as a prescription-only medicine (POM) on 11 June 2026. Before that date, there was no UK marketing authorisation in place for these medicines,” the ASA said.

Pharmacy Online ran ads promoting the oral Wegovy tablet after it had been licensed as a POM, including a website pop-up inviting people to “pre-order” it and paid social media ads promoting the oral weight-management tablet.

“We found that these ads promoted a POM to the public,” the ASA said, adding its rulings “are part of wider action” it is taking “to tackle irresponsible ads for weight loss medicines”.

The ASA found three other companies, MedExpress, Juniper and the Care Pharmacy, promoted POMs to the public, although the medicines were not named directly.

“These rulings form part of our ongoing, multi-pronged and tech-assisted approach to tackling ads for weight loss,” the ASA said.

Earlier this year, a study it commissioned examining how people interpret weight-loss ads found the public “can infer a POM is being advertised from a combination of signals including imagery, language and claims such as references to reducing cravings and appetite, significant weight loss or images of weight-loss injection pens”.

The ASA urged advertisers “to consider the overall impression created by an ad, rather than relying on the absence of a named medicine”.

Stimulating consumer demand for new prescription not permitted 

The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which has been working with the ASA and General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) to monitor ads, warned companies promoting medicines “to comply fully with advertising regulations”.

“Stimulating consumer demand for a new prescription medicine is not permitted,” said the MHRA’s interim executive director of healthcare Julian Beach.

"We take advertising that breaches the rules when promoting prescription-only medicines to the public, including weight loss medicines, very seriously.”

Beach added: “Where breaches occur, we will not hesitate to use the full range of regulatory powers available to secure compliance and protect the public.”

The ASA’s investigations manager Catherine Drewett said oral GLP-1 medicines represented “a significant development in treatment options but also new challenges for regulators”.

“We’ve acted quickly as this market has developed and these first rulings make clear that these oral medicines, like prescription-only injections, cannot be advertised to the public,” she said.

“These are powerful medicines, so it’s important that ads don’t encourage people to seek treatment in ways that could put them at risk.”