This week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Qsymia, a new drug for the treatment of obesity that contains two active ingredients, phentermine and topiramate. It joins Belviq (lorcaserin), approved just last month, as the first anti-obesity pills green-lighted by the agency (which may be too busy spying on itself to worry about such things) in more than a decade.

And not a moment too soon. According to the Center of Disease Control and Prevention,  more than one-third of the adult U.S. population is obese, a proportion that has risen dramatically in the last two decades. The associated medical costs for the condition are about $147 billion annually, and about 300,000 people die each year die of obesity-related complications.  The public has reacted as usual to the alarming scope of the problem—with avoidance of the facts, finger-pointing, claims of misinterpretation.  More productively, though, the obesity epidemic has drawn the interest of pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers, and now we now finally have some usable products.

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