Each week the mother of two injects herself with weight-loss drugs, two of which are in clinical trials and not yet approved for sale by the US Food and Drug Administration. One comes mixed with tirzepatide, the active ingredient in Eli Lilly’s Zepbound. And though the semaglutide peptide sellers included “research use only” on their labels, one seller offered injection guidance, and others touted the potential health and weight-loss benefits of their products. “It’s clear that they’re advertising for human use, but they’re trying to skirt the rules,” Mackey says. Despite the benefits, people may face negative attitudes about using drugs for weight loss. They may be “stigmatized for taking the ‘easy way out,’ ” A.
• “Drug Brokers” Recruit Pharmacies to Purchase Drugs for the Gray Market. Some gray market wholesalers gain access to shortage drugs by recruiting pharmacies to act as their purchasing agents. Most of his experience with drug shortages involves helping patients and doctors grapple with the disappearing medications.
Cheap And Risky: Stung By High Prices, Americans Turn To DIY Weight-loss Drugs From The Grey Market
I know that some of the research chemical vendors have expressed an interest in performing toxicological tests, but those could cost millions of dollars, so I’m not sure how seriously it has been taken. Pedigree and price information collected for five different short-supply injectable drugs, documenting the activities of 125 different companies, showed similar patterns of leakage and aggressive gray market price markups. For all five drugs, units normally costing $10 to $20 were regularly marked up to prices of $200 or more while they traveled through the gray market.
More On Investigation Of The “Gray Market”
Adrian, who asked for his last name to be omitted for safety and privacy reasons, is not a doctor or pharmacist. He’s a 30-year-old systems engineer who isn’t taking no for an answer when it comes to access to this life-changing weight loss medication. Adrian is one of thousands of people in a “community” — what he calls the giant invite-only group chat he belongs to — that are making or thinking about making their own GLP-1 medications. First of all, only a fraction of them have ever undergone toxicological tests in any animal, including humans. Most of the people selling these compounds don’t really have an interest in the safety of their clients. On the products, they write that it’s not for human consumption, so technically they are in the clear if someone drops dead.
Janet Tomiyama, a UCLA psychologist, wrote in the January Annals of Behavioral Medicine. When I identified myself as a writer for Science News and asked if anyone would speak about their experiences, people called me a snitch, a cop and a Big Pharma shill. One member suggested that this story could shut down peptide-seller websites.
- Even with new discounts, though, purchasing peptides from “research only” sellers may still be the cheapest option.
- Rz and say they’re for an “RS,” or “research subject,” a way to avoid calling attention to human use.
- “I would prefer to go with Eli Lilly Direct, even if it cost a few bucks more, versus compounding tirzepatide myself,” he says.
- The popularity of “gray” has medical and legal experts concerned.
- She’s not worried about measuring out the water or mixing the drug.
A Shadowy Market For Weight-loss Drugs Has Emerged Online
So if you had a batch of drugs worth $80,000 you could simply go through this chemical process and end up with drugs worth $800,000? I wouldn’t put it like that; I don’t know if hallucinogens are the biggest moneymakers, but that’s the gist of it. You can vary the specific chemical structure almost indefinitely by changing the formula a little bit. But as a scientist and someone with a bit of common sense, I would never recommend actually using recreational drugs, and especially not research chemicals. Five people sent drugs to the lab, Janoshik Analytical in the Czech Republic, which found the vials contained tirzepatide, as purported, with purity between 99.78 per cent and 99.85 per cent. CagriSema is Novo’s next-generation obesity drug candidate, still in clinical trials so not available to the public.
Gray Market Report
Yes, bad trips are known to occur, but the realistic bad trip would basically involve hiding under the covers for a couple of hours—not jumping in front of a bus because you think you’re Superman. There have already been deaths caused by the NBOMe group—something that hasn’t been reported with phenethylamines like 2C-B as far as I know. Some people have a certain reaction, almost like a psychotic episode, and then they die.
Most gray market vendors aren’t large enough to do anything close. Lambson says he understands the frustration of consumers who can’t afford or don’t have access to either brand-name or compounded versions of GLP-1 medications. But he worries about people tracking down their own peptide supply.
- Not only are stakeholders encouraged to take steps aimed at avoiding the purchase of counterfeit or suspect product, but must take clear and immediate steps if they suspect or believe that they have received counterfeit or suspect product.
- It’s not clear who sells to gray-market suppliers — or who buys from them, said Amanda Forster, a spokeswoman for Premier.
- It represents the market’s perception of the potential value and demand for the shares.
- On Thursdays, she uses retatrutide, a new obesity medicine by Lilly, also in trials.
Name-brand Drugs Come With Big Price Tags
As part of my reporting for this story, I joined multiple peptide groups online. It’s a private group with more than 22,000 members, and the rules stipulate that any talk of research peptides for human use is not allowed. For Melanie, the first two weeks on tirzepatide were the roughest.
Injectables are expected to be available in India from next year, when Eli Lilly plans to launch Mounjaro, Reuters reported. A deluge of generic weight-loss drugs are forecast to flow soon after when patents of semaglutide, used to make Novo’s weight loss medicine, start to expire in 2026. Gray markets refer to the situation where functioning or legitimate medication is diverted from legal distribution channels into illegal channels which are not authorized by the manufacturer. The motivation for the diversion of these drugs is mostly from the pricing point, and this is sometimes encouraged by supply challenges that occurs with different geographical locations. There have been issues of counterfeit drugs in both the developing and developed worlds; and in no less a place like the United Kingdom just a couple of years ago, there was the fake Xanax debacle which remains a big scar till this day.
And because people may remain on the meds indefinitely, costs can pile up. In February, Novo Nordisk reported a 25 percent jump in sales from 2023 to 2024, largely thanks to Ozempic and Wegovy. Eli Lilly’s revenue rose 32 percent, driven by sales of Mounjaro and Zepbound. In 2024, there were 8,502 GLP-1–related cases reported to poison control centers across the United States. Whether these compounded formulations—with their added B12, NAD+, or marketing flourish—represent personalized innovation or commercial exploitation depends on your vantage point. The compounded GLP-1 market exists in a precarious balance between access and oversight, necessity and novelty.
Such side effects may help explain why 65 percent of people without type 2 diabetes who take a GLP-1 drug quit within a year, scientists suggested in January in JAMA Network Open. Less than four emergency department visits occur for every 1,000 patients dispensed semaglutide, researchers estimated in April in the Annals of Internal Medicine. But just because a drug is off the list doesn’t mean supply is guaranteed.
Why ‘gray’ Is A Problem
Lambson, a board-certified toxicologist, knew right away what was going on. “This drug is probably being compounded,” he remembers thinking. After investigating, Lambson’s team at the Utah Poison Control Center in Salt Lake City reported that people were overdosing on compounded semaglutide. That means “a lot of nausea, a lot of vomiting, a lot of diarrhea,” he says. Grey Market is an unregulated market to trade IPO applications and IPO shares before listing of the stock. An investor may not want to trade in the grey market, but getting an idea of the GMP can be used to estimate the listing gain on the IPO share.
Price-gougers Hike Costs Of Vital Drugs During Shortage
The total cost is about US$50 (RM211) monthly, as little as one-tenth of what she would expect to pay their makers for full treatment. Like most pharmacists charged with stocking an entire hospital, O’Neal prefers to conduct his official business for Vanderbilt University Medical Center through big-name distributors. Meghan Rosen is a senior writer who reports on the life sciences for Science News.
It cost $350 — almost the same amount Eli Lilly charges for one month of Zepbound. A PhD student I worked alongside with just published an article about how a new class of drugs—the NBOMe class—might be metabolized in the body. That came about because some of these drugs found their way to the gray market and a lot of people who tried them wrote on internet forums that they weren’t active if you swallowed them. Instead it should be ingested sublingually, meaning you have to place it under your tongue.
Response To Suspect Product
On Reddit, users told how another Novo drug in development, called CagriSema, had helped reduce inflammation and hunger pangs better than semaglutide. Most of the grey market buyers Reuters interviewed had told their medical providers they were taking GLP-1 medicines but not where or how they bought them. Even if many secondary vendors in the gray market are legitimate, the whole set-up is one asking for unethical practices and outright exploitation, O’Neal said. High blood pressure medication that normally costs $25.90, for example, can go for $1,200 — a mark-up of 4,533 percent. Though many insurance plans pay for the meds for type 2 diabetes, coverage can be spotty for people who are overweight or obese but do not have diabetes. That’s why Melanie’s insurance didn’t cover a GLP-1 prescription.
