Even small chemical variations of known drugs can drastically change how they are processed in the body. Psilocybin-containing mushrooms have been assessed to be one of the safest recreational drugs. Is it safer to take classic drugs? 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. 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? On the products, they write that it’s not for human consumption, so technically they are in the clear if someone drops dead.
Although the forums show suppliers purportedly in China, Reuters was not able to verify where the drugs originate. They swap advice for navigating the market, exchanging information on vendors, shipping and dosage, and sometimes clubbing together to cover the cost of testing the powders. Most of the gray market buyers Reuters interviewed had told their medical providers they were taking GLP-1 medicines but not where or how they bought them. Spencer belongs to a fast-growing group of Americans turning to what many call the "gray market" for obesity medicines, bringing cheap active ingredients from China often labeled as for research purposes, according to import data and social media postings.
But do not let the allure of a low price override common sense. Can you trust a drug or a vaccine that left authorized distribution? There may be health and safety concerns. Gray market fraud may also be used to facilitate other crimes, such as kickbacks and bribery, tax evasion and money laundering. In recent years, high-tech companies such as Cisco, HP and Microsoft have successfully referred cases of discount fraud to U.S. federal authorities for investigation and prosecution.
They must welcome regulatory action—such as a national pedigree law—that limits distribution of pharmaceutical products to authorized distributors of record and other appropriately licensed distributors. Next, stronger regulations are needed regarding the distribution of pharmaceutical products. Among all respondents, only 23% told us they require documentation of authenticity from the gray market vendor before purchase. Pharmaceutical companies are pushing back against their low-cost competitors in the GLP-1 market. The price for her dose of the compounded version is $329 monthly, compared to the brand name's list price of more than $1,000 per month. Some weight-loss clinics or med spas offer injections for as little as $20, with way of vetting what you're getting, and some online clinics are simply money scams, a recent study found.
When a batch of drugs contaminated with nitazenes hits the streets, it often results in a cluster of overdoses. When the Taliban first banned poppy cultivation in 2000, fentanyl flooded the Estonian drug market as a replacement for heroin. “If large criminal groups such as Albanian mafia groups, Turkish criminal groups or Italian or Mexican groups get into supplying nitazenes to Europe on a large scale, we can anticipate a massive public healthcare catastrophe.”
More Stories From Science News On Health & Medicine
Another report, published in JAMA Health Forum, has warned that some of these compounded products use unverified chemical forms of GLP-1. The US FDA has warned against using such drugs, like semaglutide or tirzepatide, as they are not evaluated for safety, quality, or efficacy. They instead end up dealing with unregulated sellers, who sell such drugs for cheap prices, without insurance barriers, reports Fox News. A Fierce Pharma article elaborates that when legitimate medication is distributed through channels that are not authorized by drug manufacturers, it contributes to the gray market. GLP-1, or glucagon-like peptide-1, medications are used to treat and control diabetes and contribute to weight loss, describes NIH.
- No significant differences were seen among university, community, and critical access hospitals.
- None of the vendors responded to requests for comment.
- Until comprehensive access to FDA-approved GLP-1 therapies is both universal and affordable, these gray-market solutions will continue to thrive in the space where public health ambition collides with pharmaceutical economics.
- The trade in medications without the authorization of the drug company for the purpose of exploiting price differences between countries is legal.
- In an email, Novo Nordisk said the drug appeared to be "diverted legitimate product that was produced for, and distributed to, the Chinese market during late '23 and early '24. Therefore, it would be unauthorized/unapproved for the US market."
- Ever since the FDA approved the prescription of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, it's been hard to get hold of the real thing.
Chagee Founder Zhang Junjie To Wed Chinese Solar Heiress In December
- Research conducted by Goldman Sachs on the drug market has revealed that anti-obesity drugs alone are expected to hit $95 billion by 2030.
- Eli Lilly, the maker of Mounjaro and Zepbound, said it is actively fighting the counterfeits.
- Normally priced at $25.90 per unit, the drug was offered at $1,200 a unit, a 4,533 percent increase, the report said.
- A Reddit spokesperson said the site prohibits facilitating transactions involving drugs and regularly shuts down groups found to be doing this.
- He remembers one case in which the pedigree for a batch cancer medication was provided but it was still unclear whether the drug was safe, he said.
- She gets the drug from Mindful Weight Loss, a mostly telehealth-based operation led by physician Vivek Gupta of Manhattan Beach, California.
"Despite all the claims of shortages of supply and demand, the simple answer is that profit considerations are almost always a factor. "Corporations look at profit margins," says Fletcher Allen's Leavitt, "and if a generic or other drug is not profitable, it is not a priority." J&J's Neufang told CorpWatch that "the DOXIL shortage is not driven by profit motive."Analysts disagree. "Whether a company makes drugs or iPads, it has a mission to maximize profit," says Steven Kappel, who helped develop Vermont's proposed health care reform models. "The problems come when that goal diverges from what we believe is the public interest," says the head of Policy Integrity, a Vermont think tank that develops and evaluates health policy. "It raises major ethical issues when making profits conflicts with saving lives." Hard-to-make sterile injectables such as anesthesias and chemotherapies are particularly hard hit."More than 80 percent of all affected drugs were generic injectable medications, meaning drugs without patent protection that generally treat acute disease. In fact, half of the generic injectable drugs sold in the United States were on the shortages list, according to a November report by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.The AHA survey confirmed the extent of the problem with "82% of hospitals reporting they have delayed patient treatment as a result of a drug shortage, and more than half were not always able to provide the patient with the recommended treatment. In the first six months of 2011, some 99.5 percent of hospitals reported at least one drug shortage, according to a June American Hospital Association (AHA) survey; 44 percent fell short on more than 20 drugs, and 78 percent rationed supply.For example, Karen McBride, director of Pharmacy Services for Fletcher Allen Health Care, a university-affilliated Vermont hospital, says she has to scrounge drugs from other facilities and beg emergency rations from manufacturers.
There are high level anti-diversion solutions like those provided by Cypheme which ensure that the GPS position of products can be tracked as soon as they are scanned – this provides manufacturers which the much-needed information as to whether or not their products have fallen out of legal distribution channels. Consumer education is a key step in taking the fight to criminal minds that help gray markets thrive; It is important that key pharmaceuticals stakeholders (manufacturers and regulators in particular) take proactive steps to educate consumers on the dangers of using medication purchased outside of the legal channels. A lot of people will go off the drug, and that’s a shame.” When the FDA removes the drugs from the shortage list, 503B compounders must immediately stop selling them. But since compounded forms of the drug are not FDA-approved, those who make, prescribe, or use them also should have “an increased level of responsibility or awareness,” she said. He figures he earns 95% of his revenue from compounding drugs, rather than traditional prescriptions.
Drug Prices Soar As Hospital Suppliers Are Forced Into ‘Gray Market’
Nitazenes have already killed hundreds of people in Europe and left law enforcement and scientists scrambling to detect them in the drug supply and curb their spread. Going online and buying the drugs from unvetted sources that don’t require a prescription “can really put you at harm’s risk,” he says. The list price for GLP-1 drugs runs from around $1,000 to $1,300 per month. It might help patients shed more weight than anything currently on the market. These chemicals include the same active ingredient as the brand-name drugs and compounded versions, but don’t require a prescription. Without compounded versions to shore up supply, “we worry that patients are going to have access issues with this medication.”
The Synthetic Silk Road: Tracing China’s Grey-Market Precursor Chemical Trade
The drug packaging, which appeared authentic, featured Chinese writing and the Novo Nordisk logo. The drug CNBC purchased was shipped via DHL from an office building in Shijiazhuang, China, about a four-hour drive from Beijing. The operations mainly involve phony or illegal versions of Novo Nordisk's diabetes drug Ozempic and its obesity drug Wegovy as well as Eli Lilly's Mounjaro and Zepbound.
Cheap And Risky: Stung By High Prices, Americans Turn To DIY Weight-loss Drugs From The Grey Market
The price for another chemotherapy drug, cisplatin, jumped from around $39 to about $195. The Members expanded the investigation to cover 125 different companies and reviewed 300 different drug transaction chains. Gray-market vendors offered leucovorin at a 3,170 percent mark-up, the new report showed.
PoundsPunch Periodical 202503: The Gray Market For "Research Use Only" Weight Loss Drugs
Without the shortage classification, the legal justification for compounding semaglutide became more tenuous. But in March 2024, semaglutide was quietly removed from the FDA’s shortage list. As celebrities and social media influencers touted dramatic results, demand skyrocketed, leading to widespread shortages that left many patients—particularly those with metabolic disorders—scrambling for alternatives.
Join Hindustan Times
Prescription GLP-1 medications normally flow through licensed pharmacies under medical supervision. Offering potentially superior weight loss compared to dual and single agonists, Retatrutide represents the cutting edge of GLP-1 therapy. To avoid such circumstances, it is recommended to buy only drugs that are prescribed by an expert, from a verified pharmacy. Talking to Fox News, Dr. Frank Dumont suggested that these drugs have bypassed the safety precautions. The demand for GLP-1 drugs has increased drastically in the US, as per Fox News.
California, the “Golden State,” conducts its own investigations of the gray market. Gray products may not be genuine or may not work as intended. The sale of diverted pharmaceuticals may also circumvent the legal prescribing regulations of a particular country or products may be adulterated with dangerous ingredients. The most obvious example here is with gray market pharmaceuticals, especially those requiring special handling like cold chain distribution. If a product is diverted from the authorized distribution network, many companies will invalidate the warranty and software license and may not service or support the product.
And even with new discounts offered by pharmaceutical companies, the drugs’ prices keep them out of reach for many patients — especially since insurance won’t always cover them. 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. Some gray market wholesalers gain access to shortage drugs by recruiting pharmacies to act as their purchasing agents. The investigation identified a number of businesses holding pharmacy licenses that do not dispense drugs, but instead appear to operate for the sole purpose of acquiring short-supply drugs that can be sold into the gray market.
Unfortunately, because they’re altered, people are never quite sure what they are and what effects they will have, which can make them pretty dangerous. —it’s a different drug that theoretically will no longer get you in trouble with the police. So you take an illegal drug, switch a couple of molecules around, and—presto! "If providers are advertising at $200, that's because they're not real, but still they're advertising at a lower price point and that's going to be attractive to consumers," Mackey said. Brand-name semaglutide can set you back more than $1,000 a month.
