Thank you for your interest in supporting KFF Health News, the nation’s leading nonprofit newsroom focused on health and health policy. It’s important to note, not everything on kffhealthnews.org is available for republishing. You must credit us as the original publisher, with a hyperlink to our kffhealthnews.org site. “They’re constantly triggered by all this food that’s causing their weight to go up and their sugar to go high, increasing their insulin resistance and affecting their limbs and eyes.” “Nothing in life is without risk, but I would also argue that the status quo is not safe for people who need the medicine and can’t get it,” he said.
FDA Warns Against Dangers Of Gray-market GLP-1 Drugs As Demand Soars In US
Hospitals are paying exorbitant prices for drugs because of an insidious “gray market” pipeline. The reality is that gray marketers are motivated by greed, and many engage in unscrupulous arbitrage to obtain products anywhere in the world at the lowest price and sell anywhere for the highest profit. In such cases, medications are diverted from the legitimate supply chain to the gray market, where gray market distributors can sell them for inflated price, either directly or through high shipping and handling costs. Washington DC (May 22, 2012)—Today, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, introduced legislation to reform the process by which so-called "gray market" drug companies buy and sell drugs facing national shortages. Last year she bought a compounding pharmacy’s version of tirzepatide, paying about US$470 monthly, and had lost more than 20 pounds when the FDA announced the ban on compounded weight-loss drugs.
Cheap And Risky: Stung By High Prices, Americans Turn To DIY Weight-loss Drugs From The Grey Market
If the FDA lets consumers legally buy GLP-1s OTC, it will reduce the risks consumers assume when purchasing fake or adulterated knockoffs in the grey market. Direct-paying consumers are more price-sensitive and induce manufacturers to compete on price. However, clinical researchers continue to find the drug can have several other benefits.
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According to their DarkNet Trust, a registry for dark web vendors, it had been a member since December 2019. Our interactions with the companies transpired predominantly through encrypted email correspondence, safeguarding our identity and theirs. With time, we began to interact online with these sellers.
- Among these, the ones that come have injectable versions of GLP-1-based drugs that are most common.
- Online advertising of compounded glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists.
- These illegal drugs have medical risks, Sullivan says.
- Pharmaceutical gray market finds a disturbing niche during the drug shortage crisis.
Price-gougers Hike Costs Of Vital Drugs During Shortage
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. Patients and doctors have grown increasingly desperate as the shortages have forced ill people to delay or cancel treatment, or to substitute medications that can be less effective or have unwanted side effects. The survey quantified the effect of price gouging amid the worst-ever drug shortage in U.S. history. “There are a lot of people who take advantage of issues like this in the market.”
Weight-loss Drugs Are Life-changing — And Expensive Here's One Woman's Solution
Late last year, about 80 people overdosed and needed medical treatment in Dublin over a weekend. And Estonia is already feeling the influx of nitazenes, which since 2023 have been involved in nearly half of all drug-induced deaths in the tiny Baltic nation. “Synthetic opioids in the U.S. have not been driven by demand, they have been driven wholesale by supply,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow and expert on the global opioid trade with the Brookings Institution, a think tank.
What Is The Gray Market For Weight-loss Drugs?
Anecdotal claims from some people who have used them, say that they are also somewhat boring drugs to take. For researchers this was extremely interesting, but for the chemists supplying the gray market, it could be a way of increasing income. They go on to mass-produce the new drugs in labs and sell them to people who want to get out of their minds for fun. But the formulas for these drugs are published in publicly available scientific journals and seen by people looking to make a quick buck. As long as there are governments that don’t want young people to go around indiscriminately hoovering up drugs, there will be chemists tirelessly working to create new ones that haven’t been declared illegal yet. If a product is listed online for significantly cheaper, you're likely to get what you paid for — an inferior or counterfeit product.
Drug Prices Soar As Hospital Suppliers Are Forced Into ‘Gray Market’
Together, the compounding pharmacies may account for up to 30% of the semaglutide sold in the U.S., Mikhael said, although he cautions that is a “wild ballpark figure” since no one, including the FDA, is tracking sales in the industry. But everyone with knowledge of the industry, including the compounders themselves, worry that a single batch of a poorly made drug could kill or maim people and destroy confidence in their business. To date, according to FDA spokespeople, reports of side effects from taking compounded versions haven’t raised major alarms. It ran ads for the drugs during NBA playoff games. 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.
The evaporation of the compounded drug supply could come as a shock to patients. Even Hims & Hers Health — the telemedicine prescriber that got its start with erectile dysfunction drugs — is now peddling compounded semaglutide. Sales of the diabetes and weight loss drugs this year made Novo Nordisk Europe’s most valuable company and Lilly the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company. The drugs have registered unprecedented success in weight loss. Like millions of others, Mikhael credits the new class of weight loss drugs. How do these types of drugs end up on the gray market then?
The Dangers That Gray Markets Pose To Health
Despite the blunder, Spencer didn’t consider returning to compounded versions of the drugs or abandoning them altogether. The company said it is filing lawsuits, educating consumers and working with social media companies to identify and remove posts that promote unsafe products, including those described as “research use only.” It’s cheap,” said Spencer, who assumes her health plan wouldn’t cover the drugs.
Compounding semaglutide is a helpful sideline for pharmacists like him, Welch said, especially given the pinch on drug sale revenue that has led many independents to close in recent years. There’s some risk in using the non-FDA-approved product, he acknowledged, and he requires patients to sign an informed consent waiver. She gets the drug from Mindful Weight Loss, a mostly telehealth-based operation led by physician Vivek Gupta of Manhattan Beach, California. At least 28 companies mostly in China, are registered with the FDA to produce or distribute semaglutide. “FDA created this system because these are necessary drugs.” The compounders say the companies should increase production if they’re worried about competition.
Ozempic was in shortage when they conducted the study, and even doctors were struggling to get hold of the real drug via official means. However, the pharmacies that fill these prescriptions are regulated and have some level of quality control. Not all off-brands of semaglutide are illegal or necessarily dangerous.
