Now if only it didn’t cost so damn much every month even under insurance =(
Semaglutide is very, very cheap in the gray market. It's somewhat less effective than Tirzepatide and has slightly more side effects if you ramp up the dosage too quickly.
If an annual amount is purchased on the gray market, this brings the monthly cost down to:
- Semaglutide: $10/month
- Tirzepatide: $60/month
- Liraglutide: $87/month
- LY3437943: I have not yet seen this available, but it looks like distributors are notifying manufacturers of latent demand and are working to build up a supply chain.
Note that in the USA, it is legal to import certain amounts of FDA-approved drugs if you have a prescription for them. However, just because something is the exact same chemical as an FDA-approved drug does not make it an FDA-approved drug. It must be manufactured in an FDA certified facility and be the same brand/manufacturer/packaging/labeling/etc as the approved drug.
e.g. importing generic Sildenafil/Viagra is legal if you can find the Teva(tm) brand generic sildenafil in, say, Mexico or Canada for a better price. But it must be the pills manufactured by Teva in the appropriate facility with NDC #0093-5342-56[0].
If you import generic sildenafil "Cenforce" from the (very legitimate but not FDA-approved) Indian pharmaceutical manufacturer "Centurion Laboratories"...
...that would still be potentially criminal smuggling. Even if the pills you import show via laboratory test that they precisely match your medical prescription, they are not "FDA approved" and therefore not legal to import.
A lot of people do though!
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2018-11-01/...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7523158/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/07/health/fda-drug-shipments-khn...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2022/12/14/states...
Also, I expect CRISPR or gene therapy to be the long game wrt this and updating the body's GLP-1 regulation, versus maintenance doses of a pharma product. This is a shim.
https://benmay.uchicago.edu/crispr-gene-therapy
https://www.creative-biogene.com/crispr-cas9/solution/glp1r-...
Hopefully the price will come down more as it becomes more prevalent or as generics become available.
This is ignorant/uniformed, but, taking research chemical by ingestion feels like I have some natural barriers still. Where-as I feel like there's a much more raw exposure to risk with injection. Also there's dumb risks like infection, if I don't attend well enough to injections.
In spite of these protests, I think you are probably much closer to the truth here. Thanks for writing. These reactions I have are, I suspect, not really significant.
You reconstitute it with Bacteriostatic Water which is available without a prescription in the USA and contains 0.9% benzyl alcohol to inhibit bacterial growth.
If you're particularly concerned you buy a 0.22 micrometer PVDF "syringe filter" and pump it through that to another, fresh/sealed sterile vial which you can get for like $2.00 from a medical supply company (the syringe, filter, and vials are gamma-irradiated to destroy any remnants of RNA/DNA). That size filtration will filter out any lifeforms (fungal, bacterial, viral) while allowing the peptide/drug itself to pass through. So you get a guaranteed sterile solution out of the filter.
The same distributor sells legal things to import like L-Carnitine, Epitalon, Berberine, NAD+, NACET, and vitamins at great prices so I was saying I use them for things like that.
But others use them for GLP-1 agonists and many do their own independent testing.
0.22 won't filter out viruses, but time will inactivate enveloped viruses (which are usually the ones you want to avoid injecting), and source control/proper handling should take care of the rest.