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Comment by pogue | Hacker News Reader

While you might be able to get the purity of the compound itself tested, the user buying it ready for injection or even homebrewing it themselves can still have serious sterility issues, heavy metals contaminates and other nasty leftovers in the batch itself from shady companies that sell these "peptides" and etc.

When a low quality lab in China is producing something that normally costs such a high amount there are always corners cut, quality issues and people manufacturing it that are not using the same quality control and standards you would even get from a compounding pharmacy.

Author William Llewellyn's talk on how the black market of anabolic steroids evolved over the years explains how things like this are made and what sort of contaminates get into gray/black market injectables (regardless of oil or water based).

Anabolic Steroids: an evolving black market (28mins) https://youtu.be/0LL7bL4F9G4

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> When a low quality lab in China is producing something that normally costs such a high amount there are always corners cut, quality issues and people manufacturing it that are not using the same quality control and standards you would even get from a compounding pharmacy.

The cost of GLP-1 drugs doesn't come from production costs or complexity, it is purely a function of being on patent.

A month's supply of Ozempic costs less than a dollar to produce. It costs $25k in the US because of patents.

People regularly test black/gray market peptides in labs for both heavy metals and sterility (USP 61 or 71 I believe). The production of something like Testosterone/anabolic steroids is completely different has higher risks of contamination than peptides which use recombinant DNA or solid phase peptide synthesis.

That video is literally about anabolic steroids not peptides. Not to mention there was 0 testing labs in 2012 that users could send their items to, to get tested while there is many now a days. Back then in 2012 unless you had a friend at a University lab that knew analytical chemistry you were out of luck to get anything tested.

You aren't wrong about a lab in China cutting corners, having quality issues and low quality control standards but people don't care if they see 10,000+ people using peptides for decades without a single complaint about infection or real problems.

"is producing something that normally costs such a high amount" the cost has very little to do with the chemicals themself, the cost is about recouping R&D costs and having a 90% profit margin.

Actual regulated drugs are also not that great either. Sometimes these grey market peptides might be tested better than actual FDA-regulated medications. Just dig into Aurobindo and how they literally destroy records and more. An aurobindo-manufactured generic medication I take is significantly worse than any other manufacturer of that generic medication, and I've taken them from about 5 at this point. "Bottle of lies" is a good book to look into.

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