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Comment by ghostDancer | Hacker News Reader

Nothing says capitalism and free market like good extortion on health products and services. That's the way to go USA.

There is no free market at play here. This is the result of FDA regulations not allowing anyone to sell it unless they did a New Drug Application first, which could cost a billion or more. Therefore nobody in the free market was allowed to sell it without putting up the capital first, which they have to collect back now.

You could actually order this from amazon.de up until recently and have it shipped to you. That seems to have disappeared, though.

Are you saying a completely free market for drugs would be a good thing?

An NDA requires peer-reviewed studies, and something that looks at least a little like scientific rigour.

Of course we could just not bother with that.

Is that really a smart thing to do?

Require phase 1 only. That proves safety, but not efficacy. Require the companies to publicly release all data from their evaluations to the public. It's my right to decide on the risk / reward tradeoff, not some worthless bureaucrat to decide for me.

This is true. When you look at actually free markets -- like the gray markets in bodybuilding drugs, "nootropics," peptides, etc. -- you'll find that there's usually a race to the bottom on price, and that everything is easily affordable out of pocket. Quality also tends to be okay, as lab reports are one of the primary ways that customers rank and differentiate between brands.

And these aren't necessarily old pharma hand-me-downs. There are lots of novel and strange drugs (9-MBC, lol) that you can buy for next to nothing.

Where is a good place to start looking to access these gray markets?

peptidesciences.com among many others.

An easy, somewhat expensive (if you do not know the trick) entry point that is easily accessible to anyone is nexaph.com. You can pay full retail (quite expensive) or go to their Telegram (listed at the bottom of their page) and wait for a pre-sale, where it'll be a little above half the price on the web page.

Still more expensive than the rest of the random Chinese vendors, but the upshot is that participation rates are very good for Nexaph and so there's a lot of testing done -- especially for GLP1s. For example, the current batch of Tirzepatide 60mg will have a 3- or 4-vial COA done by Nexaph themselves, another 3-vial random sample tested by customers (but then compensated by Nexaph), and at least one and maybe two big group tests with 7+ vials doing a full range of mass/purity/endo/sterility testing.

I've not seen too many other vendors that get such a high participation rate. And even for this company, for non-GLP1 peptides it's still tested pretty well but not to the same extent.

Even at their expensive price point, you could buy a few kits (10 vials ea) and pay $1000 for a full suite of tests and still be into it about $80/vial total, where a vial is ~65mg and lasts most people at least a month. Do the math on that -- compared even to cheap compounded tirz it is a fraction of the cost. There is good reason why a lot of people are taking that route now.

And back to your original question - once you are on the Telegram group, ask around and people will invite you to other Telegram and Discord groups for various vendors.

Or go to glp1forum.com and a lot of the same vendors will have posts there with information on contacting them.

That's not true, most of the gray markets you have to be careful with the quality of the product. Also, there are regulations on Europe, like with insulin but in USA is much more expensive than in Europe.

> There are lots of novel and strange drugs (9-MBC, lol) that you can buy for next to nothing

Indeed, plenty of peptides that aren't really well tested in humans (in some cases, like at all). And some that have tests in foreign countries but are not recognized by the FDA (like Selank and Semax, which are nootropics). And if you want to get ahead of the curve, you can buy things like retatrutide already even though it hasn't quite completed Phase III tests yet so Lilly isn't able to sell it to you. If you hunt a little, you can even buy orforglipron now.

It is quite fascinating to watch. A lot of people are very willing to experiment on themselves. And it seems like GLP1s end up being a gateway drug -- people go to the gray market to get it cheap, and then they cave to temptation and try some of the other stuff they can get the same way.

Drugs and healthcare products should definitely be regulated so people get quality products with provable efficacy. Saying that, how the hell does an application for a new drug with the FDA cost $1Bn?! Clearly something is wrong there.

I costs $1 billion because the FDA requires an enormously expensive 3 phase trial program before you are even allowed to submit the application. There is no way to make this cheaper without relaxing the requirements.

Free market is the $20 over the counter in Europe, not the USA way.

I know, the problem with drugs in USA is the control a few corporations have over the politicians and the market, that's the reason health care and all related things are so expensive there compared to Europe.

I doubt it. The company probably would make more money selling it at 20 bucks at CVS to anyone who wants it than $800 per prescription.

People from USA always complaining about the excessive regulations in Europe but suddenly it's the USA that has worse and more excessive. It doesn't add up. And why it's another medicament like insulin much cheaper in Europe than in USA, doctors and politicians bought by big corp manipulating the market. Big pharma is an extortion racket and the USA is their field, now they want to export that model to Europe.

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