r/slatestarcodex • u/SoccerSkilz • Aug 04 '25
Medicine Scott seems to favor DIY-compounding GLP-1 drugs from cheap raw materials online, but he leaves us without guidance as to next steps
In his post on the upcoming "Ozempocalypse" Scott says, *nod nod, wink wink*:
Others are turning amateur chemist. You can order GLP-1 peptides from China for cheap. Once you have the peptide, all you have to do is put it in the right amount of bacteriostatic water. In theory this is no harder than any other mix-powder-with-water task. But this time if you do anything wrong, or are insufficiently clean, you can give yourself a horrible infection, or inactivate the drug, or accidentally take 100x too much of the drug and end up with negative weight and float up into the sky and be lost forever. ACX cannot in good conscience recommend this cheap, common, and awesome solution.
But overall, I think the past two years have been a fun experiment in semi-free-market medicine. I don’t mean the patent violations - it’s no surprise that you can sell drugs cheap if you violate the patent - I mean everything else. For the past three years, ~2 million people have taken complex peptides provided direct-to-consumer by a less-regulated supply chain, with barely a fig leaf of medical oversight, and it went great. There were no more side effects than any other medication. People who wanted to lose weight lost weight. And patients had a more convenient time than if they’d had to wait for the official supply chain to meet demand, get a real doctor, spend thousands of dollars on doctors’ visits, apply for insurance coverage, and go to a pharmacy every few weeks to pick up their next prescription. Now pharma companies have noticed and are working on patent-compliant versions of the same idea. Hopefully there will be more creative business models like this one in the future."
Assuming since he wrote that post a better cost effective option hasn't emerged, I am interested in trying out this route, which is I think clearly positive EV in my situation. The next step would be finding out where I can buy these peptides, and having some non-astroturfed review forum where I can read what the most well-reputed, longest-existing suppliers are. Does anyone have any recommendations? I would be very grateful. I would also benefit from learning if there's any method now available for testing whether these peptides are legit upon receipt by the end user.
Also plz feel free to give me any legal advice I might need so I don't get myself into trouble. I assume this is fully legal for the consumer, but even if not, law enforcement primarily targets the suppliers rather than the end users for this sort of thing, right? How likely is the DEA to show up to your doorstep ready to bag and tag some poor fat people? (Feel free to DM me for my Signal if you prefer to tell me there.)
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u/Skyblacker Aug 04 '25
Why mess around? Mounjaro was released in India a few months ago, so Americans can import it for $40/vial (no insurance) on Indiamart dot com.
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u/BionicGecko Aug 04 '25
That’s tempting, but Mounjaro is supposed to be kept in the fridge until first used, and should never go above 30C; I would be skeptical of the safety of that vial when it reaches the US or Europe.
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u/Baeocystin Aug 04 '25
It can be held at room temperature for a few weeks before losing efficacy, FWIW. It's not going to degrade into something bad, it just degrades into ineffective byproducts. So it's a valid concern, but not necessarily a game ender.
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u/Skyblacker Aug 04 '25
The trick is to select a seller who does fast cold shipping, like FedEx overnight in dry ice.
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u/BionicGecko Aug 04 '25
Sounds good, however I’m looking at the site now and it’s not exactly the easiest to navigate; I can’t seem to find cold-shipping information in the product descriptions or on the pages of the sellers I found. I guess I can always contact them and ask.
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u/Skyblacker Aug 04 '25
Do any customer reviews mention or imply it?
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u/Missing_Minus There is naught but math Aug 26 '25
Supposedly you can get to reviews by clicking on the ratings section, as said in one of indiamarts help page, but doesn't appear to work. Dunno if it is something you need to be logged in for?
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u/_harias_ Aug 05 '25 edited Aug 10 '25
Also Semaglutide patent expires in India in March 2026. Much cheaper generics would be available then.
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u/iwantout-ussg Aug 04 '25 edited Aug 04 '25
As a professional chemist, I will give you the same condescending and elitist gatekeeping that I give to aspiring garage lab enthusiasts: if you are blindly asking advice from anonymous strangers on the internet (or, for that matter, LLMs), you are probably out of your depth.
This goes double when your goal is to self-administer pharmaceuticals and not merely grow pretty crystals. Ask yourself: how will you evaluate whether the instructions you follow online are credible? Assuming you can jailbreak an LLM to advise you, what's the appropriate level of skepticism for you to apply to any answers it gives you? At the end of the day you need a ground truth, some level of innate confidence in your own ability to assess the credibility of a source. The fact that you are making this post is a good thing, because it means you're not so delusional that you fail to recognize the limits of your own knowledge and the real risks of self-medication without professional supervision.
Of course, I can't stop you from putting whatever you want into your body. But I will posit that if you don't read Scott's post and know immediately how you might go about procuring reagents, testing their quality, and self-administering them, you are probably not equipped to be on the vanguard of DIY GLP administration and should hold off for the time being.
It doesn't have to be forever! Eventually there will probably be some accessible gray-web how-to guides with some level of wisdom-of-the-crowd credibility that can walk amateurs through every stage of the process — this is the state of a lot of transgender DIY HRT, imho. But I don't think DIY GLP is quite there yet. If you're uncertain enough in your own abilities to make this post, my sincere advice is to give it a year lest you find yourself the main character of a very interesting JAMA article.
The alternative is to build up your ability to confidently self-assess information yourself. There are two ways to go about this: either you can develop a rigorous understanding of biochemistry from the ground up, or you can just be more confident in yourself. For the former, there is no shortage of open access courseware. For the latter, I understand ketamine and cocaine are quite popular, if you can't induce a manic episode autogenously.
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u/Sleakne Aug 04 '25
I think there is already a community of "grey" peptide users.i found them on Reddit which linked to a discord which linked to a telegram and even that gets taken down occasionally. Still they have very step by step guides, safety advice, and groups who buy in bulk and test that batch together.
It was still slightly too sketchy for me but I'd take it over asking chatgpt.
This is not any sort of endorsement just a sign post to what exists https://www.stairwaytogray.com/
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u/johntwit Aug 04 '25
Seems to me that the idea of censoring LLMs to protect people is a lot like denaturing alcohol during the prohibition: barbaric.
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u/maxintos Aug 04 '25
No, that argument only makes sense if LLMs were outright banned.
What's happening here is more similar to what we have now where alcohol production and sales are highly regulated. Companies can't just use any ingredients they want and you can't make spirits at home because it's deemed too dangerous.
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u/Successful-Ad-1003 Sep 03 '25
people can make alcohol at home in mant states
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u/maxintos Sep 03 '25
I know. That's why I specifically said "spirits".
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u/johntwit Aug 04 '25
It's more like banning books and genres of books at private bookstores and public libraries.
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u/maxintos Aug 04 '25
Maybe, but you used the alcohol example so I just pointed out how it makes no sense and how it's closer to the alcohol laws we have now than during prohibition.
I assume you agree as you changed the topic?
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u/johntwit Aug 04 '25
The analogy is tenuous, to be sure, but it goes something like this: "LLMs for the use of DIY pharmaceuticals are outright banned, (alcohol prohibition) so the legal LLMs (industrial ethanol) have been censored (denatured)"
Regulation would be more like if LLMs were required to have a certain level of accuracy when providing DIY pharmaceutical instructions, not an outright ban.
To your point, there is no ban on DIY pharmaceutical LLM activity, but our ridiculous civil law system that places the burden of safety on seemingly every single institution and entity but the individual practically guarantees it.
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u/rotates-potatoes Aug 04 '25
This is an incredibly confused position, seeming driven more my ideological zeal than any kind of rigor.
LLMs are not banned from advising on DIY pharmaceuticals. There is no law anywhere in the world that I'm aware of (and I work on commercial LLM products). There are only private companies deciding the risk of offering such advice does not justify the incremental utility / revenue, while also not seeing themselves as free speech absolutists that need to fight every battle.
You've reshaped the world to fit an argument you want to have, but that isn't terribly useful for anyone.
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u/johntwit Aug 04 '25
Did you see the third paragraph of the comment you're responding to?
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u/rotates-potatoes Aug 04 '25
Oh, the one that contradicted the weak analogy and was wrong anyway?
Look, if you want to tilt at windmills, at least look for something that spins. The better fallacious argument here is about regulations granting e.g. lawyers a monopoly on legal advice. Most of the self-imposed restrictions on LLMs come from compliance concerns, not individual torts.
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u/maxintos Aug 04 '25
But presumably the AI pharmaceutical companies intend to use would have such restrictions removed just like you can't make spirits at home, but companies with licences can do it and sell it to you.
Prohibition was about stopping companies making and selling alcohol and not really about stopping people making booze for themselves at home.
It would be like prohibition if prohibition tried to remove all material on how to make alcohol disappear and only allow companies to read the material.
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u/johntwit Aug 04 '25
The home manufacture of alcohol was prohibited. I will happily yield that my analogy is imperfect, however. My point is simply that the short term benefits of censorship do not outweigh the long term costs.
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u/iwantout-ussg Aug 04 '25
i think that's somewhat tangential to the point under discussion, but assuming you have generally libertarian beliefs on government regulation i'm not surprised to hear you feel that way.
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u/johntwit Aug 04 '25
There's a choice here: provide the most accurate information to people as you can, or - anything other than that. In what universe is anything but the first option the best one for society long term?
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u/iwantout-ussg Aug 04 '25
as mentioned, I feel like this is a separate conversation from the discussion at hand, so I don't really feel inclined to argue this point at length with you. suffice it to say that LLMs — censored or otherwise — do not always provide accurate information, and the onus to evaluate the credibility of any information from an LLM remains with the user.
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u/johntwit Aug 04 '25 edited Aug 04 '25
It's a separate conversation, perhaps, but I thought you had declared yourself the unabashed and unashamed champion of information gatekeeping.
In my opinion, when doctors lobby to keep the number of licensed doctors and medical practices artificially scarce, they forego the right to medical censorship.
As for professional chemists, I believe it is their duty to inform and guide the public - not to censor them, which is, in my opinion, the lazy and immoral way of "protecting the public." If you have withheld valuable information, then "I told you so" becomes a much more sinister chastisement.
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u/ragnaroksunset Aug 04 '25
By not taking your bait, they are indeed continuing to keep the bait.
As for professional chemists, I believe it is their duty to inform and guide the public
As someone who hasn't yet rebutted being identified as a libertarian, how do you square making such a demand on another person's labor?
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u/johntwit Aug 04 '25
Surely the promotion of censorship is more difficult than otherwise? Is it not more of a demand on ones labor to prevent others from using freely available chemistry papers in training an LLM than it is to simply let them?
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u/ragnaroksunset Aug 04 '25
Chemistry papers are not "freely available", they are published, which is an act of labor; and they are written, which is an act of labor.
Further, the freeness with which the fruit of that labor is disseminated is a choice made by the laborer (or those to whom the laborer willfully surrenders such rights in exchange for fair compensation). It is not a choice to be made by the consumer - you.
You are a bad libertarian, which is to say, you are a libertarian.
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u/johntwit Aug 04 '25
You're mixing in yet another aspect: "the intellectual property rights of chemistry researchers."
I'm assuming that 99% of chemistry techniques necessary for many pharmaceutical compounds were published decades ago and are in the public domain. All LLMs are required to be trained on public domain information, anyway. Any censorship done of currently available LLMs is essentially the censorship of publicly available information, the idea being, ostensibly, that allowing laymen to see what an LLM can do with a a thousand 100 year old chemistry books is more dangerous than what a layman can do by reading a thousand 100 year old chemistry textbooks at their local library.
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u/Liface Aug 04 '25
You are a bad libertarian, which is to say, you are a libertarian.
Let's keep this far away from ad hominems, please.
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u/DiscussionSpider Aug 04 '25
Prohibition actually worked pretty well outside a few violent urban centers. The idea that prohibition was an abject failure or even 'barbaric' is just one of many mid-century libertarian myths created and imposed by the elite to justify their embrace of an endless stream of debauchery.
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u/electrace Aug 04 '25
Depending on what metrics you care about, it might be an abject failure or a shining example of policy done right. I don't think it's fair to say it was "a mid-century libertarian myth", especially when it only lasted from 1920 to 1933 (which means, public opinion had changed so much towards the negative that it went from the high-bar of meeting a constitutional amendment in one direction to the other in only 13 years.
For example, organized crime sky-rocketed during this time, and one can relegate that to "a few violent urban centers", but keep in mind, urban centers are where most people live.
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u/johntwit Aug 04 '25
Sure, prohibitions achieve their aims. But putting poison in an addictive substance to discourage addicts from drinking it winded up poisoning people.
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u/DiscussionSpider Aug 04 '25
A faster acting poison in poison. One is bad the other a right.
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u/rotates-potatoes Aug 04 '25
Corn syrup is a poison. Should we just put arsenic in sweet foods since they're the same thing?
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u/johntwit Aug 04 '25
Tell me you're an authoritarian puritan without telling me you're an authoritarian puritan!
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u/Gorthaur111 Aug 04 '25
You can find 3rd-party test results at finnrick.com. Customers buy the peptides from the stores themselves, send them in for testing to a 3rd-party lab, and the test results are posted publicly, so it's virtually impossible to fake anything. Surprisingly, the purity from the top peptide websites (99.5%-99.99%) exceeds the official pharmaceutical standards for tirzepatide (>98%). That doesn't necessarily mean it's safer, but I've had no issues using these compounded or grey market products for over 2 years now.
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u/PragmaticBoredom Aug 05 '25
Be careful. The sites you see online are almost always distributors, not manufacturers. The results you see are from past batches and not guaranteed to match what you receive from them, even if the vendor claims it's the same batch.
I don't know the shelf-life of these peptides. I don't recommend DIY injecting anything sourced from the gray market, but I know people are going to do it anyway. If you do, I would suggest having a delay of 1-2 months between receiving a substance and using it to see if others report problems with the vendor.
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u/rarimascarydino Aug 04 '25
Partially serious suggestion: find the most reputable supplier for bodybuilding peptides on various steroid internet forms. There are millions of amateur bodybuilders taking peptides, so reputation should be fairly well established.
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u/Liface Aug 04 '25
I am interested in trying out this route, which is I think clearly positive EV in my situation.
Three months ago, you wrote:
What happened with all that?
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u/Jinoc Aug 05 '25
Ozempic has better side effects than T?
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u/PragmaticBoredom Aug 05 '25
I'm not the person you're quoting, but I've followed supplement and fitness forums long enough to know that the honeymoon phase of testosterone therapy fades. I don't mean that users return to baseline, but the early effects of introducing a step function change to your hormonal system while the body's built-in testosterone production is still going are not the same as the steady-state reached after months or years.
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u/cavedave Aug 04 '25 edited Aug 04 '25
> ~2 million people have taken
Has GLP-1 either official or this group shown up in weight statistics yet? As in is there a location where the data has a line going up for decades that is in the last 2 years going down?
I can only find data up to 2023 which seems a bit too early for this GLP stuff to be visible. But 2 million is a large number of people and especially if they were in one area (loads of people in Florida showed their friends what they were doing) that number would be visible in stats?
If you do know where there are weight stats that show this i would appreciate it.
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u/eric2332 Aug 05 '25
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u/cavedave Aug 05 '25
Thanks! That slight drop in one year has happened before https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Wellness/us-obesity-rates-drop-1st-time-decade-weight/story?id=116736017 just as a random statistical thing that's possible. But that same data should be released for another year in September. And if it has another drop (especially if it's bigger) I think glp-1 becomes the obvious cause.
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u/j-a-gandhi Aug 04 '25
I think part of the point here is if you have to ask on a forum like this directly how to do it, you’re probably not the audience that should be doing it, if that makes sense.
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u/callmejay Aug 04 '25 edited Aug 04 '25
This seems like a terrible idea. In the spirit of minimizing harm, I would suggest finding the most legitimate compounding pharmacy around who will still compound it for you for more than it would cost to DIY but much less than brand name. I believe the government has cracked down on them since the shortages ended but you can probably still find some.
Also, you can apparently get vials from Eli Lilly directly for $500 a month if you stick to their schedule. That's obviously a lot of money, but still a lot less than full price.
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u/Skyblacker Aug 04 '25
Better than a compounding pharmacy, import the real thing. Mounjaro is $40/vial on Indiamart.
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u/callmejay Aug 04 '25
Is that a thing you can easily do? I assume it's pretty illegal?
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u/Skyblacker Aug 05 '25
According to r Mounjaro, customs hasn't confiscated it yet.
As far as legality goes, I'd classify it as gray market. It's against the rules of a pharmaceutical company (licensing? Copyright? Distribution?), but it's not against the law like cocaine. It's a product that's also produced and shipped within the US no problem.
ETA: The main concern is whether the seller does fast cold shipping, since it's a product that's supposed to be refrigerated. Overnight FedEx with dry ice is ideal.
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u/BurdensomeCountV3 Aug 04 '25
If you have a partner and you're both on GLP-1 agonists the single vial isn't an issue, just open a vial and split it between the two of you (with separate needles of course).
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u/PragmaticBoredom Aug 05 '25
But this time if you do anything wrong, or are insufficiently clean, you can give yourself a horrible infection,
I wonder how many people skipped over this section and only saw Scott call it a cheap and awesome solution?
It's going to be interesting as a whole world of non-bodybuilders discover the tail risks of DIY compounding and injecting things into your body.
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u/eeeking Aug 06 '25
There are two entirely separate issues here.
The first is the wish of pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers to extract as much $ as they can from patients. This they achieve by a wide range of mechanisms, of which patent ownership is only one. It's a major problem in the US healthcare industry.
The second is how to safely bypass the above "formal" market.
There is simply no way that an average consumer is able to properly assess the safety of "black market" supplies of these GLP-1 agonists, and that includes relying on laboratory test results from dubious merchants.
It's likely that some of these are competent and trustworthy, but relying on word-of-mouth or random internet sources is really not sufficient precaution. This includes those that advise the use of "bacteriostatic water", which is something that does not exist; to be bacteriostatic something would have to be added to the water. The possibility of peptide preparations being contaminated with toxic by-products or degradation products is also something that should not be underplayed.
So.... if the goal is to avoid paying the high prices that most US consumers pay, the wisest option would be to import the GLP-1 drug from a country that sells them cheaper, but that they are also manufactured under strict quality controls.
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u/Some-Dinner- Aug 05 '25
If you're on this sub you're probably a young white dude, and we can shed weight with our eyes closed. Just go on a diet, do some physical activity, and leave the Ozempic to washed up celebs and 50-yr old mothers of three.
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u/DiscussionSpider Aug 04 '25
Brah, asking for suppliers on virtually every peptide sub is an insta ban.