On Oct. 16, President Trump promised to slash the price of brand-name GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy to $150 a month. Even after a top health official suggested price negotiations between drugmakers and the administration were ongoing, the announcement sent Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly stocks tumbling. For patients who’ve been priced out, that number sounded like relief.
I got three texts within an hour: “Does this mean we won’t need the research suppliers anymore?” “Can we go back to real pharmacies?” “Dr. Dothée, is this real?” That’s what my friends call me.
I’m not a doctor — I’m just the person everyone texts when the rules change again. Most of them aren’t using compounding pharmacies anymore — those dried up when the Food and Drug Administration cracked down. Like me, they’ve turned to research-grade peptides labeled “not for human consumption,” shipped from overseas suppliers with no prescriptions, no oversight, and no guarantees. I’ve been tracking FDA crackdowns, compounding pharmacy pivots, and gray market peptide suppliers for almost two years. And here’s what I know: Trump’s $150 plan can’t help people like me.
I use GLP-1s and related drugs in a way that is, without a doubt, a roll of the dice — and so far, the odds have been in my favor. I know it, and the friends who ask me for advice know it. (This essay, of course, doesn’t amount to a STAT endorsement of what I’m doing.) Nevertheless, these medications feel lifesaving to me. The restlessness that had driven me to darker places finally settled. Cravings dimmed. The constant mental noise — the reach for something, anything — stopped.
I’ve never really been prescribed GLP-1s. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. I don’t have diabetes or obesity. I just wanted to feel better. To feel in control of my recovery from addiction (GLP-1s show considerable promise there) and in control of my body.
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In 2024, a smaller telehealth startup offering compounded GLP-1s gave me what I wanted — no labs, no doctor’s visit, no pharmacy. Just a quick phone consultation and a promise. Because of a shortage of brand-name drugs, it was legal. I live in Los Angeles, where you can get an IV drip between Pilates and Botox, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when a box of syringes and a vial of tirzepatide showed up a week later. But I was. The ease of it made the whole thing feel both thrilling and suspect. I’d said I wanted to lose a few pounds. That was all it took.
And it worked. For months, I felt steady in a way I hadn’t since before methamphetamine nearly killed me — clearer, calmer, my body finally cooperating instead of working against me.
Then the rules changed. After shortages of brand-name drugs were resolved, the FDA cracked down on compounded semaglutide and tirzepatide in early 2025, ordering pharmacies to stop making them by spring. My go-to telehealth company folded. Another started shipping mystery blends with MCT oil and vitamin B-12. Doses dropped. Formulas shifted. My refill disappeared.
So I went looking elsewhere. A Reddit thread pointed me to the gray market: a compounding pharmacy still shipping despite new regulatory pressure. Overnight, the price tripled. They called it a “new blend,” but it was the same formula — just wrapped in enough novelty to justify the markup. The kind of price gouging that thrives when loopholes begin to close.
Once you go gray, it’s not just about GLP-1s anymore — it’s a sprawling marketplace of experimental treatments. It looks like midnight browser tabs and syringes lined up on my counter, order numbers in place of prescriptions. That’s where I found peptides like ipamorelin, BPC-157, GHK-Cu — short chains of amino acids marketed online to boost growth hormone, improve recovery, even repair tissue. Most aren’t FDA-approved. Some come labeled “not for human consumption.”
But still, I use them. It feels like a type of care the system can’t provide me — care I’ve had to find for myself, even if it exists outside what doctors would recommend.
The only way to access a lot of these peptides is through underground channels. That doesn’t necessarily make them dangerous — but it does mean I’m trusting my health to a supply chain that barely exists. Labels smudge. Dates blur. Dosing varies. I crowdsource advice from Reddit threads and Telegram chats full of strangers. I know how it sounds.
Still, it feels good to be the one choosing the risk — especially after a long stretch of drug and alcohol dependency that burned my life to the ground. For years, I acted like I had agency. I didn’t. Now, even when I’m wrong, it feels like the decision is mine — and that difference matters.
I found a research supplier selling freeze-dried retatrutide labeled “not for human consumption.” I mixed the powder myself using bacteriostatic water I ordered from Amazon. The first injection stung badly because I hadn’t ordered the right brand. But even the “good” brand isn’t safe anymore. There are counterfeits now: off-color labels, wrong date formatting, faded text. I wouldn’t have known if strangers on Reddit hadn’t taught me how to spot them.
STAT Plus: Ozempic for addiction: How an elite rehab center is using GLP-1s to ‘obliterate’ all kinds of cravings
That was my first hint at just how fragile this whole system is — how much depends on crowdsourced trust and trial-and-error. When it came time to calculate dosing, I turned to the same hive mind. Most of these anonymous biohackers had entire dosing protocols mapped out — color-coded charts, conversion calculators, detailed walkthroughs. The deeper I scrolled, the more it mimicked science — spreadsheets, acronyms, and conviction standing in for credentials. I tell myself I’m different from the obsessive ones. Then I realize I’m Googling peptide blends at 2 a.m., trying to figure out whether my ipamorelin is combined with CJC-1295, or if GHK-Cu comes mixed with ingredients I can’t pronounce.
The FDA has issued repeated warnings about these peptides: contamination, dosage variability, companies making false claims. They’re not wrong, but here’s the thing: The alternatives either disappeared or became unaffordable overnight.
Now, when I inject something, I know it’s risky. But I also know what I want: more energy, less brain fog and noise, a body I can actually live in. Not a shell. Not a mask. Just something that helps me stay present in my own life. A life I fought hard to keep.
Trump’s $150 promise might eventually make Ozempic cheaper. But it won’t make it available to everyone. Coverage limits remain. Under Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services still bar weight-loss drugs from reimbursement for most patients. BMI cutoffs and risk profiles decide who gets a prescription. Those of us who want GLP-1s for metabolic balance or recovery support don’t fit the criteria. Lower prices can’t fix a locked door. If the White House succeeds, the gray market may shrink — but the unmet need won’t.
GLP-1s show promise in all sorts of arenas outside of weight loss: drug addiction, alcoholism, gambling. For those of us who live with these crushing problems, it seems too cruel to wait for the regulatory process to catch up.
At the same time, the official GLP-1 market is consolidating. Axios reported Tuesday that Eli Lilly is overtaking Novo Nordisk, with Zepbound projected to hit $18 billion in sales next year versus Wegovy’s $16.5 billion. Big Pharma is winning the war for market share — but they’re still losing patients to the underground. Because even as branded drugs become more available and potentially cheaper, the same coverage restrictions, BMI cutoffs, and off-label barriers remain. I know how quickly need can turn to obsession. That’s why I keep trying to understand what drives it — in me and in the system.
The solution can’t be to shut the underground down. It has to be to make it safer — to expand access for responsible use of GLP-1s to support addiction recovery. Fund research into peptide safety. Create legal pathways for experimental treatments that are accessible to people like me.
Because right now, many of us aren’t choosing between safe and unsafe. We’re choosing between unaffordable but regulated, and accessible but risky. Until the system meets patients where they already are — in the gray zones between official medicine and survival — many of us will keep reconstituting our own solutions, one vial at a time.
Nick Dothée is a writer in Los Angeles. His work has recently appeared in the Cut, HuffPost, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is currently at work on an addiction memoir.
