Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from WBUR’s weekly health newsletter, CommonHealth. If you like what you read and want it in your inbox, sign up here.
GLP-1 drugs can seem like a miracle for anyone who’s struggled to lose weight. But they come with daunting side effects, such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation and Ozempic face. What’s more, they don’t work for everyone.
A new treatment promises even more weight loss power. Retatrutide, developed by pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, is unofficially known as a GLP-3 drug. The nickname refers to its ability to target three hormone receptors, instead of just one.
In a clinical trial, retatrutide showed promising results. This next-generation weight loss treatment was twice as effective as GLP-1s such as Ozempic, according to Sarah Zhang, who covered the issue for The Atlantic. But retatrutide is not yet approved by U.S. regulators.
Some people are so desperate to try it, they’re willing to risk injecting themselves with a substance that hasn’t been fully scrutinized, and they’re finding ways to get it, Zhang says.
Her reporting revealed people searching the web and using the app Telegram to buy products, likely from China, that purport to be the same drug.
Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd spoke with Zhang about her experience acquiring the drug, and what’s motivating people to seek out these underground markets.
Here are some highlights from the conversation, edited for length and clarity:
Is retatrutide more effective than GLP-1 drugs?
“GLP-1 is one receptor. Retatrutide is three receptors. So, I know I’ve been covering these obesity drugs for a few years now, and it’s kind of been under the radar that, among people in the know, there is this drug out there that is better — by better I mean dramatically more effective than Ozempic — and it’s on the horizon.”
These drugs are not approved by the FDA, but there’s a robust black market for them online. How big is the demand?
“I’ve been watching this for about a year now, and it’s just been growing, growing and zooming.
“This drug is available online for ‘research purposes’ only. But if you look at the websites that are selling these drugs, they’re making all sorts of health claims, which are in some ways validated because we do have some preliminary trial data to show that this drug is very effective, and people are buying the drugs. And at first my thought was like, ‘Are they getting a real drug?’ But they’re losing really astounding amounts of weight, like a hundred pounds. So, whatever they’re getting is really effective.”
What happened when you ordered it online?
“So, I wanted to try ordering some of this drug online just to see how easy or hard it was. And the upshot is, it’s really quite easy.
“There are really two ways to do it. One is you basically just go to a website and put in your credit card number, and then you get a tracking link, and it shows up on your doorstep maybe a week later. It really feels like just ordering socks or books online.
“There is also a deeper underground market that you have to access through various Telegram channels. Telegram is [an] encrypted messaging app, and that sort of requires a little bit more digging. It’s often cheaper, but in these cases, you are literally messaging a contact from China, sending them crypto, and then they will ship you something from China. In one case it came in a box for a facial massage roller, so they were trying to obscure the fact that I was actually buying a drug, and it was this unmarked white powder that came in the mail.”
What do you do with the drug once it arrives in the mail?
“It’s actually, really quite involved, and I think that’s why it gets a little bit dangerous, right? This isn’t just a pill you’re taking — this is a drug you’re injecting. You have to mix it with water, sterile water because you don’t want to get an infection from injecting yourself. And then calculate the dosage … you can get really bad side effects if you inject too big of a dose. We’ve heard of side effects like nausea and vomiting, and it can be really, really intense if you take too big of a dose on accident, as people online are saying that they have.”
In your piece, you write about fitness influencer Adrian Crook. He describes taking the drug, then eating a bag of popcorn before bed, and then he wakes up very sick.
“I think what he’d experienced is actually a pretty common side effect of these drugs and a known side effect for this class of drugs, which is that your stomach stops emptying or it slows down a lot, and you experience this stomach blockage.
“So I think after a while he’s eventually fine, but he said he felt like he almost had to go to the hospital. And there have definitely been other anecdotal reports of people saying like, ‘Oh, I got so sick. I did have to go to the hospital.’ And then there’s the other layer of safety here, which is that you don’t really know what you’re injecting. Could there be bacteria in whatever you’re injecting? Could it be a totally different drug than what you actually thought you bought?”
What do you think is motivating people to buy this drug when there are already options on the market?
“People really want to lose weight, and they want to do it at a price that they can afford. Several people I talked to, they had been on one of these other drugs, Ozempic or Mounjaro, Zepbound or Wegovy, and maybe their insurance originally covered it, but it stopped covering it. Another woman I spoke to, her copay went up to like $700 a month. And so, if you’re going to this underground market, you can think of the logic as you’re getting a cheaper drug that is better. The big caveat is that it is totally underground, unregulated, and you might not know exactly what you’re getting.”
You can listen to the full interview here.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2026 WBUR
