The gray market for peptides is pretty fascinating. I've spent the last month exploring it and interacting with some of the Chinese entrepreneurs involved, as well as the informal regulatory functions provided by self-organizing groups of buyers who pool their resources to test the products and share experiences. It's a surprisingly wholesome kind of shady.

An enterprising shopper can stock years worth of semaglutide or tirzepatide, or even the newer medicines still in trials like cagrilintide, retatrutide, mazdutide, survodutide, et cetera -- for a monthly treatment cost of less than $100. Heck, you can get max dose sema for $5/month. Which, putting aside the legal/IP and risk issues for a moment, is a good thing for the people who will likely be on these medicines for the rest of their lives.

Having a less obese population would have so many positive impacts on our quality of life, healthcare system, and economy. I hope that somehow these medicines become cheap and plentiful enough that people can take them prophylactically.

I'd say that medicine has been a net benefit to bettering the lives of those who have access to it. I'm biased, though - "drugs" have kept me alive and able for the last 30 years.

I see the confusion between medecine and drug

Here in France, drugs = some shit you get addicted easily

Will be interesting to see if you can see the impact of this on the charts for overweight people in the US. Quickly looking, I can't find a chart that showed it had actually plateaued in the past couple of years. I thought many people were offering that these drugs were far more impactful there than we were admitting.