Updated January 21, 2026 at 2:18 PM MST
If you’re one of tens of millions of Americans on a GLP-1 weight loss drug, you know how effective they can be. Now, an even more powerful drug is on the horizon from pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly.
Retatrutide hasn’t been approved yet, but people are still finding ways to get it, staff writer Sarah Zhang reports for The Atlantic.
The GLP-3 drug is twice as effective as GLP-1s such as Ozempic, she said. But without Food and Drug Administration approval, people are searching the web and the app Telegram for ways to buy the drug cheaper from China.
Misadministering the drug to yourself can cause intense nausea and vomiting, Zhang said.
“This isn’t just a pill you’re taking. This is a drug you’re injecting,” she said. “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 and kind of go up in the right way, or otherwise, you can get really bad side effects if you inject too big of a dose.”
So why are people seeking out GLP-3s with approved GLP-1s on the market? People want to lose weight — for a price they can afford, Zhang said.
One of her sources paid for a GLP-1 through insurance until it stopped covering the drug, and her copay jumped to $700 per month, Zhang said.
“If you’re going to this underground market, you can think of the logic is you’re getting a cheaper drug that is better,” she said. “The big caveat is that it is totally underground, unregulated, and you might not know exactly what you’re getting.”
3 questions with Sarah Zhang
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. So, you know, 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 kind of 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 kind of a deeper underground market that you kind of have to access through going 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 pattern that came in the mail.”
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 you basically, 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?”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Jill Ryan produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Chris Bentley. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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