Depending on your appetite for risk, there's always the gray market. It's also a lot cheaper depending on what your insurance covers. I think I picked up a year's supply of semaglutide for under $200. I've been on some form of GLP for the last 2 years and for me there have been several tangible benefits related to ADHD.
I'll note that calling it the gray market really is people uncomfortable with the idea of buying drugs from a drug dealer trying to find a way to make this more palatable.
That's not a judgment thing on my part - I've got a freezer full of Chinese peptides, among other things.
But the raw API on all of this stuff is coming from China in a way that is effectively unregulated and with no recourse if anything goes wrong. Underground Chinese labs get raided and shut down (usually because they're also involved in producing AAS or opioid precursors) often leaving millions of dollars in unfulfilled product. People get peptides with 0 active ingredient. People get peptides contaminated with disinfectant and have adverse reactions. People get mislabeled peptides. People get radically underdosed or overdoses peptides. And when a controversy hits, these labs close up shop one day and come back a week later under a new name. If you get a vial full of something truly harmful to you and you die, your loved ones have zero recourse.
Your local weed dealer has infinitely more accountability than these labs.
Testing isn't a panacea - people do endotoxin, heavy metal, HPLC, etc., but GCMS and similar basically never happens - and without knowing what the potential substances are the automatching to peaks even for GCMS is often inaccurate to the point of uselessness."Purity" reports on HPLC don't measure everything in the vial - just how pure the targeted peak is. It'll catch protein depredations, but it wouldn't tell you if there was a bunch of anthrax in the vial.
For me, the calculus still makes sense. I've got access to things that have worked incredibly well for me that are not yet available in the US, or in some cases, not likely to ever be. But the "gray" market is buying from overseas drug dealers that don't particularly give a fuck about you. They don't want to hurt you - you spend less money if they do - but they also aren't going out of their way to look after you. Most of them only started HPLC tests because the bodybuilding community demanded it, and these guys were selling AAS and HGH to them before they got into the GLP-1s, and then it became the standard.
These aren't parallel import goods getting sold in areas where they aren't supposed to or unauthorized retailers. These are drug dealers that get shut down by the Chinese government on a regular basis. Go look up QSC, SSA, SRY - and those are just some of the biggest names from the past year or so.
I like to call it the "gray" market because the substances themselves are gray, not because of their source. My weed dealer doesn't sell GLPs (yet, but I can see that coming). I haven't seen anyone arrested for having GLPs yet either-- although I have seen plenty of US based vendors have to close up shop due to legal pressure.
I do that believe that risk can be (mostly) mitigated, mainly by sticking with longstanding vendors and by trying to minimize risk with the actual substances (researching proper dosing protocol, batch testing, not assuming dosing, starting out on lower dosing with new kits etc). There is definitely risk associated, that said I'm often dabbling in non-FDA approved substances, so regardless I have zero recourse if something happens.
Are there any testing/safety protocols that you follow?
> I haven't seen anyone arrested for having GLPs yet either-- although I have seen plenty of US based vendors have to close up shop due to legal pressure.
> I do that believe that risk can be (mostly) mitigated, mainly by sticking with longstanding vendors and by trying to minimize risk with the actual substances (researching proper dosing protocol, batch testing, not assuming dosing, starting out on lower dosing with new kits etc)
Bunch of longstanding vendors have had issues. SRY was one of the biggest names for direct-from-China, shipped peptides contaminated by disinfectant, caused severe reactions for some people. Nexaph is one of the biggest names now in the US, has tons of testing, etc., but got a batch a while back from whoever their manu is in China that had some unknown excipient that got played off as a "test formulation," etc.
Batch testing helps, but it requires the original lab to have actually adhered to the batches in a way that others can track, which isn't always the case. Sometimes top colors span multiple batches, tests on the vendor spreadsheet don't necessarily correspond to the batch being sold if you're trusting their testing, etc.
> Are there any testing/safety protocols that you follow?
Not much. I use a 22um PES filter into a cartridge and inject from it for a few weeks and call it a day. I don't even bother with my own testing at jano unless I have reason to believe something is off and need to confirm.
But I never got my LSD or DMT or anything tested before either so my risk tolerance is basically "eh, send it." I just can't in good conscience recommend people follow that same risk tolerance (though I won't begrudge adults the right to make informed decisions to inject basically anything they want into themselves, either.)
https://gray.guide is a good starting point.