For those of you that decided to go Grey market, I have a question

[Need_to_shrink]

For those of you that ended up going gray market for tirzepatide, why did you decide to go this route?

What did it take to get you to the point where you were comfortable with it and what convinced you of the safety of it?

I’m just curious, as every now and again I have my moments of “should I do this “.

 

[Gr33dyOctopus]

For those of you that ended up going gray market for tirzepatide, why did you decide to go this route?

What did it take to get you to the point where you were comfortable with it and what convinced you of the safety of it?

I’m just curious, as every now and again I have my moments of “should I do this “.

Lol. Compound is not that expensive for me. Going thru brello, a 15mg script, 166 a month 500 every 3 between me and my girl as we were doing like 10 a week between us. But i wanted more of this miracle substance ( tirzzzzzz) and every so often somebody would co.e on the tirz reddit board and be all " i got 1000mg for 2 dollars on the gray side" then theyd get the comment deleted and banned for awhile.

I wanted in on that. Found some other reddit forums, made my way here, and been bugging the shit out of everyone ever since. Such is life!!!!!

Taking the gray? Man ive done bags of coke ive found in a little.bindle on the sidewalk, baggies off the floor at raves, smoked an 8 ball of meth i found in a parking lot, in the snow in another life.
Now im older, and though i value my health more than ever, sticking myself full of needles and Chinese gray has been easy, like really easy. Someone here once said " grip it and rip it ". Yep, Lets go! 😃

 

[FRMN01]

Cheapest telehealth tirz is about $200 a month. Gray 60mg kit =600mg is around $200, at highest dose of 15mg it comes to $20 a month. Safety in numbers in group buys with independent testing.

 

[Bdos1]

In Australia it was the insane cost of the branded options. The government in all their wisdom shut down local compounding which made the only affordable option gray

 

[jemifus]

Yeah you can test the heck out of it until you’d be comfortable giving it to your own grandma, and still come out way ahead on price.

 

[lessthanhalf]

I was taking prescribed ozempic as it was not too expensive in Australia , at least at the low doses I could tolerate of 0.8mg per week, but even then I was nauseous for a year. After a lot of research and calculations I worked out that swapping to tirzepatide at the calculated equivalent dose of 3-4 mg a week would be a similar price despite each 4 x 15 mg pen costing $790 Aud. Worked great and no nausea but needed higher doses to suppress appetite than I had calculated. Given that I was and still am taking it to make it easier to tolerate a 50% weight loss, and putting that weight back on carried pretty high medical risks, of maybe a few percent chance of death or very serious illness per year, the risk benefit equation is really simple, almost no matter how dangerous grey market tirzepatide is , it is much less dangerous than not taking it, and I could not afford the retail version. And the way the market seems to work, assuming the source has been "crowd tested" on a forum like this, the odds are actually very good of getting what you order, and there is a strong motive to sell good peptides if they want to stay in business. At a guess, going on the number of people on this forum ordering peptides versus the number of known cases where peptides were mislabelled or contaminated, the odds are way less than 1 in a hundred and possibly less than 1 in a thousand.

 

[byefatlicia]

For those of you that ended up going gray market for tirzepatide, why did you decide to go this route?

What did it take to get you to the point where you were comfortable with it and what convinced you of the safety of it?

I’m just curious, as every now and again I have my moments of “should I do this “.

I have never had name brand. And at those prices, I would've never considered these meds as an option for me. But my health was at crisis mode. Just at the right time, a few people shared how wonderful Tirz is. And a new friend had some from CN that made it affordable. I quickly found out that the info was correct. Tirz is amazing! And Grey Tirz is still Tirz. Testing is how we verify. Safety protocols keep us safe. Yes, there is still risk. Not as risky doing nothing would've been for me. Grey Tirz brought my A1C from 12.4 to 6. I'm down over 50lbs and feel like I've cheated death already. Still a ways to go, but I'm on my way none the less🙂

 

[SolidChick]

To be honest. I can’t afford $200 per month. Then I didn’t like the facts that on top of paying a monthly fee, you still had to buy medication out of pocket.

I started looking GLPs up and I saw TikToks about grey market and the rest is history.

I can honestly say that the peptide community (in my experience) has been supportive.

Then I saw that people were buying them, I was in groups where people spoke about what to ask for and what to look for. They had trusted vendors and I skimmed through those. I read through forums and communities. Now I’m just started vetting vendors instead of buying single vials.

 

[finnputz]

Lol. Compound is not that expensive for me. Going thru brello, a 15mg script, 166 a month 500 every 3 between me and my girl as we were doing like 10 a week between us. But i wanted more of this miracle substance ( tirzzzzzz) and every so often somebody would co.e on the tirz reddit board and be all " i got 1000mg for 2 dollars on the gray side" then theyd get the comment deleted and banned for awhile.

I wanted in on that. Found some other reddit forums, made my way here, and been bugging the shit out of everyone ever since. Such is life!!!!!

Taking the gray? Man ive done bags of coke ive found in a little.bindle on the sidewalk, baggies off the floor at raves, smoked an 8 ball of meth i found in a parking lot, in the snow in another life.
Now im older, and though i value my health more than ever, sticking myself full of needles and Chinese gray has been easy, like really easy. Someone here once said " grip it and rip it ". Yep, Lets go! 😃

Agree! Bartended in the (late) '80s....so many things up the nose with no idea.....
aaaaaa Federal Way! (go Hawks)

 

[Sasquatch]

I started on real Mounjaro 2.5mg pens, as many do. Then went to a compounder. (Who was probably passing off bac water for tirz) IOW weak shit. Too bad I knew the difference.
I often say each person has their own threshold for safety. I'm not a vet, but worked with livestock to the point where I consider myself just another animal. So don't go by my threshold. Test all you want. Filter and play with the shit till your heart's content. Start with low doses. Y'know what Mom said? "well if Johnny jumps off a cliff, would you?"
Well Mom, if Johnny and several thousand more jump off the cliff, it must be okay.

 

[dickybob]

For those of you that ended up going gray market for tirzepatide, why did you decide to go this route?

What did it take to get you to the point where you were comfortable with it and what convinced you of the safety of it?

I’m just curious, as every now and again I have my moments of “should I do this “.

Old fart here: several reasons. I'm overweight, but not so far that getting tirz as a prescription is a given-& when you get to your happy place; they are probably going to cut you off anyway. Been screwed by the outrageous pharm com/pharm benefits manager. If I got an eye drop I needed as pharmaceutical, I paid ~$575. But if I got it as eyelash enhancer at 5X concentration it was only $50.TRUE STORY. later my 0ptometrist told me that if I had just asked for best price, I could have got it for way less. (blame pharm benefits manager). As an old fart, I can tell you our medical system sucks. Finally, I had a friend going gray for tirz losing weight & loving his supplier. Please don't ask for the source. I won't give that out.

 

[randompersonrandom]

I have hoarding tendencies (I keep it under control) and the thought of losing access to something important to me is frightening to me.

With the legal fight, I was just having to live with too much anxiety about something happening to compound and me not being able to get it without spending all my money on it.

Now, unless someone wins a court battle that allows them to poke through my freezer, I have access for ten years that cannot be taken away from me.

 

[MFGamesta]

My buddy who is a doctor here in the USA uses a USA compound pharmacy and he is able to get what I need (not just peptides). After researching, I found the pharmacy, which he and other doctors use, has many imported peptides. They buy in bulk and rebrand and I know they weren't making their own GLPs but were still very expensive (half cost). Then I took the dive.

 

[MsGizmo]

For those of you that ended up going gray market for tirzepatide, why did you decide to go this route?

What did it take to get you to the point where you were comfortable with it and what convinced you of the safety of it?

I’m just curious, as every now and again I have my moments of “should I do this “.

Anger at having to spend $500 a month out of pocket for a drug to treat a legitimate medical issue when my insurance company was already get more than $3000 a month drove me to the grey market. Its not tirz though. I am taking sema and reta currently. I do have a kit of tirz in my freezer though.

As for why I trust it .. if people were being injured by grey market GLP1s it would be shouted from the mountaintops. But all I have ever heard were whispers of people being successful.

At the end of the day we are trusting someone that we are getting a medication that is going to help us. Does it matter that we are trusting a Chinese business instead of a pharmaceutical corporation?

 

[MsGizmo]

no matter how dangerous grey market tirzepatide is , it is much less dangerous than not taking it

THIS!

Obesity kills about 300 thousand Americans every year. Last time I checked there were only about 250 deaths with even the weakest of links associated with GLP1s from any source since the very first one was developed in 2005.

 

[lessthanhalf]

In my case the risks are a fair bit worse than average, long term obesity and ulcerative colitis did some damage before I managed to lose the weight, and a coronary calcium score of 645 at 58 is pretty bad. So if one in a few thousand vials of tirzepatide had cyanide in it I might still be better off taking it . The risks versus benefits are different for everyone, in an ideal world GLP's would be cheap and easily available with medical support and advice (and not too much gatekeeping), but as it is they are not cheap even for those who are not poor and only available to those who are via the grey market. A lot of the newer people on this forum are a bit younger and overweight or mildly obese or are body builders or just trying to be a bit skinnier to look better, and I think the risk equations are quite different if you are younger, less overweight and generally healthier. But even if younger severe obesity has very serious long term health consequences, and the older, more overweight, and more other health problems you develop the closer you get to experiencing those consequences firsthand at the pointy end in an emergency department, and it really is a good idea to prevent them for as long as possible. Getting cancer or having a heart attack or a stroke is really not a fun experience and Glp's make these consequences quite a bit less likely, and using them to manage obesity in the long term before the damage occurs is the ideal outcome. Without Glp medications I would most likely end up regaining weight and have serious risks of between 25 to 40 % over 10 years, with Glp's plus statins etc that goes down to about 10%, I like those odds a lot better, and those risk calculations will vary from person to person but mine are hardly unique.
From my reading of the research the biggest factor in Glp medications being effective or not is staying on them long term if you want to keep the weight off long term. And one of the most common reasons for stopping them is cost and access being limited by insurance etc. Grey peptides are cheap enough for anyone in the western world, even those who are unemployed or pensioners.
Grey peptides do carry extra risks that prescribed ones do not , but the most common and significant ones are dosing errors caused by being unfamiliar with mixing and measuring and knowing that you absolutely must make sure your math is correct on doses. There are quite a few papers and reports of hospital admissions due to these issues, mainly accidental overdoses, but the risks of harm from this are much smaller than the risks of long term health damage from obesity. I have yet to see a case report or paper on someone injured by mislabeled or contaminated peptides, I would be surprised if it had never happened, but it has not happened often enough to end up being written up in a journal, and I have not seen a definite first hand report on this forum either, so it is most likely rare.

 

[janedoe]

Began on ZB 5/24. After researching for the few months I was on it, I moved to compound due to cost benefits. Following my 1st Compound order, I began researching further, and ended up on this platform and 2 others after lurking for some time. I actually started by lurking on Meso to see what I could find, but didn't join. I read, and read and compared data of the varied experiences posted, studies, etc. Pulled trigger for Grey when I felt confident enough bc I didn't have to inquire on recon, dosing, what to do, what does what, and researched what testing afforded toward my comfort, as well as, discovering most compound places basically purchased their products similarly. I don't post alot compared to others, but I read incessantly. Knowledge is power.

 

[ambot88]

I got prescriped ozempic a couple years ago but couldn't afford it, have been glp- curious for years but assumed it was out of reach for mostly financial reasons, until last summer I had a chance meeting with an old friend who was suddenly thin who told me all about grey Reta and sold me a few vials. I loved the stuff and managed to find my way here and get my own supply. I have been overweight/obese most of my life and done many a diet and yoyo'd between obese and overweight categories but never been a "normal" weight. I had an oopsie baby at 40 during covid and I feel like if I'm going to be an old mom I can't also be the fat mom or there's no way I'd be able to keep up with her and give her the life and mom she deserves. I'm taking the risk on grey I guess, but it feels a lot less risky than continuing to be fat.

 

[Not_Your_Dad]

I say this with absolutely no evidence behind it, but I'm 99% certain that Lilly et al manufacture brand name Sema, Tirz etc. in China anyway, probably in the same goddamn factory our stuff comes from.

My wife has been in the veterinary field for 20+ years. Sometimes, for our big pups (Great Dane), she'll bring home an actual pharmacy bottle of a medication, since he takes so much, instead of dispensing it. Literally nothing is made anywhere but China or India.

I think big Pharma has done an excellent job fear mongering the notion of buying grey or generic, to the point that millions of us just buy into their bullshit and never question it. If grey was hurting anyone, it would be front page, top hit news for weeks, because BP can afford to keep it there.

 

[Gr33dyOctopus]

I say this with absolutely no evidence behind it, but I'm 99% certain that Lilly et al manufacture brand name Sema, Tirz etc. in China anyway, probably in the same goddamn factory our stuff comes from.

My wife has been in the veterinary field for 20+ years. Sometimes, for our big pups (Great Dane), she'll bring home an actual pharmacy bottle of a medication, since he takes so much, instead of dispensing it. Literally nothing is made anywhere but China or India.

I think big Pharma has done an excellent job fear mongering the notion of buying grey or generic, to the point that millions of us just buy into their bullshit and never question it. If grey was hurting anyone, it would be front page, top hit news for weeks, because BP can afford to keep it there.

Here here!

 

[Retazempic]

I felt comfortable taking my risk with grey after a convo with my doc. I asked about trying a peptide. I told him I was looking at a specific company (that turns out to be a US domestic re-seller). He told me he had not purchased or prescribed the peptide, and can’t recommend any source, but he said that he had a patient who used that particular source was reporting good results. After researching, I realised that the company was just re- selling from CN, so I decided to cut out the middleman.

 

[Sasquatch]

I say this with absolutely no evidence behind it, but I'm 99% certain that Lilly et al manufacture brand name Sema, Tirz etc. in China anyway, probably in the same goddamn factory our stuff comes from.

My wife has been in the veterinary field for 20+ years. Sometimes, for our big pups (Great Dane), she'll bring home an actual pharmacy bottle of a medication, since he takes so much, instead of dispensing it. Literally nothing is made anywhere but China or India.

I think big Pharma has done an excellent job fear mongering the notion of buying grey or generic, to the point that millions of us just buy into their bullshit and never question it. If grey was hurting anyone, it would be front page, top hit news for weeks, because BP can afford to keep it there.

It would stand to reason Big Pharma would outsource to China. More profit. Period.

 

[Coulter1966]

Name brand drugs from pharmacies are often on the recall list. Some drugs are prescribed using a formula based on patient's weight and may or may not be an accurate dosage. I'm thinking a risk is a risk is a risk. The potential risk of name brand and gray exists either way with gray possibly a little higher due to the potential additives used for "pucking".

 

[ronin365]

Autonomy and cost are big drivers for me. I do not trust the medical/pharma complex. I’m annoyed by the gatekeeping, groupthink, excessive costs, and depending on uninformed doctors who are a hindrance, not a help for things I can handle myself.

 

[Bball24]

I say this with absolutely no evidence behind it, but I'm 99% certain that Lilly et al manufacture brand name Sema, Tirz etc. in China anyway, probably in the same goddamn factory our stuff comes from.

My wife has been in the veterinary field for 20+ years. Sometimes, for our big pups (Great Dane), she'll bring home an actual pharmacy bottle of a medication, since he takes so much, instead of dispensing it. Literally nothing is made anywhere but China or India.

I think big Pharma has done an excellent job fear mongering the notion of buying grey or generic, to the point that millions of us just buy into their bullshit and never question it. If grey was hurting anyone, it would be front page, top hit news for weeks, because BP can afford to keep it there.

Well said!

Big Pharma is only out for the $$. The best way to make more $$ is to scare everyone into buying more from them.

 

[Sasquatch]

I read through this thread again. If there's a risk, it resides upon the individual. Between, cryto, reconning, dosing, and possibly sterility. If there's a place to fuck up, the likelihood resides with you.
(Doesn't all this shit have a some sort of label that reads," do not use." ?)

 

[Zydeceltico]

For those of you that ended up going gray market for tirzepatide, why did you decide to go this route?

What did it take to get you to the point where you were comfortable with it and what convinced you of the safety of it?

I’m just curious, as every now and again I have my moments of “should I do this “.

Eli Lilly Recall
Novo Nordisk Recall

nobody's perfect and some charge an astronomical amount of money for one to realize and accept this truth.

 

[Retazempic]

Name brand drugs from pharmacies are often on the recall list. Some drugs are prescribed using a formula based on patient's weight and may or may not be an accurate dosage. I'm thinking a risk is a risk is a risk. The potential risk of name brand and gray exists either way with gray possibly a little higher due to the potential additives used for "pucking".

To your point about risk, I think most ppl erroneously think buying from pharma is zero risk. Specifically when it comes to mass, purity, sterility, etc.

 

[miss-sanne]

Hmm.... I just got really tired of paying $600 for the Mounjaro pen 15 mg.
I researched for months, I found fellow danes to talk to, who already went grey.
I found, what I believe, was some trustworthy vendors.
After first pin, no looking back.
Will I ever tell anyone, my family, my friends, my co'workers (medicial doctors) ? NO , I'm not stupid. I like to keep my license.
Do I keep the prescription I made for myself for Mounjaro ? Yes. I believe it's a good idea.

 

[94brian49]

For those of you that ended up going gray market for tirzepatide, why did you decide to go this route?

What did it take to get you to the point where you were comfortable with it and what convinced you of the safety of it?

I’m just curious, as every now and again I have my moments of “should I do this “.

$$$$$ and Availability.

Even if 'legit' branded source somehow are as cheap as grey, i would still stock up grey. Reason being you don't know how greedy big pharma is, one day they could just cut supply with no good reason and hanging you dry.

Risk? Third party testing mitigate MOST of the risks, follow by filtering etc is safe enough for me