15mg Zepbound is 489 euro in Germany for a month (4 shots).
Hopefully the market will correct the pricing situation once the goldrush calms down.
Even my local pharmacist ranted about what a rort it is last time I asked LOL
I doubt you will find many here who agree with your usage of “theft” here.
That seems like a straightforward deal. You provide us benefits, we provide you benefits. A one sided deal like you propose (we protect "your" medicine and yet get none ourselves) is the real moral stretch.
I can see it argued that, being less critical than medicine, perhaps a book or software could be "out of print" for longer than medicine being out of production before the copyright protection ceases, but ultimately the only reason we have copyright to begin with is too encourage people to create and make available.
So yes, by all means. Make orphaned and out of production works publicly available.
I do think that at some point that window is long enough that the author and publisher lose any logical justification for keeping something unavailable while the rest of us subsidize their ability (via courts, laws, and police) to do so. After all, if we're paying for that stuff, what are we getting in return?
1. Test it for mass, purity, endotoxins, whether it is the real deal or not; this can be easily mitigated if one joins some testing group to share costs.
2. Calculate the dosage units properly, as it depends on how much bacteriostatic water is mixed with the powder. Here, many peptide calculators help. Some will end up making mistakes here; instead of taking 5 units, one will take 50 units--this leads to ER visits.
3. Hygiene: use gloves and alcohol wipes.
There was a temporary allowance for compounding it due to sustained manufacturer shortages but that is in the process of expiring.
[0]: https://theweek.com/articles/870872/americas-deadly-obesity-...
Your linked article says: Obesity adds between $147 billion and $210 billion to annual U.S. health-care expenses, increasing an average adult's medical costs by 42 percent — an estimated $200,000 over a lifetime.
Since annual GDP per person in the US is roughly 80k USD and average life expectancy is also roughly 80 so roughly 6.4m USD GDP per person lifetime. 200,000 USD over 6.4m would imply over 3% of GDP, which seems more reasonable.
The US is spending roughly 15% of the GDP on health. If 1% of GDP is due to obesity then this is 'just' 1/15th of the overall health spending. If 3% of GDP is due to obesity then this is 20% (3/15th) of the overall health cost in the US.
Seems alright?
A 2 year supply of Ozempic (Semaglutide) lyophilized in sterile vials is ~$120USD (300mg of Semaglutide, 2.4mg a week at max dose so 125 weeks) on the black/gray market and that's with at least 2 middlemen making a profit so realistically the cost might be closer to $70USD?. Anyone can pay to get it HPLC tested to confirm the quantity, purity, sterility etc not to mention people (bodybuilders) have been using gray market peptides for 10+years and you never hear any stories about something going wrong (Things go wrong with oil based steroids for bodybuilders commonly not peptides in BAC water).
Meanwhile that same ~$120USD 2 year supply of Ozempic is $8400 in Europe, $9600 in Canada and $24000 in the USA.
When a low quality lab in China is producing something that normally costs such a high amount there are always corners cut, quality issues and people manufacturing it that are not using the same quality control and standards you would even get from a compounding pharmacy.
Author William Llewellyn's talk on how the black market of anabolic steroids evolved over the years explains how things like this are made and what sort of contaminates get into gray/black market injectables (regardless of oil or water based).
Anabolic Steroids: an evolving black market (28mins) https://youtu.be/0LL7bL4F9G4
That video is literally about anabolic steroids not peptides. Not to mention there was 0 testing labs in 2012 that users could send their items to, to get tested while there is many now a days. Back then in 2012 unless you had a friend at a University lab that knew analytical chemistry you were out of luck to get anything tested.
You aren't wrong about a lab in China cutting corners, having quality issues and low quality control standards but people don't care if they see 10,000+ people using peptides for decades without a single complaint about infection or real problems.
"is producing something that normally costs such a high amount" the cost has very little to do with the chemicals themself, the cost is about recouping R&D costs and having a 90% profit margin.
The cost of GLP-1 drugs doesn't come from production costs or complexity, it is purely a function of being on patent.
A month's supply of Ozempic costs less than a dollar to produce. It costs $25k in the US because of patents.
I see this error on HN a lot, but the overwhelming majority of people will not do that, because the overwhelming majority of people take the path of least resistance and neither have the domain knowledge nor the drive to figure out how to do things outside the easily packaged path. Your example class of peptide-using bodybuilders are probably in the top 1% of both drive and domain knowledge to have gotten there (probably higher, even - less than 1 in 100 people on the street are that jacked).
A lot of HN users are extremely high-agency people with a significantly-above-average ability to understand how systems work and how to take advantage of that. A lot of said users make the understandable mistake that most people are like them. This is not the case.
It is extremely important if you are in charge of designing a system (as many of us are) that you understand and internalize that any claim of "people will just" that requires more than a few steps will only bear out for a very small minority (which are important edge cases, but should not be your expectation of the average user)
There is Facebook groups with thousands of 50 year old moms taking gray market peptides, not just top 1% peptide-using bodybuilders. My example of peptide using bodybuilders was about the anecdotal safety of peptides. The barrier to entry previously was ALOT higher, you practically had to either contact a middleman in China and wire money to a random bank account overseas or buy it from a steroid drug dealer, now a days there is thousands of online storefronts that accept credit card and ship domestically that come with visual graphic instructions on how to do everything.
I'm sure when the New York Times writes a big piece about how gray market peptides have become a huge thing in the Fitness social media space, others will recognize it is growing and growing fast.
Have the government step in and say, “if you want to sell your drugs in America, you can only sell them to me.”
Then the government hammers that price down as low as it can go, and buys in bulk. A small rider is added to everyone’s federal taxes - a few dollars at most - to pay for it all, and the drugs are provided for free with any prescription.
It’s called single-payer healthcare, and most any advanced country uses that method to turn a $2,000/mo drug that the end user would pay either directly or through income-reducing insurance, into a $50/mo drug that is paid indirectly through federal taxes at less than 1/100 the cost.
But nooooooo… America can’t do this because “socialism is evil”.
That said, there is some hope on the horizon, some patent expirations have already happened (i.e. liraglutide which is less effective) and some are coming:
https://glp1.guide/content/patent-expirations-for-glp1-recep...
pogue•9mo ago
Scoundreller•9mo ago
Click "View Tested Page" and you'll have the raw HTML at the right to copy into an html file and open (or drop the text heavy parts into an AI to remove the formatting). If you selected the Desktop view, open the image in a new tab.
pogue•9mo ago
Can you suggest a prompt that would quickly strip all the HTML formatting from a file? There's a lot of broken characters for quotation marks and etc, but I was able to read it. Thanks!
Scoundreller•9mo ago
albumen•9mo ago