At his home in Utah, Adrian wipes down all the surfaces in one room with isopropyl alcohol. He makes sure his HEPA filter is on. Next he snaps on a pair of nitrile gloves, then another, doubling up just like a surgeon would. Then Adrian gets to work. He uses a syringe to draw a precise amount of a clear liquid from one vial, then injects it into a second vial containing white powder. Adrian swirls the mixture around until it’s thoroughly combined, becoming a clear liquid once again. A few more steps and the job is done. His tirzepatide is ready. The whole process takes a matter of minutes.
Adrian, who asked for his last name to be omitted for safety and privacy reasons, is not a doctor or pharmacist. He’s a 30-year-old systems engineer who isn’t taking no for an answer when it comes to access to this life-changing weight loss medication. Adrian is one of thousands of people in a “community” — what he calls the giant invite-only group chat he belongs to — that are making or thinking about making their own GLP-1 medications.
They call it “gray,” for the gray market. And with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) shutting down compounding pharmacies that offer GLP-1s at a lower out-of-pocket cost, Adrian and his peers see this DIY approach as the only affordable option. “Am I supposed to put food on my family’s table, or am I supposed to get weight loss medication?” he asks in an interview with Yahoo Life.
But is it safe? Does it work? Here’s what we learned.
What is ‘gray’?
Gray, or gray market medications, are nothing new, and GLP-1s — the class of weight loss wonder drug that includes semaglutide and tirzepatide — are by no means the only drugs you can buy this way. As you might guess from the name, the gray market exists somewhere between the fully legal market and the fully illegal black market.
When it comes to tirzepatide and other drugs like it, shopping the gray market refers to the purchase of research chemicals, which are theoretically the same ingredients that make name-brand drugs work. Adrian buys a research version of tirzepatide, the active ingredient in Zepbound. It doesn’t come in a form that’s ready to be injected, so he has to do a little light chemistry on his own.
But gray research chemicals like Adrian’s tirzpepatide aren’t regulated by the FDA because they are not supposed to be used in humans. That means there’s a greater risk that it might not be as pure as the seller claims, or as strong, or even be the same chemical at all. But a gray research chemical is not necessarily a stolen, counterfeit or illegal copy of something sold on the black market.
Adrian purchases bulk orders from suppliers of powdered tirzepatide in the United States and abroad. He claims these are the same suppliers used by some American compounding pharmacies.
Am I supposed to put food on my family’s table, or am I supposed to get weight loss medication?
Why Adrian went gray
For starters, he didn’t want to. “I would prefer to go with Eli Lilly Direct, even if it cost a few bucks more, versus compounding tirzepatide myself,” he says. But it’s just not financially viable for him. It costs $349 per month for the lowest dose of Zepbound (2.5 milligrams) if you buy it through Lilly Direct, the drugmaker’s direct-to-consumer site.
For that amount, Adrian can buy enough gray to make a year’s worth of the medication, he says.
Adrian didn’t go straight to the gray market. In fact, he wanted to start on a GLP-1 because his wife had been taking Ozempic. She was prediabetic and easily got a prescription from her provider and insurance coverage, “no questions asked,” he says. Adrian had the same insurance provider, but his doctor wouldn’t give him anything but metformin. “And that wasn’t working,” says Adrian, who claims the diabetes drug did “absolutely nothing” for him.
His next step was supposed to be bariatric surgery. To qualify for the procedure, Adrian needed to get down to 350 pounds. “No amount of dieting and exercise would get me there,” he says.
When Adrian and his wife moved to Utah, he tried again to get a GLP-1, and his new doctor immediately wrote him a prescription for Mounjaro. At the time, Adrian weighed more than 370 pounds, his body mass index (BMI) was over 50, and his A1C — a measure of blood sugar used to diagnose diabetes — indicated he was teetering on the edge of prediabetes. But Adrian’s new insurer wouldn’t cover the medication. “My only options were to pay out-of-pocket or find another method.”
Deflated but not defeated, Adrian consulted his new doctor again. The physician asked if he’d considered going through a compounding pharmacy. Adrian had never heard of compounding, but he immediately went digging.
Though he’s not an MD or PhD, Adrian is a research guy. So when he looks into something, it’s not just a cursory glance; it’s a deep dive. By the time he looked into compounded tirzepatide, it was November 2024, and Adrian’s information-gathering revealed the writing on the wall. Weight loss drug shortages had paved the way for compounded pharmacies to step in with cheaper alternatives. With those shortages ending, it seemed clear to Adrian that “compounding pharmacies will eventually be forced to stop.”
His research had also brought him to Reddit forums where gray tirzepatide was discussed. Soon after, he joined the gray market group chat, studied up on the risks and the process of making tirzepatide and placed his first order. He stocked up on enough gray to make more than a year’s supply of the medication. It cost $350 — almost the same amount Eli Lilly charges for one month of Zepbound.
Is it safe?
That’s highly dependent on where the gray powder comes from. Research chemicals are required to have clear labeling that explains that their safety is unknown and they’re not intended to be used in humans or animals. As long as they have these clearly stated warnings and can’t be used in the making of controlled substances (think: heroin, methamphetamine), research chemicals are exempt from FDA regulation. That means anyone can buy them, but it also means that their safety is unclear.
Adrian is well aware of that risk and takes extra precautions to mitigate it. When he orders gray tirzepatide, he won’t use it until he and others who ordered from the same manufacturer send samples out for testing to make sure they have acceptably low levels of toxins and heavy metals. Testing is the biggest expenditure in his tirzepatide-making process (he and other DIY-ers send their samples for testing in bulk for extra assurance and cost savings). “For a full workup for endotoxins, heavy metals and mass impurities, you’re looking at about $850,” he says. “It’s still cheaper” than going through a drugmaker, he notes.
He takes additional measures to further sieve out impurities when mixing his ingredients, a process called reconstitution, which he learned from an instructional video and written guide widely shared in the community. Adrian has never had any problems and, in some ways, he feels more confident taking his DIY tirzepatide than what he got from a compounding pharmacy (he also admits, he has a bit of a rebellious streak). “As gray as the community is, it feels a hell of a lot safer than medicine,” Adrian says. And, he contends, “no medicine is really ‘clean,’” because even regulatory bodies like the FDA and the U.S. Pharmacopeia don’t require medications to be 100% pure.
Joe, a doctor of pharmacy who asked that his last name be withheld for privacy reasons, has never used gray himself, but he too went looking for more affordable GLP-1s. Joe also wound up in the same giant gray market group chat, largely out of curiosity. If Adrian and others are going by the aforementioned instructional video for reconstituting peptides, including tirzepatide, shared in the group, “it’s probably pretty good,” Joe tells Yahoo Life.
As gray as the community is, it feels a hell of a lot safer than medicine,
The procedure is “technically … the way we learned in school,” although some of the equipment is different. Joe doesn’t think that making tirzepatide this way is “an incredible risk,” but he also says that some group chat members take fewer precautions and mix their medications haphazardly. “Some of these guys are a little nutty,” Joe says.
The bigger risk, in Joe’s opinion, is that many people making gray will use it four months or so after they reconstituted the medication. According to the guidelines followed by legal compounding pharmacies, tirzepatide should only be used within 28 days after it’s reconstituted. The longer the medication has been stored, the more likely it becomes that bacteria may be introduced to the vial, or that its potency might drop off.
Is gray legal?
As the name suggests, it exists in a gray area. It’s legal (and shockingly easy) for anyone to buy research chemicals. There are no explicit laws or regulations saying that research chemical manufacturers can only sell to qualified scientists or pharmacies. However, these sellers are not supposed to provide information about how to use these chemicals in humans or even what effects they might have on people. That said, Yahoo Life did find some seller sites that violate this rule.
For that, regulators could come after these companies, says Joe. But it’s unlikely that people like Adrian, who are simply buying readily available products, would face any legal repercussions. And if one gray GLP-1 seller, or even testing facility, were to be shut down, “it’s like in the Marvel universe: If you cut off one head, a few more will spawn,” says Adrian. “And even if the government attempted to do that, it wouldn’t stop people; it would probably just encourage them more, due to the rebellious nature of people who compound themselves.”
If you cut off one head, a few more will spawn.
The results
Adrien now weighs 317 pounds — down nearly 60 pounds from where he started last fall. He could qualify for bariatric surgery if he wanted to, but he’s happy with his progress using his homemade tirzepatide. He’s sure that it’s the drug’s effects on his brain, as much as anything, that have helped him lose weight. Without it, he says he probably wouldn’t have started his “hardcore diet” or be going to the gym a minimum of four days a week.
“Society thinks this is a magic shot, but it’s not,” Adrian says. He works hard to counteract potential muscle loss or bone density declines linked to GLP-1s. “I don’t hate my body, but I know I need to change it and I’m OK with that,” he says.
His wife has reached her goal weight and stopped taking Ozempic, but Adrian says she’s supportive of his DIY efforts. He has even given some of his homemade medication to six or seven people who were denied insurance coverage for weight loss drugs. Ultimately, he feels that any risk that comes with compounding medication is smaller than whatever health consequences he might face from not losing weight. “Being obese itself is a major disease, and anything you can do to mitigate that risk is better than dying in your sleep.”
