Both traditional news outlets and newer social media platforms are bulging at the seams with advertisements and celebrity endorsements that lead to ever-increasing sales of bogus anti-obesity drugs, as well as horrendously complicated and expensive problems for law enforcement agencies at every level. Unlicensed pharmacies that operate online are happy to fulfill the demand for semaglutide.
Problem is, consumers tend to receive some totally different substance; or the real stuff but it’s contaminated with something else; or it’s the real stuff but less than the advertised amount, or — and apparently this has actually happened — the genuine item, but a larger dose than was specified in the advertising. Whatever a person injects, to receive close to 40% more of it than they intended to take is a serious drawback.
Pharmacovigilance is called for
Plenty of bargain-priced or even full-priced stuff is on the market, except it turns out to be ineffective, dangerous, falsified, unregistered, misbranded, unapproved, or some other kind of bogus. And/or dangerous. Health-wise, the best-case scenario is the simple non-delivery scam, which one news source implied can at least do no one any harm, other than losing some money.
But even that consolation is false. Some of these crooks who never intended to send any goods want not only the money, but the customer’s credit card number and additional personal information for other nefarious purposes. Meanwhile, shipments actually sent out have caused an alarming increase in emergency calls to poison control centers.
Literally hundreds of websites are selling purported Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and other fakes. For CBC news, Sheena Goodyear reported that last year alone, one security firm managed to get more than 250 of these criminal sites banished from cyberspace. But the crooks, and the tech wizards who use their powers for evil, are standing by ready to replace each deleted site with another one, or several more.
A different cybersecurity firm got 1,600 fake pharmacies removed from the web last year, at least a couple hundred of which had been peddling spurious GLP-1 concoctions. Here is an interesting sentence:
BrandShield said it had the fake pharmacy websites taken down by collecting evidence against them, and submitting that to the service providers hosting the sites.
Sadly, there is no guarantee that the service providers are conscientious and honest citizens, either. The ISPs that host advertising by irresponsible and greedy criminals might be equally craven, avaricious, and unprincipled. In these cases, international law enforcement agencies must step in, and matters become truly complicated. Some countries simply are not interested in playing nice, or being good global neighbors.
Goodyear quoted health law expert Lawrence Gostin, who has been tracking this sort of activity for at least a decade: “Few people understand that the international market in counterfeit drugs is massive.” He also emphasizes that if a person does order weight-loss injections from an online source, they’d better hope the substance that arrives is nothing worse than normal saline.
Sadly, the web is not the only source of danger. Many Americans have been offered stolen, “diverted,” or fake meds in unconventional locations, like a shopping center parking lot, by someone selling from the trunk of a car. Or perhaps in a college dorm.
And even, as journalist Katherine Eban reported for Vanity Fair, at the annual convention of the Obesity Action Coalition, where a dicey character, who was not even a registered attendee, sidled up to the medical professionals in a “stalker-ish” manner. Eban wrote:
Approaching doctors at the conference, he held up a crumpled piece of notebook paper with his contact information and his product list. The sales pitch was simple: [his company] could provide automated refills for “Ozempic, Saxenda, Mounjaro, etc.” at roughly one third of the going US price.
Shame and blame
Another factor that drives some people to online pharmacies is reluctance to face their own doctors, because correctly or not, they perceive bias or criticism coming from that direction. They are afraid their own physician will just plain refuse. Or the doctor might say that the newest weight-loss drug is unavailable — which the patient “knows” to be untrue, because obviously there it is, all over the World Wide Web.
The scary thing about this is, anyone who is taking even the genuine GLP-1 meds needs to be carefully monitored because they may wind up with stomach paralysis, intestinal blockage, or pancreatitis. And once a plethora of unknown substances enters the picture, anything can happen.
Those drugs should never be sold without a legitimate prescription from trained medic who has actually examined the patient — just as no patient should trust any alleged drug that has not been prescribed by a medical professional. Then, since these drugs come loaded into self-injection devices, there is the non-trivial fact that the needles might not be sterile.
(To be continued…)
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “Safety and Risk Assessment of No-Prescription Online Semaglutide Purchases,” JAMANetwork.com, 08/02/24
Source: “Hundreds of websites are selling fake Ozempic, says company,” CBC.ca, 04/19/24
Source: “Why Counterfeit Ozempic Is a Global-Growth Industry,” VanityFair.com, June 2024
Image by danieljordahl/Attribution 2.0 Generic
FAQs and Media Requests: 
