Nearly a year ago, news began to spread of an experimental weight loss drug called retatrutide, under development by Eli Lilly. Though the drug hadn’t made it through clinical trials, nevermind been released by a federally licensed manufacturer, a rapidly-growing black market ensured interested customers didn’t have to wait for the real deal.
Now, the bill on those black market knockoffs seems to be coming due. As CBS reports, the consequences of the unapproved retatrutide trade have now become deadly.
According to the broadcaster, the Food and Drug Administration has received at least two reports of deaths related to the use of bootleg retatrutide in recent months — the first public accounts from health officials acknowledging that the knockoffs contributed to users’ deaths.
Though CBS viewed documents related to the two deaths, it noted that the details haven’t been independently verified, and it remains to be seen whether the black market retatrutide was the principle cause of death in either case, or merely a complicating factor.
Documents related to the death of a 41-year-old woman in July, for example, names retatrutide as a “suspect product” which the deceased obtained “from an unreliable source.” The woman in question was labeled obese, and died after going into cardiac arrest.
Though more information is needed to determine whether the knockoffs were truly responsible for the deaths, the FDA’s interest is telling. In April, Medpage Today reported a case of retatrutide overdose which led to extreme side effects for the user which included kidney injury, extreme dehydration, and diarrhea lasting at least a week.
And though the FDA is at least aware of the dubious retatrutide trade, the federal government’s lax attitude toward bootleg peptides throughout the second Trump administration is arguably a principle factor contributing to the rise of sketchy knockoffs.
“It is concerning because of the breakdown of our drug-approval process in the United States of America,” associate professor at Harvard Medical School Pieter Cohen told CBS.
More on peptides: Pete Davidson Has Been Crushing Black Market Peptides to Get Disgustingly Swole