[tjpnz]

My understanding of GLP1 agonists is that they're relatively simple and cheap to produce. People have been able to source semaglutide and tirzepatide online for instance and there are communities on Reddit that will take you through mixing it/whatever you need to do prior to injecting it. I don't know where this three billion comes from.

[ygjb]

This has "I could recreate twitter in a weekend" vibes. I am not out here rallying to lick corporate boots (I am in the 'hand the drug companies a cheque to recoup research costs, and make the drug generic' camp), but this is a really bad take.

The $3 billion comes from researching and demonstrating the role of GLP antagonists, determining how to use them as a medication, developing manufacturing and distribution processes, and dosing mechanisms, testing, documenting, and getting the appropriate certifications and approvals to ensure that the risks of using the medication are reasonably well understood and communicated. Then there is the cost of marketing and educating the medical services providers in various fragmented markets about the effects and efficacy of the drugs and presenting them as alternatives to existing medications.

$3B sounds like a lot of money, but when you consider that the efforts above take hundreds to thousands of people over 30[1] years to achieve, it's not alot.

As for the idea that people should or could manufacture or self-administer these drugs safely at home, yeah, that might be the case for a very limited number of people, but I am going to lean on the ghost of George Carlin for that “Think about how stupid the average person is, then realize that half of em’ are stupider than that”.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5707151/