[sReinwald]

One thing I have noticed on Mounjaro is a (at least subjectively) significant decrease in impulse spending / buying random crap off Amazon. I have ADHD and that has been a real problem for quite a while - even with ADHD medication (Elvanse/Vyvanse in my case).

The part of Mounjaro that regulates the craving side of the weight loss equation (like reducing 'food noise' and the desire for sugary and fatty foods) seems to also affect other behaviors due to Mounjaro's effect on the brain's reward circuitry. I believe there are also early preliminary studies that indicate it can help with addictions like alcoholism.

Those drugs really are quite something. Shame they're so damn expensive. Insurance here in Germany is unfortunately legally prohibited from covering GLP-1 class drugs for weight loss unless you have a diabetes diagnosis.

[LeifCarrotson]

Are the drugs actually expensive, or just expensive for now because they can be?

Modern society basically decided that adding flouride to drinking water and iodine to table salt for everyone was better than dealing with tooth decay and gout.

I understand that peptide synthesis and cold-chain logistics are not as trivial as these elements, but this paper [1] estimates that GLP1 manufacturing costs can be under a dollar per person per month, orders of magnitude less than current market rates!

Perhaps our future society will normalize taking a daily GLP-1 agonist with their other multivitamins at breakfast.

[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

[sReinwald]

I suspect a big reason for why Mounjaro is still fairly expensive here in Germany (I pay nearly €400 for a 10mg Qwickpen - a 12.5mg Qwickpen is nearly €500) is due to health insurance not being allowed to cover them for anything but diabetes treatment.

If health insurance companies would be able to cover these drugs, there'd have to be negotiations between Eli Lilly and the insurance companies, and insurance companies have a bigger lever than individual patients who pay out of pocket. Self-payers are just price-takers. We pay whatever Eli Lilly wants us to pay.

[nerdsniper]

China can sell (at a profit) >99.8% pure tirzepatide, semaglutide, and retatrutide for <$3/weekly dose. This supply ends up at compounding pharmacies like Hims/Hers, but sometimes more directly to consumers through gray/black markets.

Another way to check if the marginal cost of production contributes to the cost of the drug is to compare the price of injectable semaglutide (~$1200) for around 10mg/month, to the price of oral semaglutide (Rybelsus), which is also (~$1,000) for around 420mg/month. That indicates that the cost of manufacturing semaglutide does not significantly contribute to the cost of the FDA-approved drug.

[MattGaiser]

They are cheap now if you dig deep enough. Lots of vendors selling peptides.

[thisisit]

Can you give some examples? And are those reliable?

[dinkelberg]

Not an example, but maybe this is interesting for folks who haven't really heard of the peptide business before. https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/feb/05/injectable-...

[zemvpferreira]

I've been on Mounjaro and find it pretty inexpensive, but I'm using a high-dose pen for a low-dose injection. One 15mg pen is going to last me around 6 months at my current rate, so around 15 euros per week.

[sReinwald]

You are essentially amortizing a single dose over 6 months by micro-dosing and receiving a clearly sub-therapeutic dose. While that may work for your specific usage, it doesn't change the unit economics for someone who needs the standard therapeutic dose, which in my case at 10 mg is roughly €400 every 4 weeks.

It’s a bit like arguing that a Porsche GT3 RS is an 'affordable' car because the monthly payment is low, provided you finance it over 30 years. The sticker price hasn't changed, you've just engaged in extreme creative accounting to make it fit a monthly budget.

[zemvpferreira]

No, it's more like arguing a Miata will fit the same need as a GT3 at 1/20th the cost. Some people don't fit a Miata, but it's still a valid option for many. Though I am at a sub-clinical dose (not a microdose) I'm still losing between 1 and 3 pounds per week. Lots and lots of people optimise their dose and their pen size to make the economics and side effects more manageable. This is not at all unique to me. It's unfortunate if it doesn't fit your case but it is widely applicable nonetheless.

[deinonychus]

That’s really neat.

I’m ashamed that I have this wish that I were overweight and had an excuse to try a GLP1 just to see how it would affect my impulse control with non-food habits.

I guess there’s not much stopping me from buying some unregulated drugs from the internet and self-experimenting, but I haven’t heard experiences from people deliberately using them for anything but weight.

[sigilis]

If it helps, I don't think that there is anything to be ashamed of to want to try new things even if you recognize it is inadvisable. If there were no physical consequences, I'd like to try all sorts of medicines to see what effect they would have on me.

As a user of Mounjaro, obtained from a doctor, I find the experience very interesting. It has all sorts of weird side effects that I don't expect. As a bioinformatician in training it's great fun to speculate about the causes, pathways, signals, and whatnot that might be involved as this drug perturbs so much stuff in my system.

It's not pleasurable per se, but it is interesting. I have changed my food habits significantly without actually trying. I think I was too impatient to eat to cook if that makes sense. Weirdly, foods taste better to me which I did not expect. I also have found myself really enjoying my hobbies more. This has resulted in a lot of 3d printer filament purchases, so my impulse control may not have been helped much.

As far as experimenting on yourself, it will likely require the cumulative effect of weeks or months to notice changes in non-food habits if such changes occur at all.

There's probably some online doctor that will prescribe this thing to you for several hundred dollars/euros or whatever. You may suffer greatly for your curiosity, though. There are instances of very unpleasant side effects, some of which I experience personally.

[papascrubs]

Depending on your appetite for risk, there's always the gray market. It's also a lot cheaper depending on what your insurance covers. I think I picked up a year's supply of semaglutide for under $200. I've been on some form of GLP for the last 2 years and for me there have been several tangible benefits related to ADHD.

https://gray.guide is a good starting point.

[cthalupa]

I'll note that calling it the gray market really is people uncomfortable with the idea of buying drugs from a drug dealer trying to find a way to make this more palatable.

That's not a judgment thing on my part - I've got a freezer full of Chinese peptides, among other things.

But the raw API on all of this stuff is coming from China in a way that is effectively unregulated and with no recourse if anything goes wrong. Underground Chinese labs get raided and shut down (usually because they're also involved in producing AAS or opioid precursors) often leaving millions of dollars in unfulfilled product. People get peptides with 0 active ingredient. People get peptides contaminated with disinfectant and have adverse reactions. People get mislabeled peptides. People get radically underdosed or overdoses peptides. And when a controversy hits, these labs close up shop one day and come back a week later under a new name. If you get a vial full of something truly harmful to you and you die, your loved ones have zero recourse.

Your local weed dealer has infinitely more accountability than these labs.

Testing isn't a panacea - people do endotoxin, heavy metal, HPLC, etc., but GCMS and similar basically never happens - and without knowing what the potential substances are the automatching to peaks even for GCMS is often inaccurate to the point of uselessness."Purity" reports on HPLC don't measure everything in the vial - just how pure the targeted peak is. It'll catch protein depredations, but it wouldn't tell you if there was a bunch of anthrax in the vial.

For me, the calculus still makes sense. I've got access to things that have worked incredibly well for me that are not yet available in the US, or in some cases, not likely to ever be. But the "gray" market is buying from overseas drug dealers that don't particularly give a fuck about you. They don't want to hurt you - you spend less money if they do - but they also aren't going out of their way to look after you. Most of them only started HPLC tests because the bodybuilding community demanded it, and these guys were selling AAS and HGH to them before they got into the GLP-1s, and then it became the standard.

These aren't parallel import goods getting sold in areas where they aren't supposed to or unauthorized retailers. These are drug dealers that get shut down by the Chinese government on a regular basis. Go look up QSC, SSA, SRY - and those are just some of the biggest names from the past year or so.

[papascrubs]

I like to call it the "gray" market because the substances themselves are gray, not because of their source. My weed dealer doesn't sell GLPs (yet, but I can see that coming). I haven't seen anyone arrested for having GLPs yet either-- although I have seen plenty of US based vendors have to close up shop due to legal pressure.

I do that believe that risk can be (mostly) mitigated, mainly by sticking with longstanding vendors and by trying to minimize risk with the actual substances (researching proper dosing protocol, batch testing, not assuming dosing, starting out on lower dosing with new kits etc). There is definitely risk associated, that said I'm often dabbling in non-FDA approved substances, so regardless I have zero recourse if something happens.

Are there any testing/safety protocols that you follow?

[cthalupa]

> I haven't seen anyone arrested for having GLPs yet either-- although I have seen plenty of US based vendors have to close up shop due to legal pressure.

If you google "med spa arrest glp-1" you can find a good amount of occurrences, e.g. https://www.wsaz.com/2025/09/19/woman-arrested-selling-black...

> I do that believe that risk can be (mostly) mitigated, mainly by sticking with longstanding vendors and by trying to minimize risk with the actual substances (researching proper dosing protocol, batch testing, not assuming dosing, starting out on lower dosing with new kits etc)

Bunch of longstanding vendors have had issues. SRY was one of the biggest names for direct-from-China, shipped peptides contaminated by disinfectant, caused severe reactions for some people. Nexaph is one of the biggest names now in the US, has tons of testing, etc., but got a batch a while back from whoever their manu is in China that had some unknown excipient that got played off as a "test formulation," etc.

Batch testing helps, but it requires the original lab to have actually adhered to the batches in a way that others can track, which isn't always the case. Sometimes top colors span multiple batches, tests on the vendor spreadsheet don't necessarily correspond to the batch being sold if you're trusting their testing, etc.

> Are there any testing/safety protocols that you follow?

Not much. I use a 22um PES filter into a cartridge and inject from it for a few weeks and call it a day. I don't even bother with my own testing at jano unless I have reason to believe something is off and need to confirm.

But I never got my LSD or DMT or anything tested before either so my risk tolerance is basically "eh, send it." I just can't in good conscience recommend people follow that same risk tolerance (though I won't begrudge adults the right to make informed decisions to inject basically anything they want into themselves, either.)

[sReinwald]

It would probably be interesting, but if you are not overweight, the appetite suppression will likely make this not a very healthy or very fun experiment. I started at 5mg in October, and even on that smaller dose I had to force myself to eat even just ~800kcal a day - especially in the early weeks. When you have a lot of weight to lose, that's a pretty welcome effect. When you are already at a healthy weight, not so much. That caloric intake would put most adults into a pretty deep caloric deficit.

I'd suspect if the effects on non-weight indications check out in studies, we might see drugs that could specifically target those effects without also slowing down your digestive tract. Addictions like nicotine and alcoholism and their consequences cost health insurance companies (and us as a society) billions of Euros/Dollars each year, so there'd be a strong incentive to pursue this.

[thinkingtoilet]

That would go in line with what I've read of it helping people with mild addictions.

[01100011]

On Wegovy(semaglutide) I haven't noticed any change in my binges or impulsiveness. Slightly worse(not dramatic) depressive episodes but that's about it.

[bluescrn]

I may well have done more hobby-related shopping 'binges'/impulse buying in place of eating/drinking binges while on Mounjaro.

But that wasn't such a bad thing - it was mostly due to feeling a bit more awake/alive in the evenings compared to when I'd be drinking or overeating.