Legit Ozempic sales are on the rise as counterfeit products put patients at risk

Two new studies show how desperate Americans are for safe, approved Ozempic or synthetic and potentially dangerous diabetes/weight-loss drugs.

Another study found US prescriptions and refills for Ozempic (semaglutide) have been rising over the past three years, jumping nearly fivefold (392%) between 2021 and the end of 2023.

Ozempic’s modified-for-weight-loss cousin, Wegovy (also semaglutide), saw sales rise quickly after its launch as well.

According to researchers led by Dr. Dima Qato, assistant professor of clinical medicine at the University of Southern California, sales of Wegovy increased more than 14 times between July 2021 and the end of 2023.

“The number of prescriptions filled for semaglutide increased significantly, reaching 2.6 million prescriptions filled in retail pharmacies in December 2023,” the Qatos group reported Aug. 2 in the newspaper. JAMA Health Forum.

All this has led to the US shortage of Ozempic and Wegovy, which was announced for the first time by the US Food and Drug Administration in March 2022, the researchers noted.

Consumers who cannot get semaglutide due to shortages, or who cannot afford the drug (Wegovy about $1,349 per month), continue to turn to black market sellers on the Internet, a second study found .

That’s a light move, warned researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

They have found many counterfeit semaglutide products online that are contaminated with toxins or contain dangerous levels of the drug. In some cases, the drugs were not delivered after the customers sent the dealers hundreds of dollars.

A team led by Tim Mackey, of UCSD’s Global Health Program, conducted an online search that identified 317 online pharmacies offering semaglutide, 134 of which were found to be illegal activity.

MacKey’s teams have ordered semaglutide from six sites that have been declared “not recommended or aggressive” by two leading online pharmacy groups.

Three sites offered consumers standard 0.25 milligram semaglutide injection pens (similar to Wegovy), while three others offered a powder form of the drug that could be “reconstituted for injection,” the researchers said. said.

The drugs weren’t cheap, with small doses ranging from $113 to $360.

Customers often don’t get what they hoped for.

In the case of three vendors, the product never arrived, in what Mackey’s team called “nondelivery attacks.” In these scams, the sellers take your money but then claim that the drug is being held by US Customs and additional fees of up to $1,200 are required to release it (US Customs told Mackey’s team that such requests are fraud).

However, very bad consequences may await people who do accept their orders.

The real one, called Ozempic, gets a score of 22 out of 22 on a list designed to evaluate the purity and safety of the drug. Unfortunately, the products from the remaining three vendors that were accepted and tested by the researchers could combine the worst 8 or 9 on the scale.

These products often had dirty names and were clearly not licensed for sale, the UCSD team said.

In addition, one sample showed traces of endotoxins (a possible indicator for bacteria), although no specific pathogen was detected.

All products contain semaglutide, “but at very low levels of purity,” Mackey’s team wrote. One sample contained 39% more semaglutide than recommended, a potentially dangerous issue.

All of this may be contributing to disease and overdose, the researchers noted.

“US poison centers reported a 1500% increase in semaglutide-related calls,” Mackey and colleagues noted.

These illegal pharmacies “operate without a proper license and sell medicines such as semaglutide without a prescription, [and] represents a consumer risk for ineffective and dangerous products,” the group concluded.

The study was published on Aug. 2 in the newspaper JAMA Network Open.

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