America’s New Drug Dealers Have Moved from Street Corners to the Internet – and the FDA is Letting Them

(Peter Pitts, President and Co-founder of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest ) - Consumers purchasing retatrutide online may think they are buying a safe, clinically tested weight-loss drug. They are not. Medical spas and online sellers have built a booming black market around an unapproved investigational drug – exploiting polished websites and professional packaging to sell illegal drugs to unsuspecting Americans. What is especially concerning about today’s version of this deception is how FDA is doing nothing to stop it, allowing this black market to turn into a digital-age Wild West. 

Retatrutide is an investigational molecule currently being studied in clinical trials for the treatment of obesity. It has not yet received approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and cannot be lawfully sold. That is not an opinion. That is the law. And yet sellers are aggressively marketing it as equivalent to – or even superior to – FDA-approved therapies already on the market.