How to lose weight, infringe patents, and possibly poison yourself for 22 Euros a month.

Introduction

In March 2025, Scott Alexander wrote:

Others are turning amateur chemist. You can order GLP-1 peptides from China for cheap. Once you have the peptide, all you have to do is put it in the right amount of bacteriostatic water. In theory this is no harder than any other mix-powder-with-water task. But this time if you do anything wrong, or are insufficiently clean, you can give yourself a horrible infection, or inactivate the drug, or accidentally take 100x too much of the drug and end up with negative weight and float up into the sky and be lost forever. ACX cannot in good conscience recommend this cheap, common, and awesome solution.

With a BMI of about 28, low executive function, a bit of sleep apnea and no willpower to spend on either dieting or dealing with the medical priesthood, I thought I would give it a try. This is a summary of my journey.

Please do not expect any great revelations here beyond "you can buy semaglutide from China, duh". All of the details here can also be found elsewhere, still I thought it might be helpful to write them down.

Also be careful when following medical advise from random people from the internet. The medical system is full of safeguards to make very sure that no procedure it does will ever hurt you. Here you are on your own. I am not a physician, just an interested amateur with a STEM background. If you do not know if it is ok to reuse syringes or inject air, or do not trust yourself to calculate your dose, I would recommend refraining from DIY medicine.

Picking a substance and route of administration

The two main approved GLP-1 agonists are tirzepatide and semaglutide. Both are peptides (mini-proteins) with a mass of about 4-5kDa which cost approximately the same to produce. A typical long term dose of tirzepatide is 15mg/week, while semaglutide is 2.4mg/week, so I focused on sema because it looked like the cheaper option. ^[1]

While I would have preferred oral to subcutaneous injection, the bioavailability of oral semaglutide is kinda terrible, with typical long term doses around 14mg/day -- forty times the amount of subcutaneous injection. So I resolved to deal with the hassle of poking myself with needles and possibly giving myself 'horrible infections'.

Given that the long term dosage is 2.4mg/week, and that sources generally state that once opened, vials should be used within four (or eight) weeks, I decided that the optimal vial size would be 10mg -- enough for four weeks. ^[2]

Finding a vendor

So I started searching the web for possible vendors of lyophilized semaglutide. I found a wide range of prices from 250$ for a 10mg vial (which would last four weeks at maximum dosage) down to about 50$. And a single website which offered ten vials of 5mg each for 130$.

That one seemed to be a Chinese manufacturer of organic compounds ^[3] . Slightly broken English, endless lists of chemicals by CAS number, no working search function on the website, outdated and incomplete price info provided as a jpeg on the site. I figured that if it was a scam site, it was matching very well to my preconception of how a site of a company more enthusiastic about synthesis than selling to consumers would look like, and contacted them. After I was provided with current pricing (also as a series of jpegs), I sent them about 200 Euros worth of BTC ^[4] for ten 10mg vials plus shipping. (Shipping was 70$, probably indicative of a preference to sell in larger quantities.)

A week or so later, I got my delivery. Ten unmarked vials, of a volume of about 3ml each, filled to perhaps a third with a block of white stuff. ^[5]

I would have preferred to have a quantitative analysis of the contents, but all the companies in Germany I contacted were either unwilling to deal with consumers or unable to perform HPLC-MS, so I reasoned that the vendor would be unlikely to sell me vials filled with botulinum toxin instead ^[6] , and just started with injecting myself with 1/40th of a vial per week, which would amount to 0.25mg if the content was as advertised.

(If anyone has a great, affordable way for peptide analysis, please let me know in the comments!)

Sourcing bacteriostatic water

Unlike random pharmaceuticals, bacteriostatic water can be legally sold in Germany. Sadly, it would have cost me almost as much as the active ingredient, about 15 Euro per vial. So instead, I decided to craft my own bacteriostatic water. I sourced a lifetime supply of benzyl alcohol for a couple of Euros. Instead of dealing with distilled water, I bought sealed medical grade plastic vials of 0.9% NaCl solution "for inhalation", roughly 0.5 Euro a piece. Once a month, I add 0.1ml benzyl alcohol (naturally sterile) to one 5ml plastic vial, which gives me about 2% benzyl alcohol, which is twice of what is specified as BAC, erring on the side of caution (and tissue damage from alcohol, I guess).

Other equipment

I already had a bunch of sterile 20G hypodermic needles and 3ml syringes from another project. For injection of minute quantities of liquids into my body, I bought sterile 1ml insulin syringes with 6mm, 31G needles (@0.3 Euro). ^[7]

Happily, I owned a fridge and a disinfectant spray, completing my toolset.

My current procedure

Every four weeks, I will prepare a new vial. I prefer to fill the vials with 3ml of my BAC+, which should give 3.3mg/ml of sema.

Apply disinfectant to hands and workspace to taste. Then, start with opening a new plastic vial of NaCl. Using an insulin syringe, add 0.1ml benzyl alcohol to it. Unseal a 3ml syringe and needle and draw and release your BAC+ from the plastic vial a few times to mix it. Now draw 3ml of that, tear off the plastic cap ^[8] of your new glass vial, stick the needle through the rubber seal and slowly inject your BAC into the vial. The vial will be low-pressure, so getting liquid into it is really easy. Shake a bit and wait for the lyophilized peptide to dissolve. Store it in a fridge (preferably in the plastic box with the other vials), and liberally apply disinfectant to the rubber seal before and after each use.

To draw a dose, first figure out the volume you need. Disinfect, unseal your 1ml syringe, first inject an equal amount of air into the vial, then turn the vial rubber side down and draw the liquid. To start with, I would recommend drawing 0.1ml more than you need, because you will likely have some air bubbles in. Remove the needle, get rid of the excess air (and excess liquid). Check that you are in a private place, expose your tights, apply disinfectant, pinch the skin of your tight with two fingers, stick in the needle with the other hand, push down the plunger. Cover up your tights, put your vial back into the fridge, safely dispose of your needle. ^[9]

Outcome ($N=1$)

Having taken semaglutide as scheduled for some 22 weeks, I have recently cut my dosage in half because I have reached a BMI of 22.

Traditionally, weight loss was seen as a moral battle: eat less than you want to eat, eat different things than you want to eat, do more sports than you want to do. Basically, spend willpower points to lose weight.

GLP-1 agonists are a cheat code, like reaching enlightenment through psychedelics instead of years of meditation, or bringing a gun to a sword fight. I literally spend zero willpower points in this endeavor. I continue to eat what I want and how much I want, it just so happens I want less food. I am under no illusion that this cheat will give me the full benefits of exercise and proper diet. But realistically, these were never an option for me (until someone discovers an infinite willpower cheat).

Will I rebounce once I quit sema? Not a problem, at 20 Euros a month, the drug pays itself in money not spend on chocolate, and it is less of a hassle than taking my other pills once a day, so I am willing to continue to take it for the rest of my life.

Thanks to Scott Alexander for pointing out this option and to my Chinese vendor for providing Westerners like myself with cheap bodily autonomy.

Up next: The bio-pirate's guide to DIY MAID (due in a few decades, PRNS).

1. I should probably add that the price difference is not all that large. 60mg tirzepatide vials cost perhaps twice as much as 10mg sema vials, because a lot of it is dose-independent overhead. ↩︎

2. Also note that the standard recommended dose schedule calls for minimal doses at the start, which will come down to 75uL. This would be even less convenient using 20mg/vial. ↩︎

3. The sha1-sum of their 14-character domain name is 6682ca2d70b203e0487c49d868ea20401b5ede1c. Note that I can not vouch for their production chain (obviously), but am personally very happy with my dealings with them and plan to buy my next pack of vials from them as well. I do not want to link them to avoid this looking like a sketchy drug advertisement. DM me if you can't find them. ↩︎

4. Their slightly unfavorable exchange rate for bitcoin happily negated the exchange rate between US$ and Euro, simplifying my calculations here. ↩︎

5. I was suspicious about that amount, as I would have imagined that 10mg would be a lot less. While I do not have a scale on that level of precision, I confirmed that the residue of a dried droplet was much less indeed. ↩︎

6. If I had been wrong about that, I would at least have contributed to raising the sanity waterline. ↩︎

7. Obligatory whining about excessive paternalism: A few years ago, I could buy medical grade syringes and needles (Braun) from Amazon Germany. These days, all the offers say "for research purposes only". When did society decide that people having access to medical grade equipment for any purpose was a bad thing? Is anyone under the impression that not providing heroin addicts, needleplay enthusiasts, or peptide enjoyers will result in them abstaining from risky behavior? ↩︎

8. When I was taking ketamine for depression (filling injection vials into a nasal spray), I did not know about the plastic caps. Turns out it is really hard to pierce them with a hypodermic needle. ↩︎

9. I recap, which is fine here because I already have all the pathogens in my blood which might be on the needle, and then collect the needles in an empty bottle for disposal. ↩︎