One State’s Battle to Stop People From Taking Unapproved Weight-Loss Drugs
As bootleg versions of an experimental drug from Eli Lilly flood the market, regulators try to curb supply
- Regulators are trying to curb the supply of illicit, unapproved versions of Eli Lilly’s experimental weight-loss drug retatrutide.
- The black-market compound enters the U.S. from overseas suppliers, often based in China or India, and is sold by clinics and online sellers.
- The Ohio State Board of Pharmacy conducted 1,102 proactive inspections of wellness clinics and medical spas between March 2025 and August 2026.
Tiffinne Perkins, a nurse practitioner who ran an Ohio-based weight-loss clinic called Enbody, appeared on the local news and lifestyle morning show “New Day Cleveland.”
“How many people got skinny thanks to you lately?” asked the host, in a segment sponsored by Enbody.
“Oh, boy, all of them,” Perkins replied. “Hundreds.”
A little over a year after that 2024 TV appearance, inspectors from the Ohio State Board of Pharmacy arrived at Perkins’s clinic. They found more than 400 vials of illicit weight-loss drugs, including retatrutide, a next-generation weight-loss drug that Eli Lilly is developing but isn’t yet approved. The clinic’s license was suspended within days.
Perkins denied the clinic sold retatrutide. Her lawyer said they wouldn’t appeal the board’s decision or the $300,000 fine.
Clinics and medspas, promising people transformational weight loss, have figured out how to procure and sell an experimental drug that hasn’t gotten through the government’s drug approval process, prompting serious safety concerns from authorities.
Social media has amplified interest, with influencers promoting Eli Lilly’s retatrutide—often called “reta”—as a superior weight-loss solution. The black-market compound makes its way to the U.S. through a robust and loosely regulated peptide industry fueled by Chinese suppliers.
Regulators are trying to come to grips with this underground system. States like Ohio have started to crack down in the past year. While approved pharmaceuticals are subject to rigorous vetting, the same standards don’t apply to the black market, raising fears of potential contamination, mislabeling and unknown ingredients that could cause dangerous side effects.
Other states, including Oregon and Iowa, have put out notices warning patients and medical professionals about using retatrutide.
It looks like a game of whack-a-mole.
“They shut down a company, and it pops up again under a slightly different name with a new website,” said Tenille Davis, a pharmacist and chief advocacy officer for the Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding, a compounding-pharmacy trade group.
Between March 2025 and August 2026, Ohio’s board conducted 1,102 proactive inspections of wellness clinics and medical spas across the state, leading to 54 immediate emergency shutdowns of businesses that posed a “danger of immediate and serious harm.”
Inspections in Ohio jumped 56% since fiscal year 2024, when regulators started seeing illicit retatrutide and other peptides, board data show.
The Food and Drug Administration has sent warning letters to telehealth companies marketing retatrutide, distributors for selling it and outsourcing facilities for repackaging it. But critics say the federal regulators either don’t have or aren’t fully using the limited authority they do have to stop this influx of illicit drugs.
An FDA spokeswoman said that the agency would continue to take action to remove illegal drugs from the market and that it urges consumers not to use retatrutide unless they are part of an official study.
The explosion in use of compounded versions of weight-loss drugs has “really exposed these gaps in our regulatory structure,” said John Hertig, board chair of the advocacy group Collaborative for Evidence-Based Medicines.