Regulators have warned the public is “at risk” and people need to be educated due to the rapidly growing black market for weight-loss drugs and illegally traded medicines.
More than 1.5 million people in the UK use the medication, but as popularity soars for these so-called miracle drugs, so has the criminal availability of them.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) seized almost 20 million doses of illegally traded medicines during 2025, with a potential street value of nearly £45 million.
Andy Morling, head of the criminal enforcement unit at the MHRA, told a Health and Social Care Committee meeting that 81,000 doses of GLP-1 drugs alone were seized over the last three years, and “99 times out of 100”, the products are genuine.
“That doesn’t make it safe, it hasn’t been produced in accordance with manufacturing processes,” Mr Morling said. “The sterility is questionable, the dosage is questionable.”
He estimated it is just 10 per cent of the problem, with the profit margin for medicines on the black market rivalling cocaine and heroin.
“We cannot arrest our way out of this; it’s about educating the public,” Mr Morling said.
Weight-loss injections, such as Mounjaro and Wegovy, also known as GLP-1 receptor agonists, work by mimicking the natural hormone which regulates blood sugar, appetite and digestion. They are a prescribed drug and to access them on the NHS, a patient needs to have a BMI of 40 or more, but private providers offer them to those with a BMI over 30.
However, since the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) approved semaglutide for weight loss in March 2023, criminals have been making fake products.
Mr Morling recalled the MHRA seized 900 fake pens that contained insulin and “could have killed people”. Then he explained criminals sold weight-loss drugs in small, unlabelled vials through social media and back street beauticians, before moving to manufacturing their own weight-loss drug with their own branding.
But he reassured the committee that the MHRA is fit for purpose and is “leading the way globally” when it comes to tackling the weight-loss drug black market.
Weight-loss drugs are prescription-only and only available via a doctor or a qualified healthcare professional. Sourcing medications from unregulated suppliers will not meet the MHRA’s strict safety and quality standards and could be dangerous.
However, not everyone buying weight-loss drugs from the black market realises they are doing so, with the lines between medical and cosmetic becoming “blurred”, Mr Morling warned.
People are buying weight-loss drugs from beauticians and from social media and, in some cases, with fatal consequences.
Committee chair Layla Moran cited the case of 53-year-old Karen McGonigal, whose two daughters claim her death in May last year came days after she was illegally administered a dose of semaglutide.
“It was a local Botox provider, I believe, who gave her this jab illegally, and I understand there is an ongoing investigation with Greater Manchester Police,” she added.
“If we don’t get to the bottom of this wild west unregulated market, everyone is at risk,” she told the committee.
There are currently 55 MHRA officers who “proactively patrol” the internet looking for illegal sellers, Mr Morling told MPs.
However, he said “half a dozen staff” are dedicated to looking for offending social media posts.
“I think ultimately it’s a social media company to determine whether to take these things down or not, whether they believe that they’re in breach of the law,” he said. “We can ask them to, we can’t compel them to.”
He added there is a “spectrum” that the regulator is seeing, with illegal online sellers at one end and genuine prescribers at the other.
“What we see is a bit of the blurring of the lines between the two, where there are illegal medicine sellers purporting to be prescribing when in fact, it’s just a front for an illegal online pharmacy,” he said.
“It’s difficult for the public to tell the difference sometimes between the two.”
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