The Health and Youth Care Inspectorate (IGJ) has imposed a trade ban on an online dealer in illegal medicines. The Peptidekoning is no longer allowed to sell three medicines meant to treat diabetes but used as weight-loss drugs, RTL Nieuws reports.

The Peptidekoning sold semaglutide, tirzepatide, and retatrutide via social media and several webshops. The first two are only allowed to be sold in the Netherlands with a prescription. The third is still an experimental drug that has not yet been approved for sale anywhere in the world.

According to the IGJ, Peptidekoning sold and delivered the substances without the required license or registration. “It is insufficiently guaranteed that the medicines meet the requirements for quality, safety, and efficacy,” the Inspectorate said. “Furthermore, the manner in which the medicines are offered provides insufficient certainty regarding this. And that entails risks for public health.”

Peptidekoning must immediately cease trading in these three substances and is also banned from selling them via another webshop or channel.

This is the first time the IGJ has imposed a trade ban on diabetes medicines that consumers use for weight loss. Though it has also fined several newspapers for writing about these meds as weight loss drugs, raising censorship concerns among journalists.

Previous research by RTL Nieuws showed that many people turn to the black market for GLP1 medicines to lose weight. This is usually because they do not qualify for the diabetes medication through a doctor. The number of poisoning reports involving these injectable medicines doubled in a year.

Experts are deeply concerned about the increasing supply of illegal medicines, especially experimental medicines that are still under study. “It is life-threatening,” Marloes Dankers of the Institute for Responsible Medication Use (IVM) told RTL Nieuws. “You are your own guinea pig if you start experimenting with these kinds of substances. The substance is still under investigation. We do not yet know exactly what the risks are. And you are never certain whether the substance being offered illegally is actually the real substance. Maybe it is something completely different. Maybe it is contaminated. There are really significant risks.”