In an ideal world , we want the drug companies to keep making plenty of money from GLP drugs to make it worthwhile to keep developing new ones, as that process is extremely expensive. And to have grey ones be readily available. They are unlikely to sell legit GLP's at reasonable prices for some time, except perhaps sema once it is off patent.
I would love to know how many people are actually using compounded or grey GLP peptides compared to the legit versions, and whether it is more or less. Given the number of newspaper articles out there recently there sounds like a lot of people using grey GLP's. But the drug companies are still making plenty of money. While there are going to be some people using grey GLP's who could afford the legit ones, there are a lot and most likely a large majority who could not afford their current prices, so grey peptide use is not necessarily cutting into their market as much as they might think.
I saw an article yesterday where lily refused an australian deal to have tirzepatide be available as a subsidised medicine for diabetics, something they have applied for 4 times, but obviously the price offered by the government was not high enough. So not going to be available for obesity in the near future here at subsidised prices. Ozempic already is , but only if you are diabetic or obese and have already had a heart attack or stroke. Which is a bit late really.
Even in the US there is political pressure on the companies to reduce prices, and some deals have been made, given recent news about providing them for $50 to older patients.
But overall real price reductions are not going to happen until there is more competition, especially from the chinese companies who I think are more likely to sacrifice profit margins for market share, once their GLP's are more available.
Grey availability is really up to china, I do not think they care much about about low grade political pressure from the US , but they could be convinced to crack down on it as part of some larger trade deal. Otherwise my guess is it won't happen until it interferes with local legit drug companies, there is one new chinese GLP now available and it forced drastic drops in prices of tirz and sema in china, but once some of the others in development make it I suspect the grey market might get hit. And the chinese government could definitely stop grey peptides from being made if they wanted to. I am not sure it could survive as a totally underground black market in china given it requires fairly technical production equipment to make GLP peptides. And china's generally harsh enforcement style. I cannot see customs enforcement in the west substantially stopping chinese peptides given the vast volumes of packages being imported from china to everywhere else, there are just too many to inspect.