Over the past year, staff working in Australia’s needle and syringe programs have noticed something unusual.
Thin-tipped needles, typically used for injecting heroin and methamphetamine in a vein, are being requested by a new kind of injector. They’re also taking a new kind of drug: peptides.
How did an experimental medicine still moving through clinical trials end up in needles made for injecting into a vein?
To answer that question, I followed the journey of a vial of retatrutide.