Stronger than Ozempic. Not exactly legal. 'Reta' has entered the chat

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Last summer, the musician Angel Money wanted to lose weight ahead of a music video shoot. A friend of hers had been injecting herself with a peptide called retatrutide. Money was curious.

"She handed me a vial as a gift, basically, and was like, ‘Let's just get you together, girl,'" Money said. The needles weren't a problem. Money had been regularly injecting herself with hormones since she started transitioning more than 10 years ago. And she wasn't freaked out about taking a peptide her friend had bought from China. Money had long been using social media to document her adventures "body hacking" with drugs, nootropics and research chemicals she bought from the internet.

Money's first dose was 1.5 milligrams. People noticed almost immediately. "You look tiny," her creative director told her just days later.

Six weeks later, she had lost 35 pounds.

"It was almost this Cronenbergian experience of body horror," she said with a smile. "This was exactly what I wanted, but I wanted this over three months. But every time I looked in the mirror, my body was changing more and more."

She liked how she looked. "Especially as a woman, so much of your value is tied to the way that you look," she said. "And you're treated radically different depending on how you look."

She also liked how she felt. "On reta, I feel like I have a whole different neurological headspace," she said. "I feel like a different person sometimes." She was less interested in food and recreational drugs. She spent less time sleeping and doomscrolling. She felt a little bit manic.

It inspired her to write a song called "Retatrutide" that will be released as a single later this summer. "The chorus is ‘Re-ta-tru-tide/ just let the old you die,'" she said.

Money is currently taking a reta break. "For the summer, I want to gain a little weight," she said. She's put on about 10 pounds since her lowest weight. But someday she might start again.

Okay, so what is reta?

Retatrutide is a peptide that was developed by Eli Lilly and Co. Often abbreviated as "reta," rhyming with "meta," it's similar to other medical injectables you may have heard of, with some important distinctions.

Reta is not Ozempic. Ozempic is a semaglutide, which activates GLP-1 receptors.

Reta is not Mounjaro or Zepbound. Those drugs are tirzepatides, or "dual agonists" that activate both the GLP-1 and GIP receptors.

Reta is called a "triple agonist." That means it activates GLP-1, GIP and glucagon receptors. (Some people erroneously call reta a "GLP-3,″ which is not technically correct.)

Retatrutide is not approved to treat or prevent any disease anywhere in the world. At least not yet. Many people assume it will eventually be approved by the Food and Drug Administration and sold by drug companies to treat diabetes and obesity.

In Phase 3 clinical tests of semaglutide on humans, patients with diabetes lost between 5 and 6 percent of their body weight. Tirzepatide clinical trials on diabetic patients yielded weight loss between 11.6 and 13.9 percent of patients' body weight. But in the recent Phase 3 clinical trials of retatrutide, patients with Type 2 diabetes at the highest dose of 12 mg lost an average of 16.8 percent of their body weight.

"This is as big a deal as 1921, when insulin was discovered for diabetes," said Harpreet Bajaj, the medical director of endocrine and metabolic research at LMC Healthcare in Canada. Bajaj was one of the authors of a study published by the Lancet in June that was partly funded by Eli Lilly.

It's not just that it helps with weight loss, which can be particularly difficult for diabetics. Retatrutide can help reduce fat in the pancreas and liver, blood pressure and LDL cholesterol, according to Bajaj.

"This has the potential to change the whole cardio metabolic profile of people living with Type 2 diabetes to hopefully help them manage their diabetes, the glucose aspect, the weight aspect, but also control their cardiovascular risk," he said.

Bajaj is bullish on the results of the study he worked on as well as another Phase 3 study of patients with obesity, also sponsored by Eli Lilly. But he stresses that it's too soon to jump to conclusions.

"The Phase 3 program of retatrutide has 14 trials," Bajaj said. "Twelve of those are still ongoing. And so we need to know the results before the FDA and other agencies can come to a conclusion and hopefully approve this molecule."

According to research by CBS News based on data from the National Poison Data System, reports of human exposure to retatrutide reported to U.S. poison centers have climbed from 13 in September 2025 to 132 in April 2026. Some reta users - especially those who take high doses without titrating up from a smaller dose - have ended up in emergency rooms with uncontrollable diarrhea.

That hasn't stopped people from buying it online, mixing it in their homes and injecting it in their bodies.

When people lose fat with semaglutide or tirzepatide, they frequently lose muscle mass. But some reta users seem to maintain or grow their muscles while losing fat. It's made the peptide particularly appealing to men, including the streamer Hasan Piker, who said he was curious about reta during an appearance on the menswear podcast "Throwing Fits."

In Telegram and WhatsApp groups, users trade tips about procurement from Chinese vendors, tutorials about how to use cryptocurrencies for payment and warnings about scams. Some will form small cohorts to send a sample for testing before they start taking it en masse. YouTube tutorials on how to mix and inject peptides abound. There are scads of forums and subreddits full of people posting their progress photos, asking for advice and reporting side effects.

"I don't think we've ever seen a drug that hasn't come out yet take the world by storm like this," said Ashley Froese, who runs a private clinic in Mesa, Arizona. "So I think it's only going to get bigger once it is approved."

Froese is part of the online ecosystem that helped popularize reta. About 225,000 people subscribe to her YouTube channel, where she uploads videos with provocative titles such as "Dr. Explains Why Retatrutide is KING of Fat Loss Peptides," "Doctor's Full Protocol to DELETE Visceral Fat: Peptides, Supplements & More" and "Bait and Switch - The FDA & Big Pharma's Move Against GLP1 Access."

Froese received a doctor of osteopathic medicine degree from Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee and completed her residency at the University of Alabama. The clinic she founded doesn't accept insurance and charges a monthly membership fee. Of her 500 patients, she estimates that 200 are taking GLP drugs, including reta.

"I can't really name names and pharmacies at this time, but basically pharmacies have popped up and have been willing to take a risk to say, ‘Even though this is still considered a research chemical, not intended for human consumption, we made it for you,'" Froese said.

Why can't she name names?

"Because I don't want to market for them, to be honest, right now," she said. "And I haven't talked to my attorney about it."

Froese repeatedly emphasized that it's dangerous to procure peptides from gray-market online suppliers. But she also knows that many people - including some of her patients - are doing so. And she says she wants to provide them with information.

"That is the hardest line that I've been walking," she said. "But there are other doctors like me out there, you've just got to find them."

That may be easier said than done. "I did talk to my doctor, and they laughed at me and said, ‘You can try exercise,'" said an epidemiologist at an Ivy League school who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of legal and professional repercussions. Because he was in his mid-30s and weighed only 195 pounds, his doctor didn't think he needed an injectable for weight loss.

He started looking into retatrutide. "I read every single scientific article that has been published on the drug, and so I felt like I had a pretty good understanding," he said.

He also visited "all sorts of sketchy forums" to figure out where he could buy reta. "‘Research' is a strong word here," he said.

Ultimately, he settled on a Chinese supplier and bought a year's supply of weekly reta doses for $200 using cryptocurrency. He spent an additional $200 getting the peptides tested by a U.S. lab.

Reta is the only peptide he takes. He started at a dose of 0.5 mg in November, gradually working his way up to 4 mg. So far he's lost about 25 pounds. He says he used to skip french fries at restaurants, knowing he would end up eating the entire order. Now he stops after a handful.

Not everyone is taking these drugs in moderation.

In the Phase 3 clinical trials, subjects started at a dose of 2 mg. Some gradually titrated up to a dose between 9 and 12 mg. But online, you can find injector pens that dispense 15 mg in one dose.

Another potential problem is the unknown risks that could come from combining reta with other untested peptides.

"Probably the most alarming thing within the peptide space is that more of these peptides are being sold and marketed as stacks," said Luke Cox, a lecturer at the School of Sport and Exercise Science at Swansea University in Wales who has studied the use of injectable weight-loss drugs among weightlifters. Some of the most popular combinations of peptides are sold as "stacks," or combinations of peptides taken together, with names such as "Wolverine" and "GLOW."

"We simply do not fully understand how these different peptides interact with one another in the body, and we definitely don't have the long-term data to really support that these things will not be harmful in the long run," Cox said.

John Mathis, a 49-year-old construction manager from Woodbridge, Virginia, is undeterred by such warnings. "The amount of people who have shared their stories and experiences really overwhelm any negative [information] that I see." Mathis said. His own research, which included reading accounts from users on sites such as Reddit and using ChatGPT to learn about the chemical composition of various peptides, helped persuade him to try his own cocktail.

In December, Mathis began combining retatrutide with other peptides including MOTS-c, tesamorelin and secretoglobins. "And then I started looking at some other peptides," he said. "I've since integrated the substances of semax and selank as well as some epithalon."

He's currently taking a break from reta. But now that he's lost nearly 70 pounds and gained some muscle, he's started taking Melanotan II, a peptide that makes his skin tan. "Too much of it, you can get too dark," he said. "Like, you can literally almost change your entire skin tone."

Sometimes he wears a tank top with a cartoon syringe that reads "IYKYK Peptide Junkies." He's also started selling peptides to friends and family. To him, it's all part of counteracting the forces of what he calls "Big Food" and "Big Pharma," both of which he characterized as profiting off obesity in America.

Mathis isn't having that. "Let's get it from China!" he shouted.

Shane O'Neill connects the dots between entertainment news, internet fads, celebrity gossip and pop culture ephemera to sketch a portrait of how we live today.