UK Parliament
The market for counterfeit weight-loss medications could have been predicted and could be fixed by increasing NHS prescribing of the drugs, Zubir Ahmed, Labour MP for Glasgow South West, has suggested.
Speaking as part of a panel at the Labour Party conference, held in Liverpool on 29 September 2026, Ahmed, who is also a doctor, said that a new regulatory body working between the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) could help solve issues around the illicit supply of medications.
Concerns around people accessing GLP-1 drugs on the black market were “only [an issue] because we’ve not stepped into the space and taken responsible decisions”, he added.
Ahmed continued: “We knew this was coming down the track… every policymaker in the Department of Health and Social Care and [every] politician has been informed of the fact that [GLP-1s are] something that is revolutionary.
“You could have wholly predicted a scenario like this, because if you restrict the use of a drug that is by any measure going to transform lives — and it’s the only thing that’s bent the arc of obesity in 50 years… [it] was inevitable that this was going to happen.
“We shouldn’t be surprised that there is a counterfeit market in GLP-1s that is thriving.”
GLP-1s represented a “unique scenario” because their use has been led by grassroots demand rather than a top-down approach from policymakers and clinicians, he said.
Ahmed noted: “Almost all of this demand is legitimate demand, and it’s probably clinically indicated demand…. the problem is the means by which people are going about fulfilling that demand.”
In addition to improving patient education around addressing illicit medicine supplies, Ahmed said he thinks that “there’s also a policy piece here around how we then meet that unfulfilled, legitimate, clinically appropriate demand”.
“It’s not beyond [us] to come up with a programme and a solution where we can deliver these drugs safely, free at the point of care, to the population that meets them,” he added.
Ahmed also said that the medicines regulator had “limited” resource and “legal levers”, and did not have “enough of a scope” to tackle illegal online advertising of medicines to patients, adding: “They don’t have powers of arrest, for instance. A lot of other agencies that work in these kinds of spaces do.”
There was a “gap” in regulation around online medicines access “that people can fall through and criminals can exploit”, he suggested.
Ahmed noted: “The GPhC is responsible for the inspection of pharmacies and the online space.
“And then on the medicines side you’ve got the MHRA. And actually what you probably need to fix something like this is have some kind of joint body working between the two. And I think that’s missing right now.”
Also on the panel, Georgina Lawton, head of healthcare at barcode developers’ body GS1 UK, suggested that barcoding of medicines could be used to help verify whether they came from a legitimate source.
“As technology improves, and as we build ultimately a system that may help with visibility verification, we’ve also got an NHS app, and wouldn’t it be great if when that medicine got to you, you could scan your medicine, and you could ask pertinent questions to lead to where that medicine came from,” she suggested.
