If ur rx drug is 1) common 2) ideally non-patented 3) ideally non-scheduled 4) doesn't have specific storage needs (a la insulin), you can get it from the same factories that sell raw chemicals to the local factories that sell it to the pharmacies that sell it to you -- this works for medications other than hrt & it is not illegal.
1. Look up your rx on Wikipedia and figure out whatever the chemical in it actually is. Navigate to that page.
2. Find the CAS #. This is a universal identifier that will help you overcome language barriers.
3. Go on madeinchina.com and search for ur drug by cas #. If you are very sketched by giving $$ to a company that can be hard to vet, you can also go on like reddit i guess and look for "hrt raw suppliers" with good reputations and see if they also carry what youre looking for but that can be less likely unless its a hormone med. Tbh i usually just trust companies that make a lot of pharmacueticals and that have a digital footprint going back at least five years. Very very common medications and especially things like cialis id be slightly more discerning about sources because theres more profit motive in scamming people over them; running a scam for random pharmacueticals is just...a strange thing to do with a low hit rate.
4. You'll need to actually email a human being to make an order :( confirm the CAS # to make sure ur talking about the right thing. Doing a buying pool with friends can give some insurance in case it ends up being weird
5. Optional IMHO but probably a good move: locate a drug checking service in ur general region. If its hard to find, find your nearest harm reduction group or street medic collective and ask them to shake the phone tree for you. If they're annoying about it find the second nearest. Etc. Ur looking for someplace that has a Mass Spectrometer and will check out a sample for you. Idk why some diy hrt guides tell you to pay for this out of pocket 💁
6. Dosingggg (for oral pills other stuff can get more complicated see note at end): you can get gel caps for cheap on like Amazon or whatever and use a tiny spoon (made with tinfoil) to measure each dose with a milligram scale. It's easier to put a whole pile of powder on the scale and take a little bit off into the scoop and measure by how much the weught goes Down, than it is to try to weigh and then cap each dose. +/-0.5MG is usually an ok tolerance. If ur stuff is dosed by MICROGRAMS look up thr 4theives miso card procedure
6a. I hate doing this so the other thing you can do is look up ur med on pubchem by CAS# and see what its soluble in. Graduated cylinders are cheap and accurate so if its water- or oil- soluble OR ethanol soluble in a reasonable amount (like your normal dose could be dissolved in <5mL of ethanol), you can do oral liquids! Oil solubility you might need to just test at home. Work out an appropriate mg/ML solution (you might need to do some hands-on testing with a small amount of ur powder to see what amount dissolves happily in what amount of solvent), figure out how many doses you want to make at once, mix that much powder and that much liquid together, and dose with an oral syringe. Water solutions you want to keep for no more than 1wk at a time or alternately, the max amount of time you wouldn't be sketched by drinking water left in an unsealed container, bc even tho drug raws & plain water arent the MOST microbe friendly itll grow Stuff eventually. Oral liquids WILL change metabolism, alcohol solutions will change it most, water will change it least. Metabolism is already super duper weird and variable by individual so for a lot of oral rx meds, adding a small variable is not going to drastically change the general variability of the population that that drug has been tested in. However: don't trust internet strangers to know everything about ur situation and do some reading on the pharmacology of ur specific meds and make decisions you think will be good.
7. Keep ur head up and stay thoughtfully engaged with this process. If the reason you take this med has some kind of metric you can test at home, like getting a BP cuff or something, you should be doing that and writing things down. Generally its a good idea to track ur own daily health situation in writing. Apps are bad for privacy, we know this. There are also really interesting consumer health metric items available like little patches that test ur blood sugar over the course of about 2wks.
If ur already financially ok and pay some amount out of pocket for ur rx I think you should strongly consider doing something like this because it is a gamble and if you can better afford to work out the kinks up front AND stop paying that bill every month in the future, congrats, chances are even a fraction of those savings put away for like, a year or less are enough to pay for someone else you know to do it again and snowball into a better situation for everyone.
Finally: compounded medications, like epinephrine injections, are a bit more complicated than all this. You will need to look up the compounding information including preservatives and stuff, which by law have to be publicly available for all medications (this is what's on those box inserts for ur drugs). You'll probably also need to read some compounding pharmacy industry publications and do some other weird research to find a version that seems safe and is achivable in ur situation. This is still a process anyone can do but if you've never done it before, it will be a higher gamble/learning curve.
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