Forty issues in, it’s worth stepping back from any single compound or company to ask a bigger question: what has actually changed in this industry over the stretch of time we’ve been covering it, and what’s exactly the same as it was in our earliest reporting.

What’s Genuinely Different

Third-party testing is more commonly advertised than it was a year ago, even if the rigor behind that advertising still varies enormously — and payment processing has, if anything, gotten harder for sellers, not easier, as processors have grown more consistent about treating this category as high-risk.

“The biggest thing that hasn’t changed in a year: a buyer still has to do most of the verification work themselves.”

— from this newsletter’s own year-in-review discussion

What Hasn’t Moved

The core structural facts we keep returning to — a concentrated overseas manufacturing base feeding many retail brands, an RUO label doing legal work it was never meant to represent to buyers, and a near-total absence of regulatory oversight connecting a seller’s claims to what’s actually in the vial — are functionally unchanged from issue No. 1.

What We’d Tell a New Reader

If you’re new to this newsletter: the single most useful habit we can recommend, repeated across dozens of pieces over a year, is treating every claim — potency, purity, safety, effect — as something to verify against a primary source, not something to take from a product page.