Why Are People Injecting Themselves with Peptides?
About a decade ago, a group of competitive CrossFitters in Charleston, South Carolina, went looking for ways to improve their athletic performance without taking steroids. At the time, members of the fitness community were starting to inject themselves with peptides—short chains of amino acids, sometimes called microproteins, that often act as signalling molecules in the body. Certain peptides were said to enhance strength, energy, endurance, and recovery. They hadn’t been officially approved for use as drugs, however, and many had never been studied in humans. Some of the CrossFitters were patients of a local doctor named Craig Koniver, who had trained in family medicine but went on to offer Botox treatments and skin fillers, as well as I.V. drips that were supposed to slow aging. “People are really enjoying the benefits,” the CrossFitters told Koniver, of peptides. Would he help the group figure out which to inject, in what doses, and how often?
Koniver began ordering peptides from compounding pharmacies, which produce custom medications. He tinkered with various doses, often extrapolating from animal studies, and tried some on himself. He gained a reputation for peptide wizardry. “My name got passed around,” he told me. Rick Rubin, the music producer, introduced Koniver to the neuroscientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman, who invited him onto his hugely popular show in 2024. (“You’re going to get blitzed,” Koniver remembers Huberman saying.) On the podcast, Koniver said that “almost everyone I could think of” can benefit from peptides, and he highlighted an “awesome, supersafe” example called BPC-157. In the month that followed, eight hundred new patients requested appointments. He now sees a total of about a thousand; six thousand more are on a wait list. A membership to his practice can cost fifteen thousand dollars a year, suggesting a revenue in the tens of millions. “I could charge more,” Koniver said. “But I want to sleep well at night.”
In February, I flew to Charleston and met with Koniver in a modern red brick building that houses his clinic. He and his wife, Keli, have a sort of his-and-hers practice: she co-founded a wellness spa next door. Koniver greeted me in his waiting room, which featured a soft-rock soundtrack and brochures for serums and stem cells. His bald head, goatee, and glasses made him look like a friendlier version of Walter White, from “Breaking Bad.”
“Peptides are usually the opening question we get,” Koniver told me, in his office. He described many of his clients as “the well who want to be super well”—celebrities, politicians, models. “We don’t take insurance, obviously.” I spotted a Raiders helmet signed by Howie Long, a defensive end turned Fox Sports analyst, on a bookshelf. On a computer, Koniver showed me an electronic ordering system that looked much like the one I use to treat hospitalized patients. But his system, unlike mine, allows him to request unapproved peptides in bespoke combinations, or “stacks.”
Next, Koniver led me to the clinic’s I.V.-infusion room, where he offered me a poke bowl for lunch. Concoctions were scrawled on a dry-erase board like specials in a diner; one was described as “Dr. Koniver’s blend” of vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. He asked me if I’d like a complimentary drip of methylene blue, a chemical dye that is increasingly marketed for improving longevity and memory. I knew it as a last-resort blood-pressure drug that, at high doses, constricts blood vessels so much that it can cause gangrene. I accepted the poke but declined the drip.
After lunch, a new patient, a handsome middle-aged man I’ll call Toby, eased into a recliner topped with a fluffy pillow. A nurse inserted an I.V. into one arm; Koniver shook his other hand, saying, “Welcome aboard!” Toby and his family had recently been in a car accident, but he’d lost trust in most doctors, he said, after they became “obsessed” with viruses and vaccinations during the pandemic. He was glad that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, was getting the country “on the right track.”
“I’m not a big vaccine guy,” Koniver replied. “A lot of them don’t have the data.”
Toby wasn’t here for a peptide injection, but Koniver advised him to try one on a future visit. “I’ve seen tremendous results,” he said. He also said that one of his I.V. drips, which includes methylene blue, makes his patients “feel like they’ve been plugged into an electrical socket.”
“Love that!” Toby responded.
I was puzzled, perhaps naïvely, that little-studied peptide shots had earned Koniver’s trust, while meticulously studied COVID-19 vaccinations had not. “Anecdotal data means a lot to me,” he said. “Two days after a vaccine, someone has a stroke. Two days later, they’re dead. . . . You see enough of that, it makes an impression.”
In recent years, federal efforts to control peptides have placed Koniver at odds with public-health agencies. In 2023, during Biden’s Presidency, the Food and Drug Administration placed nineteen peptides, including BPC-157, on a “do not compound” list, citing “potential significant safety risks” that included immune reactions, pancreatitis, and accelerated growth of cancerous cells. In response, Koniver began offering a peptide that differed by a single amino acid. “So far, we’re getting very similar results,” he told me.
In 2024, Koniver was sanctioned by South Carolina public-health officials who found, among other things, that he’d failed to maintain his registration with the Drug Enforcement Administration while prescribing controlled substances, and that he’d neglected to check patient vital signs before administering ketamine. Koniver attributed these lapses to charting issues and said that no patients were harmed. “There was never a clinical complaint,” he added. He paid a ten-thousand-dollar fine and agreed not to administer ketamine or testosterone for a year. The state of New York, where he was also allowed to practice, ordered him to surrender his medical license there.
As far as peptides go, Koniver seemed to support America’s public-health agencies coming under new management. “Some of my patients are very high up in the government,” he said. “They’re extremely concerned about what the F.D.A. is doing to peptides.” In the era of Make America Healthy Again, the popularity of peptides has risen. Many compounding pharmacies are experiencing soaring demand; the Times reported that U.S. imports of gray-market peptides and hormones from China roughly doubled last year. The podcaster Joe Rogan has credited BPC-157 with healing a case of elbow tendonitis in two weeks. Beauty influencers who want deeper tans and enhanced libidos are taking Melanotan II, also known as the “Barbie peptide.” Even New York magazine recently published a freelance writer’s account of self-injecting peptides, titled “Life on Peptides Feels Amazing,” which failed to cite any peer-reviewed research or academic scientists. In February, R.F.K., Jr., said, on Rogan’s podcast, that he had taken peptides himself and that, under his leadership, the F.D.A. would stop restricting many of them. Kennedy, who has railed against the agency’s “aggressive suppression” of unproven treatments, has vowed to “end the war.”
The human body produces thousands of peptides. Many are portions of proteins which send messages or regulate systems in the body, often in ways that scientists don’t fully understand. Researchers have known about some peptides for decades, and dozens have been turned into safe and effective drugs. The hormone insulin is a peptide that moves sugar from the bloodstream into cells; GLP-1, or glucagon-like peptide-1, spurs the pancreas to release insulin and slows the passage of food through the gut. (Peptides are usually defined as having about fifty amino acids or fewer; more than that and they’re proteins.) But the science underpinning the current peptide craze dates to the turn of the century, when Pinchas Cohen, a respected pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, started to focus on age-related diseases. For one project, Cohen tried to disrupt a protein associated with insulin resistance and diabetes. By injecting human DNA into yeast cells, he was able to produce several chains of amino acids that clung to his target. Cohen told me that the first two chains were known proteins, but the third was “this ridiculous little thing” made up of only twenty-four amino acids. Strangely, he couldn’t figure out where it had come from. According to the conventional wisdom of the day, the DNA he’d injected shouldn’t have coded for it.
The peptide, humanin, was ultimately traced to a tiny snippet of mitochondrial DNA—part of the ninety-eight per cent of the human genome that had long been dismissed as “junk DNA.” Cohen’s work helped reveal that, in the three-billion-letter book that is our genome, even obscure one-liners can be an important part of the story. Junk DNA, it turned out, wasn’t junk: it contains instructions for numerous peptides and proteins that had never been studied. “The public conception of peptides doesn’t grasp what’s going on from a scientific perspective,” Cohen told me. “This is not a dozen or so things you can buy at the gym. This is a revolution in science. It’s going to start a new era of drug discovery.”
Cohen had little control over how his groundbreaking research would be used, however. After he published a series of animal and cell studies on humanin’s potential benefits—the peptide seemed to curb inflammation, control glucose, and possibly even provide protection against Alzheimer’s—so-called biohackers began ordering it on the gray market. Cohen himself tried to develop it as a drug, but the peptide was so unstable that it broke down within minutes. More concerning, humanin was eventually linked to breast and brain cancers. Nonetheless, it continued to be sold online. Koniver told me that he has taken it. “I have no idea what people are injecting,” Cohen said. “Probably fragments of degraded material.”
Cohen is now the dean of the gerontology school at the University of Southern California, and his lab has identified many more peptides. “The rule in my lab is, if you discover it, you get to name it—but I have veto power,” he told me. “I like Yiddish names.” SHLP stands for “small humanin-like peptide”; SHMOOSE stands for “small human mitochondrial ORF over serine tRNA.” Other discoveries include MENTSH and PUTZ. His team is best known for identifying MOTS-c, which has been called an exercise mimetic: it activates cellular pathways that are usually turned on during exercise. Strikingly, older mice treated with the peptide can run for twice as long as their untreated counterparts.
Cohen deemed MOTS-c promising enough that he founded a company to take it into a Phase I clinical trial—an early step on the road toward F.D.A. approval. The peptide caused skin irritation but otherwise appeared to be safe. Its short half-life, however, required it to be injected several times a day, which limited its appeal as a drug, and the company ran out of funding. MOTS-c is now on the F.D.A.’s do-not-compound list, owing to the potential risk of immune reactions “for certain routes of administration.” Yet it, too, continues to circulate on the gray market. One Redditor said that, since he started taking it, “energy and stamina are through the roof.” Cohen reacts to these trends with dismay. As enthusiastic as he is about the potential of peptides, he told me, “people should not be taking them until they’re fully tested. The history of shortcuts is not a happy one.”
The evidence in favor of many other unapproved peptides is even sparser. BPC-157, which is short for Body Protection Compound 157, was discovered in human gastric juice in a lab led by Predrag Sikiric, a Croatian scientist. (It appears to be a fragment of a larger gastric protein, but no one has traced it to a human gene; Cohen thinks it’s probably a product of bacteria that live in the gut.) Studies have touted a staggering variety of benefits in cells and animals; it reportedly heals ulcers, regenerates nerves, aids muscle and tendon repair, counters neurodegenerative diseases, and protects organs from injuries. But most of this research is co-authored by Sikiric, who holds several patents related to BPC-157, and some experts have accused him of cherry-picking evidence. “Science advances through critical verification rather than by repeatedly affirming findings within the same research group,” a team of scientists in Poland wrote in response to Sikiric’s BPC157 claims. In the usual course of things, a promising drug candidate would be ushered into human trials. Yet, in the three-plus decades since BPC-157 was discovered, no controlled human trial of the peptide has ever been published. In the nineties, Sikiric licensed the compound to a Croatian company called Pliva, which sought a treatment for ulcerative colitis; the results were never released. In 2006, the research-and-development arm of Pliva was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline, which has ample resources for clinical trials, but the company has not commercialized the peptide. According to Sara Talpos of the science magazine Undark, a company partly owned by Sikiric sponsored a 2015 trial, at a hospital in Tijuana, that tested the safety of an oral version of BPC-157. The results still haven’t been published. Sikiric assured me that the trial had been “absolutely successful” and that the data would be available “very soon,” but he declined to let me see it.
Independent scientists have said that BPC-157 appears promising in lab studies—but with major caveats. The peptide seems to stimulate the production of nitric oxide, which enhances blood flow and reduces certain forms of inflammation, but it also generates free radicals that damage DNA and proteins. In addition, the peptide seems to promote angiogenesis, the development of new blood vessels, possibly via a signalling molecule expressed in many human cancers. “You don’t want to just willy-nilly stimulate angiogenesis,” Paul Knoepfler, a biologist at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, told me. (Sikiric argues that it does these things in a balanced way; he has written that, when it comes to nitric oxide and angiogenesis, “all criticisms of BPC 157 should be dismissed.”)
At the inaugural MAHA summit, last year, a compounding-pharmacy executive told the audience that his grandmother was taking BPC-157, and that this was “just one example of these products that can change people’s lives.” Andrew Huberman said on a podcast that two shots had healed a back injury, even as he warned listeners about the peptide’s potential risks. In online forums, people have credited the peptide with boosting energy and curbing pain; they have also reported strange rashes, increased fatigue, depressed moods, and vision problems. It’s possible that BPC-157 is useful, and that the potential gains are worth the potential pains. But, absent human trials, it’s next to impossible to know what it does in the body. Some health consequences might not become apparent for years—and anecdotal evidence is rife with confounding factors. If a peptide stack is popular among weight lifters, who’s to say which peptide did what? Maybe the perceived benefits are actually attributable to dead lifts, or protein shakes, or a good night’s sleep. Knoepfler warned of placebo effects. When people think a medicine is pricey, they frequently report benefits, even when it’s actually an inert substance. “You pay all this money,” Knoepfler said. “You get a set of vials. You inject yourself. It hurts. You really want this to work.”
In some cases, peptides have been clearly linked to harms. Last year, at the Revolution Against Aging and Death Festival, in Las Vegas, two women received peptide injections at a conference booth; shortly thereafter, they developed elevated heart rates, swollen tongues, and trouble breathing. By the time they reached the hospital, one of them had lost control of her neck muscles, and the other had been intubated. Both were ultimately connected to ventilators. (The peptides involved have not been disclosed.) The doctor who administered the injections defended himself by citing an A.I.-generated report, telling ProPublica that it “basically says that it is impossible it was the peptides.” When I asked Sikiric whether people should be using peptides like BPC-157, given the lack of data in humans, he said, “As a medical doctor, I should reply negatively. As a human person, I’m not sure. You have to do what’s right for you.” Regulatory agencies have a role to play, he said, but “the final judgment of whether something works belongs to the people, not the F.D.A.”
Let’s say you want to make money on health-related products without feeling the squeeze of F.D.A. regulations. You have two main options, Peter Lurie, a former F.D.A. official who now leads the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told me. The first is to adopt a clever marketing strategy. If your company were to claim that its product treats COVID, it would be selling a drug. “Boom! The F.D.A. can come down on you,” Lurie said. But, if the company describes its product as an immunity booster, the agency’s authority is less clear. You usually don’t need to conduct clinical trials to sell dietary supplements, sometimes referred to as “nutraceuticals.”
A second loophole involves compounding pharmacies, which are largely regulated by state pharmacy boards. Sam An, a pharmacist at a compounding pharmacy until 2021, told me that his workplace employed about twenty people—pharmacists, technicians, cashiers, couriers—in what resembled a chemistry laboratory. At first, he said, “I felt like I was making a difference.” He might create a liquid drug for someone who couldn’t swallow pills or a fertility drug tailored to a woman’s hormone levels. With time, though, An grew disillusioned. For many such pharmacies, he said, “it seemed like the focus became how to make a quick buck.” During the pandemic, compounders charged exorbitant prices for ivermectin, even after the drug proved ineffective against COVID-19. Many started profiting from GLP-1 drugs during widespread shortages. “They’ll add a vitamin and say, ‘Look, we’ve customized it for you,’ with a wink and a nod,” An said. “The barriers to doing these things are laughable.” He considers the peptide craze even more troubling. “They’re taking advantage of a population that’s looking for a solution and charging them lots of money for something with no proven benefit that could potentially cause harm,” he continued. “How is that O.K.?”
The F.D.A. began taking a more assertive approach in 2012, when steroids from a Massachusetts compounding pharmacy led to hundreds of cases of meningitis and more than sixty deaths. “The agency is well aware that there’s plenty of activity out there that is likely illegal,” Lurie told me. But the F.D.A., like the I.R.S., has the resources to go after only a fraction of serious violations. “By the time you put BPC-157 on the list, there’s probably a BPC-158,” Lurie said. (“There has not been a ‘war on peptides,’ ” he added. “There has been a war on unapproved products making improper claims.”) Trump’s F.D.A., which reports to Kennedy, is also unlikely to aggressively enforce restrictions on peptides. Neither H.H.S. nor the F.D.A. responded to requests for interviews with Kennedy or Marty Makary, the F.D.A. commissioner. A request to speak with a top F.D.A. compliance official was met with a boilerplate statement that said, in part, “Americans deserve to know the quality of the products they are buying and deserve drugs that have been proven to be safe and effective.”
Fans of peptides are increasingly cutting out the middleman and ordering directly from gray-market suppliers. Last year, a twentysomething man I’ll call Michael, who regularly lifts weights and practices jiujitsu, began struggling with fatigue and weight gain after starting a new job and recovering from a bad bout of COVID. Friends of his had taken peptides—he remembers one of them telling him, “Bro, you should really try them out”—but Michael was initially wary. He spent weeks reviewing animal studies and reading testimonials on various online forums. He ultimately decided to order some retatrutide—an experimental GLP-1 drug that Eli Lilly has advanced to Phase III clinical trials—from a company that sells chemicals for research. He received a container of powder, mixed it with water, and injected it into his stomach. He felt so nervous that he almost passed out. But he soon lost weight, and that made him curious about what other peptides could do.
Michael had a nagging foot injury, possibly related to jiujitsu, so he ordered a stack of supposedly healing peptides known as the KLOW blend, which includes KPV, GHK-Cu, TB-500, and BPC-157. “You pretty much use the general consensus of what people have taken before you,” Michael told me. (Luke Turnock, a sociologist at the University of Lincoln, in England, has described this phenomenon as “folk pharmacology.”) Michael’s foot pain improved, but, strangely, he also noticed that his skin was changing color; KPV derives from a hormone that contributes to skin pigmentation. Next, Michael ordered a peptide called Semax, which, in Russian, is short for “seven amino acids.” In parts of Eastern Europe, Semax is prescribed for brain trauma and other neurological conditions. “People use it kind of like an Adderall,” Michael told me. Although he found himself procrastinating less, he started to feel “like a pincushion,” he said. He decided to save it for “when I felt like I really needed it.”
Finally, Michael began taking MOTS-c. He said to himself, “O.K., if my mitochondria got fucked up in some way from COVID, hopefully this fixes the system.” The peptide seemed to give him more energy, but he noticed that he was sweating a lot. When I asked Michael if he felt uncomfortable putting untested products into his body, he, too, invoked COVID shots, calling them “a vaccine that also had no long-term studies.” “So it’s, like, Pick your poison,” he said. If the health-care system fails to meet the needs of patients, people will look for their own solutions. “This stuff is going to get a lot more popular,” he told me.
I decided to procure some peptides of my own. Michael recommended a company called SwissChems. “It’s legit,” he said, not one of those “trust-me-bro situations.” A quick search told me that, in 2024, the F.D.A. sent the company a warning letter that said, in part, “Despite statements . . . marketing your products as ‘research chemicals only,’ evidence obtained from your website establishes that your products are intended to be drugs for human use.” I spent a hundred and seven dollars on some BPC-157, CJC1295, and TB-500. At checkout, thirty capsules of demoxytocin—a synthetic hormone that doctors use to induce labor and to treat postpartum bleeding—were added to my cart for free, as though they were lotion samples from Kiehl’s.
I ordered three hundred dollars of MOTS-c from the Ultimate Human, a website run by Gary Brecka, a prominent biohacker who has hosted R.F.K., Jr., on his podcast. In my cart, a photograph showed a futuristic blue vial labelled with the words “Research use only,” yet an order of bacteriostatic water and syringes was automatically included, and I was asked to fill out a questionnaire and meet with a medical provider. A video chat with someone named Cynthia appeared on the screen. “You did great with your answers, so I’ll approve it,” she told me. The consultation lasted less than thirty seconds.
Finally, I searched for peptides on TikTok. On a page called Peptide Nexus, which had more than ten thousand followers, I watched animated vials of personified peptides that looked like the emotion avatars in the movie “Inside Out.” “Yo, I’m TB-500!” a smirking red vial declared, a fire raging in the background. “I’m the recovery peptide people call Wolverine mode.” A vial labelled PT-141, which is marketed as a treatment for low libido, was depicted in a tuxedo, shooting a Cupid’s arrow. “I target desire pathways,” it said. “People call me the date-night peptide.” When I submitted an inquiry on WhatsApp, the vender responded with a guarantee of “99% purity.” I made a few selections from a PDF menu. Most payment platforms will flag peptide sales, the vender said, and sent me a video explaining how to pay in cryptocurrency. My bank initially flagged the transaction as concerning; I had to give my assurance that I really did want to convert a hundred and eighty-five dollars into bitcoin.
The idea of medical freedom—that we should be allowed to decide what to do about our own health—has long had a special status in the United States. “A significant portion of Americans have embraced freedom of therapeutic choice as a constitutional value for most of the country’s history,” Lewis Grossman, a medical historian, writes in his book “Choose Your Medicine.” Benjamin Rush, a Founding Father and a physician, criticized the medical establishment for being closed-minded about treatments recommended by non-physicians. “Many of our most useful remedies have been discovered by quacks,” he argued. In the late nineteenth century, the psychologist and philosopher William James wrote, “If the word ‘sacred’ can be applied to any personal right, surely the right to treat one’s own body as one chooses may claim this title.” A few years later, the Postmaster General stopped delivering mail to the American School of Magnetic Healing, arguing that the organization was committing medical fraud. The school sued, contending that its methods were legitimate, and the Supreme Court ultimately ruled in its favor. “There is no exact standard of absolute truth by which to prove the assertion false and a fraud,” the majority opinion said.
In the twentieth century, however, scandals involving unregulated medical products helped swing the balance of power toward regulation. In the thirties, elixir sulfanilamide, an antibiotic mixed into a toxic solvent, gave patients intense pain, kidney failure, and neurological problems. After more than a hundred people, including many children, died across fifteen states, Congress passed the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which authorized the F.D.A. to evaluate a medical product’s safety before it could be sold. The agency’s modern-day role was defined in 1962, after thalidomide caused birth defects in thousands of babies around the world. The Act was amended to include a much higher standard: drugmakers now needed to conduct controlled trials in order to demonstrate that their products were effective. The gap between the two standards was immense. Around two-thirds of drugs that met the 1938 safety requirement failed the 1962 efficacy bar.
It is becoming possible to imagine a future in which American regulators lose their grip on the safety and the efficacy of drugs. The venture capitalist Jim O’Neill, Trump’s former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the current nominee to lead the National Science Foundation, has said that, as soon as drugs are proved to be safe, Americans should be able to “start using them at their own risk. . . . Let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized.” Most states have enacted so-called right-to-try laws, which enable patients with life-threatening diagnoses to receive treatments that have completed Phase I safety testing. (More than ninety per cent of such treatments will not be F.D.A.-approved.) In recent years, Montana state laws have gone even further, granting all patients access to an even wider array of experimental treatments. The state may become a hub for medical tourism. Clinicians are shielded from many kinds of disciplinary action, and they can practice for up to twenty-one days a year without holding a Montana medical license.
The case for more medical freedom rests on laudable principles. We don’t usually want the government deciding what we can and can’t do with our bodies. And, clearly, there are shortcomings to the current drug-approval process. Pharmaceutical companies must typically invest many years and hundreds of millions of dollars to win approval for a drug; partly for this reason, some promising treatments are never approved, and many arrive too late for people who urgently need them. The economist Alex Tabarrok has written that when an approved drug harms people there are front-page stories, but “when the FDA fails to approve a good drug . . . the bodies are buried in an invisible graveyard.” On the other hand, if we’re making medical decisions in an information vacuum, are we really choosing freely? “The through line of history is that people will try to sell anything with all sorts of fantastical claims,” Joshua Sharfstein, a health-policy professor at Johns Hopkins and a former principal deputy commissioner of the F.D.A., told me. “If you’re for patient choice, you should be for a system that requires companies to show that their product does what they say it does.”
My first two peptide orders arrived quickly. The third, from Peptide Nexus, did not. A company that claimed to be handling the shipping process contacted me, saying that it wouldn’t send the peptides unless I paid a “refundable insurance fee”—another eighty-three dollars’ worth of bitcoin. The vender didn’t let me cancel my order, so I warily paid the fee. Two weeks later, neither the seller nor the shipper was responding to my messages, and I still had not received my order.
Reader, I did not inject myself with the peptides. Instead, I delivered them to Finnrick Analytics, a company in Austin, Texas, that tests powdered peptides for purity, potency, contaminants, and toxins. Results are posted on the company’s website, which gets more than a million hits a month. In the company’s telling, it is providing a public service—creating transparency and accountability where F.D.A. enforcement has fallen short or been stymied. “We test peptides to make sovereign health safer,” its website says. If you’re going to use, use safely. At the same time, insofar as the company promotes a kind of self-regulation within the peptide world, it also enhances the industry’s legitimacy. If a drug seems safer to take, maybe give it a try.
Finnrick’s office is compact and sits on the second floor of a co-working space. On a filing cabinet, a fierce-looking figurine of Goku, the protagonist of the “Dragon Ball” manga franchise, appeared to be shooting a bottle of semaglutide out of his hands. On a table were scores of vials in trays; beneath it was a box stuffed with incoming packages. Jake Anderson, a recent college graduate, opens most of the packages, takes a photograph of the vials inside, and replaces the labels. “That’s so the lab doesn’t know where it’s coming from,” he said.
“We’ve been getting packages like mad men,” Caanan Towns, the company’s operations manager and a former college wrestler, said. He joined the company after using peptides to treat a hip injury. In the past year, the number of packages that Finnrick receives has increased more than fivefold, and since December it has more than doubled. “The crazy part is that we’ve put out zero marketing,” Towns added. “But peptides are like a hobby: people don’t just take peptides, they want to talk about them with their friends.”
Towns and I drove my peptide samples to a squat gray building about ten minutes away. Krause Analytical, a family-owned laboratory that Finnrick hires for much of its testing, also works with the F.D.A. to test food and pesticides that cross the Mexican border. I spotted a forklift and some sacks of corn flour inside. Mark Krause, the lab’s jovial, broad-shouldered director, walked me past dishwasher-size chromatography and mass-spectrometry machines. “Sometimes you don’t need all this fancy stuff to know something’s not right,” he told me. He held a vial of pale-blue powder in one hand and a vial of white powder in the other. “GHK-Copper should be blue,” he said. “If they send you something white, I don’t know what it is, but it ain’t GHK-Copper.”
Krause, who seemed peptide-skeptical, estimated that about ten per cent of the peptides Finnrick sends him have serious anomalies of purity, dosage, or sterility. Some vials contain endotoxins—fragments of bacterial cell walls—suggesting poor manufacturing practices and a compromised supply chain. “But, hey, these are ‘research chemicals,’ right?” he said, winking. “Nobody’s injecting them into their bodies!” On a computer, Krause pulled up a chromatography analysis, which separates mixtures into individual components. The graph showed a flat line with a single sharp spike in the middle. “That’s pure,” Krause said, pointing to the spike. “Just one thing.” Next, he showed me a graph that looked like a jagged roller coaster. “All sorts of stuff in this one,” he said. “Or whatever was originally in there has degraded.” A third graph had two spikes—one for a known peptide called ipamorelin and another for something mysterious a few inches away. “We don’t know what that is,” Krause said.
About a week after my visit, Krause shared his analysis of the peptides I’d given him. According to his testing, my order of MOTS-c, from the Ultimate Human, was ninety-eight per cent pure and contained eighty-seven per cent of the dose on its label. (Of course, this didn’t mean that the peptide itself was safe or effective.) All the peptides I’d ordered from SwissChems had significant issues. The vial of BPC-157 contained lead, the vial of TB-500 contained endotoxins, and the vial of CJC-1295 contained less than forty-two per cent of the advertised dose.
Many of our era’s health trends have something in common: they strive not only to mitigate disease, as mainstream medicine has always been expected to do, but also to optimize health, an aim that many doctors shy away from. I’m not convinced I can offer unproven treatments and still uphold my oath to do no harm. And, even if I knew how to help people attain “peak performance” in their fitness, their careers, or their sex lives, I’m not sure that’s my job. If traditional doctors don’t promise their patients these things, however, others surely will. Timothy Caulfield, a law professor at the University of Alberta, said that health influencers increasingly engage in “scienceploitation”: they generate hype by making speculative claims that extrapolate wildly from limited research. “You take a genuinely exciting area of science and overstate and misrepresent it to sell bunk,” Caulfield said. In his view, Wellness 1.0—which focussed on alternative ways of knowing and on spirituality—has been replaced by Wellness 2.0, which often co-opts the language of science. “It’s almost too easy with peptides,” Caulfield told me. “Even just the word ‘peptides’ sounds science-y and legit.”
On a rainy day this spring, I entered a large hotel in midtown Manhattan that was hosting the Integrative Health Symposium, an annual conference for “forward-thinking practitioners.” I walked through a buzzing exhibit hall, passing booths for “immunity-boosting” mushrooms and protein bars. For some reason, an online-prescribing company was raffling off a Louis Vuitton bag. I approached the booth of a compounding pharmacy and inquired about the peptide business. “The Feds don’t know what to do,” a representative told me. “It’s like Prohibition.”
I was on my way to meet Edwin Lee, an Orlando-based endocrinologist who has worked to bolster the scientific credibility of unapproved peptides. Before I could locate him, a fit middle-aged man, who turned out to be a former car salesman, stopped me. “Want more energy and less pain?” he asked. He instructed me to stand on what looked like a futuristic skateboard—a “vibration plate” that purported to decrease stress, build muscle, increase circulation, and even improve sex. The board began to shake and flash purple; my whole body jiggled. “Get on this for ten minutes a day,” he said. “It’s the equivalent of being on an elliptical for an hour.” He was willing to sell me the board for half off a sticker price of thirty-six hundred dollars.
I politely excused myself and found Lee in the hotel lounge. He was tall, with short salt-and-pepper hair, thin-rimmed glasses, and a happy-warrior disposition. Lee is known for having co-founded the Clinical Peptides Society, which offers a certification for people who want to administer peptides. He also started a petition called Save Peptides, which has collected nearly ten thousand signatures in an effort to loosen government restrictions. “A lot of conventional doctors think this is all bullshit,” he told me, smiling. “They think I’ve gone to the dark side. We agree to disagree, because I still want to go hiking with them.”
A few years ago, Lee’s son, a high-school cross-country runner, developed a sharp pain down his leg. “Daddy can inject you with peptides,” Lee’s wife told him. The boy replied, “He’s not fucking injecting me!” Then Lee showed him some photographs that Sikiric, the Croatian peptide researcher, had published. They depicted a rat’s bloody Achilles tendon, which Sikiric’s team had cut into, healing after BPC-157 injections. Lee’s son ultimately acquiesced—“He just needed to see the evidence,” Lee said—and two weeks later he was running again. Lee now keeps peptides for his family in the butter compartment of his fridge.
While we spoke, one of Lee’s patients, a health-care investor and a former soccer player, wandered into the lounge. One morning in 2024, the man had awoken with searing knee pain that turned out to be a meniscus tear. Several doctors had recommended that he get surgery. Then, at last year’s conference, he met Lee. “This random dude says he can fix you,” the man said. “Why do you trust him? Intuition. There’s something about him. I’ve never seen a doctor be that confident.” The man flew to Orlando, where Lee injected him with BPC-157. Within days, his knee pain improved.
“I don’t care how many publications someone has,” the man said, hopping on one leg for emphasis. “I don’t want studies. I want results.”
“Not everyone gets better that fast,” Lee said, beaming.
Later, Lee and I both attended a talk on peptides by Steven A. R. Murphy, a Connecticut concierge doctor whose website advertises “telemedicine consultation and prescription for Rapamycin, Peptides and other medicines.” The room was so packed that some people were gathered outside the door. The title slide had a photo of a Ken doll with a syringe pointed at its forehead.
“Which ones have you tried?” a young man standing next to me asked.
“None,” I said, feeling like a teetotaller in a frat house. He looked perplexed.
Murphy asked how many audience members had prescribed peptides, and about half raised their hands. He reviewed some peptides that had been approved for specific indications—and thus could safely be prescribed to patients for other conditions—before turning his attention to gray-market peptides. Ipamorelin, for example, was “one of the cleanest” growth-hormone-releasing peptides. It could be given orally or—“illegally,” a slide read—as a subcutaneous injection. Murphy advised us to stick to off-label use of approved peptides, instead of prescribing their unapproved cousins. Otherwise, we might get a “nasty letter” from the F.D.A., or even lose our medical licenses.
At the end of the talk, Lee stood to address the room. “We really need to save peptides!” he said. He exhorted the group to generate data on peptides, noting that he’d personally published three papers about BPC-157. “But I’m only one person,” he said. (Lee’s papers were not randomized and did not use control groups; the largest included sixteen patients and was published in a little-known journal.) On his way out, Lee handed me a copy of a book he’d written. Inside, he’d signed his name, along with a message: “Enjoy life with peptides.” ♦