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\n Photo: \u00a9 Jill Greenberg, Courtesy Clamp Gallery\n <\/p>\n
This article was featured in New York\u2019s One Great Story<\/a> newsletter.\u00a0Sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n On a frigid December afternoon, I took an elevator up to the sixth floor of a midtown office building on a busy stretch of Eighth Avenue and walked into the lobby of Atlas Men\u2019s Health. The clinic\u2019s motto: DOMINATE THE DAY. Its website features a variety of AI-generated images of smiling women in athleisure and shirtless men, including one with bulging biceps holding an oversize photorealistic eggplant advertising the \u201cPriapus Shot,\u201d a penis injection for erectile dysfunction. The lobby had decorative touches you might call Temu neoclassical: a plastic olive tree, replica Greco-Roman busts, a Spartan helmet. The only other person in the room was the secretary, talking on the phone behind a large marble desk. \u201cSo your son has a bodybuilding competition coming up?\u201d she said. \u201cWe can certainly help with that.\u201d She rattled off names of compounds, long strings of letters and numbers; my ears perked up. These were what I\u2019d come looking for: peptides.<\/p>\n I consider myself a complete idiot when it comes to health and wellness. I\u2019ve never tried acupuncture, creatine, cupping, lion\u2019s mane, Chinese herbal medicine, a neti pot, or nootropics. But over the past year, my rigid lack of interest in what other people are doing to their bodies started to crumble. The results were too noticeable. Friends and acquaintances were showing up at parties newly tan, ripped, skinny, with good skin. \u201cI have so much energy! I don\u2019t even drink coffee anymore,\u201d they would say. \u201cI fixed my stomach\/sleep\/ligament issues!\u201d This wasn\u2019t some big secret: They were injecting peptides and would happily tell you about their \u201cstacks\u201d and offer to connect you with their \u201cplug.\u201d I wanted in.<\/p>\n After a few minutes in the lobby at Atlas, the secretary led me into another room for my consultation with Mandeep Singh, a registered nurse at the clinic. He asked what my goals were. Weight loss? Muscle gain? Enhanced sexual performance? \u201cUh, I guess I get a little sleepy and distracted in the afternoon,\u201d I said. Singh suggested a compound called NAD+. (Technically not a peptide but a coenzyme, it\u2019s often sold alongside peptides at clinics like Atlas.) NAD+ \u201ccranks up that electricity\u201d that cells produce, Singh said. \u201cPositive effects: bringing clarity, more energy, just a feeling of wellness, stamina.\u201d Long term, there could be anti-aging benefits: \u201cEvery cell in your body is a little bit younger and healthier. We\u2019re not going to turn you into Benjamin Button, but you\u2019re just healthier overall.\u201d He also suggested a peptide called tesamorelin, known for \u201cturning up the volume on your natural production of growth hormone,\u201d which could help me build lean-muscle mass. Unlike many peptides, tesamorelin is actually approved by the FDA, though only for helping HIV patients reduce abdominal fat.<\/p>\n I decided to stick with just the NAD+, which would require a twice-weekly shot, rather than the daily jab needed for tesamorelin. I paid $250 for a six-week supply, which showed up on my doorstep a few days later, shipped from a compounding pharmacy in Houston. I returned to the clinic for a lesson in at-home injection. The cheerful secretary \u2014 her AirPods still in \u2014 showed me how to reconstitute the dry powder in the vial with bacteriostatic water, measure out a dose, and inject myself in the soft tissue under my arm. I pushed the plunger down, and 100 milligrams of NAD+ surged into my body. (New York\u2019s lawyers want me to be clear: I am not advocating for you to try this, and, certainly, I am not a doctor.) Half an hour later, on my couch at home, I felt a warm glow spread through my limbs, sort of like a milder version of the rush produced by Adderall. I pulled out my laptop and started writing some emails.<\/p>\n Peptides are the building blocks of proteins, consisting of between two and 100 amino acids linked together. They occur naturally in the body and affect the endocrine system, helping to regulate metabolism, mood, and energy. Insulin is a peptide; it was the first to be reproduced in a lab, in 1921. Since then, more than 80 others have hit the market, used to treat conditions including cancer, osteoporosis, multiple sclerosis, HIV, and chronic pain. Other compounds, including several of those now growing in popularity, were synthesized in the 1980s by Soviet scientists who used them to treat both Olympic athletes and Chernobyl survivors.<\/p>\n Peptides are the body\u2019s messengers: They can tell skin cells to make more collagen, spur muscle growth after exercise, or affect immune activity. \u201cThere are some conditions where they work very well,\u201d said Dr. Neil Paulvin, a physician who prescribes peptide therapies at his functional-medicine practice in Manhattan. \u201cThese include inflammation, gut health. And there are some conditions where they may provide small or no improvement.\u201d<\/p>\n The global peptide-therapeutics market has swelled to over $50 billion in annual sales and is projected to nearly double again in roughly the next decade. The boom can largely be traced to the popularization of weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy; the P in GLP-1 stands for peptide. Their success helped normalize the idea of regular self-injection at home while opening the door \u2014 psychologically and commercially \u2014 for a wave of other compounds promising miraculous benefits. There are peptides marketed for just about every wellness and cosmetic outcome you might imagine. BPC-157, used for reducing inflammation and healing injuries, is also popular (Joe Rogan is a fan); so is GHK-Cu for anti-aging skin care. There are dozens more, sold for everything from quicker tanning (melanotan-II) to increased libido (PT-141).<\/p>\n Discord chat rooms buzz with users asking for advice on stacking and dosing protocols. On Reddit, where r\/peptides has almost 140,000 members, people post pictures of their transformations. \u201cThe difference 4 months of peptides can make,\u201d wrote one woman, captioning before-and-after images of her newly glowing skin and defined jawline. \u201cMy stack is TIRZ, GHKCU, KPV, NAD+, 5AMINO 1MQ, and LIPO C!\u201d<\/p>\n Even before GLP-1 agonists brought peptides to the masses, off-label use of the compounds was common among bodybuilders, who have long experimented with exotic substances and documented the results. Adam Katz, 25, is a fitness influencer who goes by Coach Katz on social media. He has been bodybuilding since he was 14. In the past year, he said, many people in the fitness community began using Retatrutide, a weight-loss drug in development by Eli Lilly. It has shown immense promise in clinical trials: Patients lost on average around 50 percent more weight than those on the first generation of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic. Yet to be approved by the FDA, it\u2019s currently being synthesized illegally and sold through a sprawling gray market.<\/p>\n For the four months leading up to a bodybuilding show, Katz successfully used it to cut weight. This past May, he posted a video recommending Retatrutide for anyone trying to get \u201cshredded for summer.\u201d Now, he said, \u201cyou\u2019ll see soccer moms and random people that don\u2019t even go to the gym using Retatrutide.\u201d<\/p>\n Recently, I spoke with a 34-year-old woman I\u2019ll call Rachel, who was turned on to peptides after visiting L.A. and seeing a group of her friends who all looked amazing. \u201cI was like, \u2018What\u2019s going on? Why do you guys all look so jacked and your skin is really tight and nice? You guys party constantly.\u2019\u2009\u201d Their response: \u201cOh, we\u2019re all on peptides.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond being intrigued by the cosmetic benefits, Rachel was looking for help with the chronic knee pain she had spent a decade battling; the only thing that ever seemed to work was expensive, time-consuming acupuncture. Within weeks after she started using the peptides TB-500 and BPC-157, both known for promoting tissue repair and reducing inflammation, her knee was pain free. She started taking NAD+ and soon felt energetic and clear of the brain fog that had plagued her since a bout of COVID. It also made her skin bright and prevented hangovers.<\/p>\n \n Influencers across TikTok are selling peptides for every cosmetic and wellness concern\u2014from weight loss to glowy skin, muscle gain, sexual performance, and more. Clockwise from top left: Photo: autisticclips8\/TikTok; alexaaronn\/TikTok; smoneyyz\/TikTok; bricesmithhh\/TikTok.\n <\/p>\n \n Influencers across TikTok are selling peptides for every cosmetic and wellness concern\u2014from weight loss to glowy skin, muscle gain, sexual performance… more Many peptides are produced either by compounding pharmacies in the U.S. or by an ever-growing number of factories in China. The most serious users tend to get peptides from the latter for both a wider selection of products and cheaper prices.<\/p>\n John Ramsay has been sourcing doses from a factory called Xingruida Trade Co. for the past year. His path into peptides was fairly typical: After a stint in the military left him with lingering injuries, he went to a men\u2019s clinic in Colorado for testosterone-replacement therapy; staff there suggested he try peptides for weight loss, but the $400-a-month price was out of reach. A job at a kratom company in Salt Lake City introduced him to a more DIY route: His \u201cbiohacker forward\u201d boss hired a nurse to administer IV drips, and one day the nurse suggested adding NAD+. Ramsay tried it and woke up feeling unusually good \u2014 \u201cI\u2019m 47, so the days of feeling great get a little bit more limited,\u201d he said \u2014 and soon started asking what else peptides might do. The nurse steered him to tirzepatide, the FDA-regulated GLP-1 marketed as Zepbound, which he got through a pharmacy.<\/p>\n This worked well but cost $500 a month. The nurse told him he could get the same drug for less from Paramount Peptides, one of many U.S. outfits that get around the FDA by saying their products are \u201cfor research only,\u201d a loophole available as long as nothing is explicitly sold for human use. Ramsay began ordering from the site\u2019s long menu. Retatrutide helped him shed more than 70 pounds in a year, and he added tesamorelin to burn visceral fat as well as a \u201cWolverine\u201d blend of BPC-157 and TB-500 \u2014 touted for regrowing tissue \u2014 which he credits for faster surgery recovery. His health, he said, shifted dramatically: no more sleep apnea, no more blood-pressure meds, a healthier liver. The costs, however, were adding up. \u201cFirst couple months out of the gate, I got really hyperfocused on it so I spent about a couple grand,\u201d he said. \u201cMy wife\u2019s like, \u2018Babe, what are we doing? We got a freezer full of these fucking peptides all the time.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n When TikTok and other platforms began feeding him ads for Chinese peptide factories, his deal-hunter instincts kicked in. He reached out to a seller on WhatsApp named Jasmine, and by this past March he was ordering directly from China. He bought tirzepatide and NAD+, sent samples to a third-party tester, and, after the results came back as advertised, \u201cbuilt a relationship with this peptide company.\u201d The savings are enormous: A vial of tirzepatide that once cost him $480 through regulated channels can be had for around $20 from Chinese warehouses. American vendors and clinics are taking advantage of the price disparity. \u201cHormone-therapy clinics, longevity clinics, IV clinics, men\u2019s clinics, fertility clinics, all of them \u2014 this is their gold-mine time,\u201d Ramsay said. He has become a peptides guru to people he knows around Salt Lake and to the 190 or so who\u2019ve joined his Discord channel. There, they can talk to his supplier; when they buy from her, John gets discounts on his peptides.<\/p>\n The Chinese companies themselves are happy to sell directly to consumers. My Instagram algorithm is flooded with their advertisements showing gleaming factories with thousands of peptide vials rolling off assembly lines. One ad, from a company called \u201cPeptides fatory sale [sic],\u201d promised, \u201cWhen you find a reliable supplier, you wilt get a refrigerator full of peptides.\u201d It included a link to chat on WhatsApp. I clicked on it and was soon texting with Yara, whose profile picture was an AI-generated image of a beautiful woman standing in a snowy cityscape. \u201cHey \ud83d\udc4b welcome! You\u2019ve just connected with TeYi Company \u2014 direct factory peptide supply. \u26a1Demand is crazy right now.\u26a1\u201d<\/p>\n I responded saying I was an American vendor interested in purchasing large amounts of Retatrutide to resell stateside. How much could TeYi sell me? \u201cWe are a factory,\u201d Yara wrote. \u201cYou can have as many as you want.\u201d She attached videos showing large industrial freezers packed full of vials at the company\u2019s Guangdong headquarters. She would happily sell me 10,000 20-milligram vials a month at $13.50 a pop. \u201cWe are airlifted. Don\u2019t worry about customs,\u201d Yara wrote. \u201cWe will give you a refund if you are detained.\u201d The same quantity of Retatrutide from U.S.-based retailers typically costs anywhere from $150 to $400 per vial.<\/p>\n I started replying to every gray-market ad I got served, asking the dealers on WhatsApp \u2014 exclusively female avatars with pictures that seemed AI-generated \u2014 how much volume they could supply. A hundred thousand vials a month? \u201cNo problem, dear friend,\u201d wrote Sophia, the representative from Huai\u2019an Dinglin Trading. \u201cWe have our own factory. How long do you need to deliver?\u201d<\/p>\n Judi, from Nanba Biotechnology Co., offered me a million vials a month at $10 each. I asked if her company had other customers in America buying that kind of volume. \u201cYes, my colleagues have them,\u201d she wrote back. \u201cBut you\u2019re the first person I\u2019ve met who does. \u26a1\u263a\ufe0f\u201d<\/p>\n The saleswomen were persistent. After I didn\u2019t respond to one for a week, she followed up: \u201cHey friend. Peptide consultant Annie wishes you a happy life. Do you have any plans to order peptide medications in the new year?\u201d<\/p>\n I must admit I have found myself enjoying my biweekly injection ritual: preparing the needle, sterilizing my skin with alcohol, the mild euphoria as the NAD+ courses through my bloodstream, the sense of alertness it provides without a comedown. I also felt the thrill of being an early adopter. In the past decade, we\u2019ve all seen people willing to bet big on objectively stupid investments like dogecoin and $GME get rewarded for insane risk tolerance. For many young people, the feeling seems to be that they may be foolish not to make high-leverage bets with another extremely volatile asset: their own bodies.<\/p>\n Since I began searching for peptides on social media, my algorithm has been serving up an endless parade of comically jacked men and toned, tan women enthusiastically talking into their phones about better living through retail pharmacology. The surreality of these videos cannot be overstated. A young man with a low taper fade injects blue fluid into his stomach to a soundtrack of \u201cBetter Off Alone.\u201d A young woman injects her boyfriend\u2019s stomach while he stares at his phone, captioning the video \u201cnursing school gf + peptide bf\u2009\ud83e\udef6\u2728.\u201d Miami influencers dance at a nightclub while bottle girls hoist a glowing sign that reads WHAT PEPTIDES YOU ON? The clip is captioned, \u201chow life feels when we have random chinese research chemicals in our bloodstreams.\u201d Typically, people making videos about peptides have affiliate links for peptide vendors in their bios. They are following the standard e-commerce playbook: Find something with an arbitrage opportunity via cheap overseas manufacturing and build a sales funnel from social media.<\/p>\n Influencers use cute words to dodge the moderators: peppers for peptides, ratatouille for Retatrutide. A real-estate agent in San Diego offers free NAD+ shots with a house tour. In a video titled \u201cDay in the Life of a Peptide Millionaire,\u201d an extremely tan, smooth-skinned man who calls himself \u201cthe Peptide King\u201d talks about his industry. \u201cFind what you\u2019re good at and just scale the shit out of that,\u201d he says while showing off his collection of Ferraris and Lamborghinis to the very young man interviewing him. This gold rush slots neatly into a lineage of Miami-adjacent hustle-influencer trend cycles \u2014 NFTs, drop-shipping, OnlyFans agencies. There\u2019s one key difference: No one ever injected Bored Apes into their ass.<\/p>\n According to a source at one of New York\u2019s elite prep schools, peptide use is rampant among students. They buy the compounds from TikTok influencers and hide the vials from their parents in mini-fridges they keep in their bedrooms. Students circulate TikToks, such as one in which a young woman stashes vials of peptides in what seems to be her family fridge, captioned \u201cwhen ur mini fridge breaks so now u gotta hide ur peps behind sum ranch.\u201d In another clip, a teenage user with the bio \u201c16 year old on Mexican research chemicals\u201d poses with a dog-ears filter. The onscreen text: \u201c\u2018No bro we\u2019re way too young to be pinning peptides\u2019\u2026 \u2026Translating\u00a0\ud83d\udd01 \u2026 \u2018\u2026 Glory to the state of Israel! Long Live Benjamin Netanyahu!\ud83c\uddee\ud83c\uddf1\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The phenomenon known as \u201clooksmaxxing\u201d takes the peptide hype cycle past the point of absurdity. The subculture is built on a grim premise: Looks are destiny, and only those willing to undergo the most extreme interventions will win in work, dating, and life. Though women participate, this philosophy is geared ultimately toward the vanities and neuroses of young men. Looksmaxxers have developed their own language: \u201cmogging\u201d means out-classing someone\u2019s appearance, to \u201cascend\u201d is to transform your looks, and the \u201cPSL scale\u201d (an acronym referencing defunct looksmaxxing forums) ranks people from \u201csubhuman\u201d to \u201cgiga chad.\u201d Peptides are ubiquitous. \u201cLooksmaxxing is mostly about visible optimization and speeding up aesthetic results, so peptides get pulled in as tools that promise faster fat loss, better skin, and improved recovery,\u201d said a 22-year-old college student I met in Ramsay\u2019s Discord for peptide enthusiasts. \u201cThat\u2019s where people like Clavicular come in, translating peptides into an aesthetic-first language that resonates with that crowd.\u201d<\/p>\n Clavicular is the online alias of 20-year-old Miami-based influencer Braden Peters. In the past six months, he has become inescapable in certain corners of social media frequented by young men. His flat, affectless delivery evokes Patrick Bateman transplanted into zoomer streaming culture: wearing a hat with the N-word on it, mocking an OnlyFans model\u2019s \u201chorrible nasolabial folds\u201d and \u201crecessed maxilla\u201d on a podcast, smashing his cheekbones with a hammer to reshape them, advocating jaw surgery, even taking meth to achieve a gaunt, hollowed-out look. He appeared to hit someone with his Cybertruck on a livestream. He danced at a Miami nightclub with the Tate brothers, Nick Fuentes, and other far-right figures to a Kanye West song with lyrics praising Hitler. On a stream with a teenage influencer who goes by the name Jenny Popach, Peters praised her for losing weight with Retatrutide \u2014 \u201cWould you say that is the biggest thing for your ascension?\u201d \u2014 and injected a fat-dissolving acid called Aqualyx into her face. (In response to fact-checking queries, Peters said our story included \u201cinternet rumors, clipped jokes, fabricated interpretations, and outright falsehoods,\u201d though he also clarified specifics.)<\/p>\n All of this has turned him into something of an edgelord folk hero. \u201cClavicular stole the fire from the gods,\u201d Fuentes declared on a recent stream. \u201cIn 2026, we\u2019re all ascending, we\u2019re all on peptides. We\u2019re all working out. We\u2019re all mewing, we\u2019re all bone smashing.\u201d<\/p>\n Peters\u2019s profit strategy fuses shock-jock tactics with straightforward marketing. The looksmaxxers tell their young, insecure followers that their lives will be empty unless they submit to increasingly risky interventions, then sell them the solutions. Peters offers a paid course, including detailed advice on which peptides to take. For $49 a month, his fans can join \u201cClavicular\u2019s Clan,\u201d which promises \u201cDETAILED GUIDES THAT WILL GUARANTEE ASCEND YOU!\u201d There is, of course, a peptide vendor linked in his bio.<\/p>\n \n A peptide user\u2019s supply. In the absence of clinical trials for these substances, users rely on anecdotal evidence and self-experimentation to determine whether they are effective. Roy Wersbe, 24, first tried the inflammation-reducing peptide BPC-157 a few years ago after hearing about it on X. Within two weeks, it cured a case of tennis elbow that had plagued him for years. \u201cI was just, like, totally shocked,\u201d he said. Wersbe started cycling through a variety of injectables that he buys from an online nootropics seller called Limitless. He believes big pharma and traditional medicine oppose peptides because they enable self-healing. \u201cPeople just feel hopeless with the health-care system,\u201d he said, \u201cand are trying to take matters into their own hands.\u201d Yet he\u2019s uneasy about where the hype is heading \u2014 on a recent trip to the Huntington Beach farmers\u2019 market, he saw someone selling peptides alongside fresh produce. \u201cIf people got super-sick this next year, I wouldn\u2019t be surprised,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Thirty-three-year-old Trevor (a pseudonym) began using peptides after he hurt his Achilles tendon training for a marathon. He was sold BPC-157 and TB-500, which he was told to inject into his ankle. The first time, he felt some pain in his lower back. He kept taking the blend every other day as instructed. Within a week or two, the pain returned but much sharper. It was so bad, he said, he \u201cfell to the floor. It knocked me out.\u201d Trevor went to urgent care, where clinicians suggested he likely had kidney stones. \u201cI was like, \u2018Damn, that\u2019s really what happens when you just fucking inject yourself with stuff,\u2019\u2009\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Forty-year-old Daisy (also a pseudonym) says the rotating stack of compounds she takes for joint pain has had an unexpected effect. \u201cI went through like a second puberty on it,\u201d she said. \u201cI was just like jacked and had big boobs.\u201d She compared one of her peptide blends \u2014 BPC-157 and GHK-Cu \u2014 to Compound V, the glowing blue fluid from The Boys. \u201cIt\u2019s bright blue, looks insane, and burns when you inject it,\u201d she said. She also tried intramuscular NAD+ shots deep into her thigh. \u201cThat one scared me \u2014 it makes your heart pound hard,\u201d she said, noting it often sparks intense euphoria. \u201cA lot of the people I know who like it are former heavy drug users who turned to wellness,\u201d she said. \u201cYou have to be a little bit insane to do it.\u201d It\u2019s also a little ritual, and it \u201cgives you something fun to talk about\u201d at parties. \u201cPeople love to compare stacks.\u201d<\/p>\n Daisy views it as less extreme than cosmetic surgery, which is considered normal among her peers. \u201cYou\u2019re gonna chop off part of your face and stitch it together to tighten your skin? That\u2019s crazy, and it\u2019s also really bootleg.\u201d Still, she\u2019s had mishaps \u2014 like after she injected into her ankle per Reddit advice. \u201cI had really gnarly nerve pain for several days. I was like, \u2018Fuck, did I permanently hurt myself because some random person on Reddit said something?\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n She sources her peptides from an L.A.-based company called Centre Research. Its website promises \u201cscience backed solutions for medical providers and modern humans alike.\u201d A former Centre employee who asked to stay anonymous explained the company\u2019s process: Customers describe their goals, receive a consultation, and get matched with peptides from a menu of dozens of compounds. \u201cThere\u2019s weight loss, body composition, skin and hair, cognitive health,\u201d they said. \u201cThere\u2019s one that basically mimics Viagra. And then there\u2019s a few that are, like, mitochondrial, so they just help clean out your system.\u201d<\/p>\n Centre offers peptides for individuals as well as wholesale service for med spas across the country. Its supply comes from a combination of compounding pharmacies in the U.S. and factories in China, according to the former employee. (A representative for Centre said it doesn\u2019t \u201csource any peptides from China or compounding pharmacies. They are manufactured in American facilities.\u201d) It makes a point of testing everything it gets for purity. \u201cWe spend thousands of dollars on testing, and we test very frequently,\u201d the former employee told me. Business is good. \u201cEvery month is like double what we did the month before, just in our first year,\u201d they said. They described the clientele as an eclectic mix of people. There are the celebrities and \u201ccelebrity adjacent\u201d clients in L.A. who \u201ccare about aesthetics and stuff.\u201d But many of the clients, especially on the wholesale med-spa side, are conservative people from Middle America.<\/p>\n Like most peptide vendors, Centre operates in a gray area that the former employee compares to decriminalized marijuana: \u201cIt\u2019s not illegal, but it\u2019s not, like, approved.\u201d When a client begins using a new peptide, the clinic starts them on a standard dosage and then modulates from there based on their reaction to the treatment. They said everyone makes sure to tell patients, \u201cWe\u2019re not medical professionals. If you have any questions or concerns, you need to talk to a doctor.\u201d<\/p>\n The compounding pharmacy that shipped my NAD+ was founded by a man named Brigham Buhler. In September, Buhler made his fourth appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, where he is a recurring advocate for the peptide movement. On the show, he described a series of increasingly tense meetings he\u2019d had over the past year with the FDA, in which he pushed for compounding pharmacies to be allowed to produce any peptides they want; they\u2019ve been banned from doing so since 2023, after the FDA found the formulas carried \u201csignificant safety risks\u201d and lacked proven efficacy.<\/p>\n Buhler believes pharmaceutical companies and their cronies at the FDA want to keep peptides off the table until they can patent and monetize them. \u201cBig pharma got beat to the punch,\u201d he told Rogan. \u201cCompounding pharmacies already have these peptides in their tool belt,\u201d and the FDA doesn\u2019t like that. He told officials that federal restrictions were pushing consumers toward riskier, Chinese-made drugs. \u201cEverywhere you look now, people can buy peptides online with no checks and balances. No FDA inspection, no validation,\u201d he said. \u201cWe need to bring peptides back through safe, compliant compounding pharmacies. Not black market, which is springing up everywhere. We\u2019re gonna have another opioid crisis.\u201d If the FDA reverses its guidance, the change may come from the top. In May, on a podcast hosted by biohacker Gary Brecka, RFK Jr. promised to \u201cend the war at FDA\u201d on peptides.<\/p>\n Until then, the safety of what users inject comes down to individual suppliers with little to no oversight. To the rescue: several testing companies aiming to help people safely engage with the gray market. Rina Dukor is the co-founder of a company called BioTools, which makes molecular-testing equipment used by everyone from pharmaceutical giants to federal agencies. Recently, she has been working with a peptide-testing start-up called Finnrick, launched in 2025 by the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Michael Carter. People can send in their peptides and Finnrick will test them for purity and label accuracy. It\u2019s sort of like a for-profit \u00e0 la carte FDA. \u201cEveryone has a peptide guy,\u201d Carter told the San Francisco Standard. \u201cWhat people need is transparent information.\u201d<\/p>\n Nearly 30 percent of the peptides tested by Finnrick are either mislabeled, under- or overdosed, or contaminated with toxins or foreign bacteria. \u201cWe\u2019ve also seen peptides where it says \u2018semaglutide\u2019 and it\u2019s actually Retatrutide or there is no peptide at all,\u201d Dukor told me. She\u2019s particularly concerned about untested products coming from China. Many of the Chinese peptide shipments have COAs, or certificates of authenticity, from testing companies; these are tests showing a given batch of a substance is pure. But the COAs often tell consumers nothing about whether the manufacturer has put the right amount of a substance in a vial. \u201cThey might tell you it\u2019s five milligrams. They might put two milligrams. They might put 15 milligrams,\u201d Dukor said. \u201cBut it might look the same; it\u2019s just a lot of white powder.\u201d The risks from accidentally taking too much of a peptide can be severe. In July 2025, two women were hospitalized in Las Vegas after injecting peptides at a MAHA-aligned health fair. The manufacturers can also stuff the vials with filler without telling consumers what they are using. Most often, it is a neutral substance called mannitol. But Dukor has seen vials filled with unlabeled glucose, which is dangerous for diabetics.<\/p>\n \n Adam Katz, 25, blames an overuse of Retatrutide for his necrotizing pancreatitis, a potentially lethal condition. Katz, the bodybuilder, is unnerved by what he\u2019s seeing. He said he\u2019s constantly fielding questions from younger people who \u201cwant to just use peptides for everything,\u201d he said. Peptides, he warned, \u201caren\u2019t the answer to everything, and also they\u2019re not harmless.\u201d He has experienced the risks firsthand. After several months of using Retatrutide, he starting having increasingly severe stomach pain until he finally went to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with acute necrotizing pancreatitis, a potentially fatal condition. A month later, in early January, he was back in the hospital with another flare-up. A few weeks ago, I texted Dukor an ad I was served on Instagram for a Chinese company advertising \u201cgray market peptides.\u201d It depicted a huge haphazard warehouse piled high with cardboard boxes. Climate control seemed lacking. \u201cWow!!!! Crazy is not a sufficient word!!\u201d she texted me. \u201cPeptide structure and thus activity is very sensitive to temperature, pH and humidity.\u201d A peptide can be stored at room temperature, but, she added, \u201cwhat happens when you send it from China in the summer from Beijing, where it\u2019s humid and hot, and it sits on a trailer for who knows how long on this container, then the container sits in transport again. Is it hot, is it kept in the cold? Who knows!\u201d<\/p>\n She recently caught a glimpse of the peptide boom in China firsthand while giving a talk at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. She noticed testing instruments in a lab were being used incorrectly, giving off-kilter data. She asked the techs whom they were testing for. \u201cThey\u2019re like, \u2018Oh, the local Chinese peptide company.\u2019 I\u2019m like, \u2018What?!\u2019\u2009\u201d Even if the data they were getting was wrong, she said, \u201cat least they were testing.\u201d<\/p>\n In December, John Ramsay connected me with Jasmine, the sales rep for Xingruida Trade Co. I was curious about the process of buying from abroad \u2014 at least, that\u2019s what I told myself. Jasmine sent a detailed document listing dozens of peptides for sale, videos of the factory\u2019s production line, and several testing certificates. I ordered the smallest and cheapest available dose of Retatrutide \u2014 ten five-milligram vials \u2014 and paid $135 in bitcoin. Two weeks later, the package arrived labeled as PHILIPPINE FACE MASKS and marked for RESEARCH USE ONLY. I sent a vial to Dukor for testing. \u201cIt appears to be Reta,\u201d she texted me. \u201cThe purity is good.\u201d It was dosed correctly and mixed with mannitol. I opened my fridge and looked at the powder sitting on my shelf next to an onion. What the hell, I thought. Couldn\u2019t hurt to lose a few pounds after the holidays. I reconstituted a vial and shot it into my stomach.<\/p>\n Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/23c08aacc17d7407a9d31a5aa071f81748-Peptides-TikToks-02.rdeep-vertical.w460.jpg\")
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\n Influencers across TikTok are selling peptides for every cosmetic and wellness concern\u2014from weight loss to glowy skin, muscle gain, sexual performance, and more. Clockwise from top left: Photo: autisticclips8\/TikTok; alexaaronn\/TikTok; smoneyyz\/TikTok; bricesmithhh\/TikTok.\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/2411523fe62db67640f64ad95e4d9fa4c1-Peptides-Fridge.w710.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Michael Friberg for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n![\"PEPTIDES](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/0e932b97c38551df978fa0ce8fa01c7bbf-Peptides-Adam-Katz.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Zack Wittman for New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n
\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 26, 2026, issue of
\n New York\u00a0Magazine.<\/p>\n