Not For Human Consumption

Grey market peptides have built a parallel pharmaceutical infrastructure under the thinnest regulatory pretense. The data reveals a cultural contradiction that extends far beyond weight loss.

The FDA classifies BPC-157 as Category 2 (ineligible for compounding) while Telegram communities with 35,000 members crowdsource third-party lab testing at $850 per batch. Eli Lilly’s retatrutide achieves 28.7% weight loss in Phase 3 trials while Chinese suppliers ship enough semaglutide API to produce over one billion starter doses. At a December 2025 San Francisco party called the “Chinese Peptide Rave,” attendees learned injection technique in a co-working space that bills itself as a “self-governed vertical village.” The coherence between these scenes exposes regulatory theater, economic desperation, and a philosophical tension about bodily autonomy that reaches into everything from transhumanism to gender identity. This article seeks to delineate some of the peptides I’m familiar with, approaching each from an angle of “does this actually work in substantiated clinical evidence?” to “are we running our own, empirically flimsy, decentralized trials by FAFOing with substances with less evidence?”

The answer to both of these questions is Hell Yeah.

The state of the art: Gen3 agonists

Retatrutide (LY3437943) represents the current apex of incretin pharmacology. A 39-amino-acid single peptide engineered from a GIP backbone, it simultaneously activates three receptor targets:

• GLP-1 (appetite suppression via hypothalamic satiety centers)

• GIP (enhanced insulin secretion and fat metabolism), and crucially,

• the glucagon receptor: increasing energy expenditure through hepatic fatty acid oxidation, achieving what dual agonists cannot.

The clinical data is pretty straightforward. Jastreboff et al. reported in the New England Journal of Medicine (2023) that the 12mg dose produced 24.2% mean weight loss at 48 weeks with 100% of participants achieving ≥5% loss and 83% achieving ≥15%. The December 2025 TRIUMPH-4 Phase 3 results pushed this to 28.7% at 68 weeks (mean absolute loss: 71.2 pounds). Sanyal’s Nature Medicine substudy (2025) documented up to 82% reduction in liver fat, with 90%+ normalization rates. The glucagon component distinguishes Gen3 from prior generations: it enables thermogenesis rather than merely suppressing appetite. This has historically been done in the bodybuilding community by ingesting industrial poisons like DNP (dinitrophenol) or combining other dodgy thermogenic compounds which risk organ damage, chronic reactions or even organ failure & death. So, clearly, retatrutide provides a safer alternative to patient cases where Gen2 and Gen1 medications and supplements are ineffective at producing weight loss. And secondarily, it may also be attractive to bodybuilding / biohacking communities which historically leveraged poisons for ~2% bodyfat reduction.

Native GLP-1 has a half-life of approximately two minutes due to DPP-4 degradation. Liraglutide (Gen1, 2010) achieved 13-hour half-life via fatty acid conjugation—enabling daily dosing and ~8% weight loss. Semaglutide (Gen2, 2017) introduced α-aminoisobutyric acid at position 2 for DPP-4 resistance plus optimized albumin binding, extending half-life to seven days with 15-17% weight loss. Tirzepatide (2022) added the benefit of GIP receptor agonism, achieving 20.2% in head-to-head SURMOUNT-5 comparison to semaglutide’s 13.7% (NEJM, 2025). Sequentially, retatrutide’s triple agonism represents the logical terminus of receptor stacking. My opinion is that the endpoint of these drugs may, from this point on, look like improved time-delivery mechanisms, eventually converging on the possibility of subdermal drug-delivery implants. But the current consensus is clear: within both the medical and the peptide enthusiast community, Gen3 GLP-1/GIP/glucagon agonists are the “holy grail” of weight loss medications. They work. Astonishingly well.

Evidence vs. Enthusiasm

In contrast to the family of GLP agonist peptides, the evidentiary foundation for “research peptides” like BPC-157 and TB-500 collapses under scrutiny. BPC-157, a 15-amino-acid pentadecapeptide derived from gastric juice protein, has extensive rodent data — upregulating VEGFR2, activating the Akt-eNOS axis for angiogenesis, modulating dopaminergic and GABAergic pathways. But the systematic review in PMC (2025) is dispositive: “There are no completed clinical studies describing its efficacy in humans.” The single retrospective study involves 12 patients with knee pain, no control group, and no validated outcome measure. A Phase I trial initiated in 2015 with 42 volunteers has produced no published results.

TB-500 (synthetic Thymosin Beta-4 fragment) shows more promise in corneal and dermal healing studies, with topical formulations demonstrating measurable epithelial recovery. However, systemic injection for “tissue regeneration”, the number one use case promoted by the peptide enthusiast community, currently lacks human efficacy data. Both compounds sit on WADA’s Prohibited List (Class S0) and the FDA’s Category 2 bulk drug substances list, meaning they cannot legally be compounded by 503A or 503B pharmacies. Many influencers and health & wellness gurus push them anyway.

The pharmacokinetic concerns are real. Peptides degrade via oxidation (methionine, cysteine, tryptophan residues), deamidation (asparagine, glutamine at high pH), and hydrolysis. Grey market products lack cold-chain guarantees, undergo unknown storage conditions, and arrive with certificates of analysis from labs users cannot verify, with the exception of a handful of (generally more expensive) suppliers which use the same Janoshik testing that FDA-approved labs use. One Belgian market study found grey market peptides containing 10-90% less active ingredient than claimed, plus microbial contamination, heavy metals, and cross-contamination with other substances (although, this was 2018, so I’m sure things have improved here).

FDA regulatory landscape and the collapse of the shortage loophole

The semaglutide/tirzepatide compounding market existed under a specific legal exception that has now closed. Under Sections 503A and 503B of the FD&C Act, compounders cannot make “essentially copies” of FDA-approved drugs unless those drugs specifically appear on the shortage list. The October 2024 removal of tirzepatide and February 2025 removal of semaglutide from emergency authorization terminated legal compounding—with enforcement discretion ending May 22, 2025 for 503B facilities.

The differences between the type of pharmacy matters: 503A pharmacies compound based on individual prescriptions with state board oversight, no CGMP requirements, and no adverse event reporting. 503B outsourcing facilities register with FDA, face regular inspections, comply with CGMP, and report adverse events. Neither can now routinely compound copies of approved GLP-1s. Workarounds involving vitamin B12 addition or non-standard dosing are explicitly characterized by FDA as “circumvention.”

In September 2025, the FDA issued more than 50 warning letters to U.S. and international companies. The enforcement template is consistent: products labeled “RESEARCH USE ONLY” or “NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION” but marketed with therapeutic claims, dosing protocols, or injection supplies represent “unapproved new drugs” regardless of disclaimer. The warning letter to Summit Research Peptides (December 2024) cited Facebook posts advertising “Unlock Maximum Health Benefits” and “Achieve Your Weight Loss Goals” for products labeled as research-only semaglutide and retatrutide.

Unfortunately, criminal prosecution is not speculative, but the US Federal Government has been increasingly broken since they were last awake at the wheel (pre-COVID). The consequences exist in much of a gray area as well.

The Tailor Made Compounding prosecution provides the clearest precedent. Following an August-October 2018 FDA inspection revealing ineligible bulk substances (including BPC-157, Follistatin, GHRP-2, GHRP-6, and numerous others), TMC pled guilty to distributing unapproved new drugs. Owner Jeremy Delk received three years probation and $1,788,906.82 forfeiture, the value of 2019 sales. A separate prosecution of Gavin Burns Smith (Precision Peptides/DNA Peptides) resulted in six months home confinement and $2,102,684.06 forfeiture despite “research/laboratory use only” disclaimers.

Since then, the peptides market has exploded in scale, demanding even more attention from the FDA. In 2024, eight Chinese companies shipped enough semaglutide API to produce over one billion starter doses. Novo Nordisk estimated 1.5 billion doses over six months. Import Alert 66-80 now establishes a “green list” of compliant manufacturers; products from unverified sources face detention without examination. Among the detention findings: shipments declared as “non-sterile liquids” (GLP-1s must be sterile), products with fraudulent manufacturer addresses (one listed a JW Marriott hotel), and APIs from facilities that refused FDA inspection.

The party that changes you

The December 13, 2025 “Chinese Peptide Rave” at Frontier Tower in San Francisco crystallizes the American cultural moment around grey-market peptides. Hosted by data-centric marketing startup Soup via Peptide Partners (which operates from within the building), the event featured lab tours on the 8th floor with live reconstitution tutorials and injection technique demonstrations, followed by an actual rave on the 6th floor. The Luma invitation’s sardonic tone captured the ethos of its mad genius progenitor, who goes by the pseudonym Chairman Birb Bernanke: “It will not be appropriate for you to talk about what you’re working on, discuss Landian techno-accelerationism, or share your thoughts on the AI-industrial spending complex and its’ ponzinomics once the music is playing.”

Four hundred and fifty people RSVPed for the 300-person capacity event. The dress code specified no backpacks, no “trash fits.” Products on display included the “WOLVERINE STACK” and “POWERHOUSE STACK”— likely including BPC-157 (FDA Category 2, ineligible for compounding) and marketed for “healing tendons.”

The event was a roaring success.

The grey market operates through layered communities with distinct knowledge requirements. “<REDACTED>” (Telegram, 35,000+ members) enforces strict entry standards: members must already understand reconstitution, dosage mathematics, and COA verification. They will kick members for basic questions like “What is bacteriostatic water?” The group maintains a “NO OILS” policy (oils = anabolic steroids; they focus on water-based peptides) and coordinates third-party lab testing at $850 for full endotoxin/heavy metals/purity workups.

“<REDACTED>” (600+ members) functions as a feeder community, teaching vendors, technique, and dosing to newcomers. Reddit communities (r/<REDACTED>, r/<REDACTED> with 46,000+ analyzed posts) use coded language — “S$ma” or “T!rz” for products, “RS” (research subject) for human users, mainly to evade platform moderation. When a Science News reporter identified herself on one forum, members called her “a snitch, a cop and a Big Pharma shill.”

So, what’s another reason people are leaping into this scene?

The government-approved stuff is far more expensive, and now lags behind peptides like retatrutide in pharmacological efficacy.

Grey market semaglutide costs approximately $50 per vial (~1 month supply). Retatrutide may be even cheaper, at as low as $20/mo. A Hacker News post documented a two-year supply (300mg) for $120. Brand-name equivalent at retail: $24,000. The 80-200x price differential explains the demand that no regulatory enforcement can suppress. Compounded semaglutide from telehealth providers like Hims ($199/month) occupies the middle ground, but post-shortage, that market faces legal uncertainty.

What about someone who isn’t me (SWIM)?

It may come as no surprise to someone reading this article that I definitely do not inject grey-market peptides, and I totally haven’t lost 13.8% of my bodyweight on retatrutide in the past 90 days or so. It would be irresponsible for me to also argue that if I were to hypothetically do this highly irresponsible thing, it would totally not have cascading effects improving endothelial damage from years of methotrexate use, hypothetically allowing me to (with medical supervision) cease its use entirely. It would also be irresponsible to argue that Gen3 agonists like retatrutide may improve the autoimmune disorder management of patients on long-term glucocorticoids by modulating IL-6 expression in an unclear pathway, as well as reducing overall medication dependence by lowering necessary mg/kg for maintenance medication. What would be most irresponsible would be mentioning that if someone were stupid enough to do all this, they could simply check if anything were wrong by paying ~$30 to Quest Diagnostics without physician approval for a CBC with differential and $70 for a battery of other tests related to the kidneys and liver.

It would be even more irresponsible for this person to do something like, I don’t know — and this is entirely hypothetical — inject NAD+, BPC-157, GHK-Cu, KPV and TB500 with associated before/during/after bloodwork to measure their effects (n=1) on various inflammation markers and hormones. I would definitely not be doing that, because the screaming horde of neanderthals who eat poison and go to family doctors in shitty cities agree with my government (smarter than me, despite being composed of almost solely geriatric pedophiles) which claims that using your brain to take charge of your health and body (even if it’s against the law) is morally or socially wrong.

It would be THE MOST irresponsible for me to argue that LLM-agent systems like Claude Opus 4.5 have advanced far enough now to provide as-or-more-accurate diagnostics when fed high-quality clinical data, and that the only thing you should use PCPs for at this point are getting them to approve stuff you can’t get yourself, or check in every once in a while for the proactive detection and treatment of severe disease (or clear you for surgical procedures). And that if you’re not in a top-5 market for healthcare, you’re better off asking ChatGPT etc. in addition to your doctor, who might be 78 years old and suggest using over-the-counter cough medicine to treat a systemic eosinophilic autoimmune disorder.

But of course, I wouldn’t argue any of this, because the government and people over the age of 70 in poorer health than me know what’s best for me. And I’ve never injected grey-market peptides. I didn’t even know what they were until writing this article.

D2C blood testing is enabling scaling this culture

Direct-to-consumer blood testing removes physician gatekeeping for peptide self-experimenters. Marek Health, founded by Derek of “More Plates More Dates” and explicitly serving the bodybuilding/peptide/TRT community, offers custom 30-50 page lab analysis reports, direct prescribing of TRT and peptides (BPC-157 15mg vial ~$350), and panels specifically designed to “Meet Treatment Requirements” for guided optimization. The company partners with LabCorp (~2,000 locations) and explicitly markets toward “health optimization” and “performance.” Derek has appeared on Peter Attia’s podcast discussing “exogenous molecules used and misused by bodybuilders and athletes.”

Function Health (valued at $2.5 billion after November 2025 Series B) offers 160+ biomarker tests for $365-$499/year, with celebrity investors including Matt Damon and Kevin Hart, and endorsements from Andrew Huberman and Jay Shetty. SiPhox Health (Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures) developed painless “EasyDraw” blood collection from the upper arm, marketed to “high performers, biohackers, and busy professionals” with integration across 300+ wearables.

The biomarker panel for peptide users is standardized across communities: HbA1c and fasting glucose (GLP-1 monitoring), ALT/AST/GGT (hepatotoxicity from peptides), ApoB and lipid panels (cardiovascular risk), total and free testosterone with estradiol (TRT optimization), IGF-1 (growth hormone pathway). The “test → adjust dose → retest” feedback loop operates on 6-12 week cycles. Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint protocol, testing blood every 3-6 months, biological age twice yearly, establishes the aspirational template that trickles down to grey market users. His methodology specifically may bite off too many concurrent experiments to be empirically sound, but the culture of self-experimentation born of biohackers, grinders, and DIY hormone replacement therapy (HRT) downstream of necessity and state agency removal has led to this. Of course, without Sadie Plant, there would be no Bryan Johnson.

If Nature is unjust, change Nature!

Hormones, bodybuilding, and bodily autonomy

Philosophical incoherence emerges when examining bodybuilding’s relationship to hormonal self-modification. Testosterone was synthesized in 1935 (Butenandt and Ružička won the 1939 Nobel Prize). By 1954, Soviet weightlifters’ dominance was attributed to testosterone use. Dr. John Ziegler introduced Dianabol to American athletes in 1958-60; by the early 1960s, the York Barbell lifters were “the beefiest in the country.” The progression from testosterone to HGH to insulin to peptides to SARMs represents seven decades of normalized radical hormonal self-modification.

Online communities developed sophisticated harm reduction infrastructure: post-cycle therapy protocols, bloodwork monitoring, dosage timing, side effect management. Evolutionary.org (1.9+ million monthly visitors, 215,000 members) operates with “clear hierarchies and the need to display cultural knowledge to be accepted.” Academic analysis in Harm Reduction Journal (Tighe et al., 2017) found that experienced members “wanted to take a more active role in monitoring their health” and communities operate through “ethnopharmacological-connoisseurship.”

In December 2025, a 13-person FDA expert panel gave a “resounding endorsement of testosterone replacement therapy” and recommended expanding FDA-approved indications to include age-related low testosterone while removing testosterone’s Schedule III controlled substance designation. Panel statement: “Testosterone is still regulated as if it were a dangerous, performance-enhancing drug from the athletic doping scandals of the 1980s.” The medicalization of male hormone optimization proceeds apace, completely contradictory to action at the federal level which seeks to remove access to HRT from various other interested groups.

Max More coined “morphological freedom” in 1993: “the ability to alter bodily form at will through technologies such as surgery, genetic engineering, nanotechnology.” Anders Sandberg’s 2001 essay (reprinted in The Transhumanist Reader, 2013) argues morphological freedom is “an extension of one’s right to one’s body, not just self-ownership but also the right to modify oneself according to one’s desires” — “essential not just to transhumanism, but also to any future democratic society.”

At Concept Country, members have regularly harkened to “freedom of form”, the ability to become anyone. We limit this only at the threshold of becoming a Timothy Leary or Robert Anton Wilson type, which is illegal and subject to fines and imprisonment. You are not allowed to become that.

The therapy/enhancement distinction collapses under examination. Per BMC Medical Ethics (2017): “Traditional routes for setting limits, such as referring to nature, the therapy-enhancement distinction, and the health-disease distinction, turn out to have some shortcomings… this has proved prone to disappear quite rapidly when the distinction is closely analysed.” Vaccines “enhance” immune response without pre-existing disease. TRT for “optimization” treats no pathology.

If society permits hormonal modification for aesthetic purposes (bodybuilding steroids, despite illegality), age-related decline (TRT), and athletic performance, the logical question becomes unavoidable: why are these forms treated differently from gender-affirming hormone therapy? Florence Ashley’s CMAJ analysis (2024) connects medical autonomy to gender self-determination: “At the heart of medical ethics lies the principle of autonomy… Gender-affirming care, however, does not only implicate medical autonomy. It implicates autonomy over everyday life.” I personally disagree that these are different. Medical autonomy to me is autonomy over everyday life. We shouldn’t have to stretch arguments to include gender-affirming care when it is clearly just as, or more important than optimization and bodybuilding. It’s ridiculous that we even have to present this framing.

DIY communities in both domains demonstrate parallel structures: peer forums, bloodwork sharing, circumvention of medical gatekeeping, community-developed harm reduction protocols. A Social Science & Medicine study (2025) on nonbinary DIY HRT found it “emerged as both a mode of knowledge production, a site of communal care, and a practice through which participants could support themselves and their communities and achieve bodily autonomy.”

The future

What to expect: oral formats, gene therapy, and regulatory impossibility.

The next phase arrives from the future. Orforglipron (Eli Lilly, oral once-daily GLP-1) completed multiple Phase 3 trials with 12.4% weight loss at 72 weeks; FDA Priority Review secured, launch expected 2026 at $149-$399/mo (lol). The oral format eliminates injection barriers entirely. Amycretin (Novo Nordisk, oral GLP-1/amylin dual agonist) achieved 13.1% weight loss in 12 weeks in Phase 1 (approximately double Wegovy at the same timepoint) and advances directly to Phase 3 with projected US approval Q4 2030 (lol).

Then there’s the myostatin inhibitors, which represent the muscle pathway. Bimagrumab (Novartis Phase 2) achieved 20% reduction in fat mass and 4.4% increase in lean mass in obese diabetics. Nature Communications (2025) demonstrated that blocking GDF8 + activin A preserves muscle during GLP-1 therapy and enhances fat loss. Dr. Se-Jin Lee’s myostatin research now fuels clinical trials of 10+ drugs targeting this pathway.

Elizabeth Parrish, CEO of BioViva, self-administered follistatin and telomerase gene therapy in Colombia in September 2015. Claimed results: telomere lengthening from 6.71kb to 7.33kb, MRI showing muscle size increase and intramuscular fat reduction. Critics note the 9% difference is within measurement error. But a 2022 peer-reviewed paper showed telomere lengthening maintained over years, and a 2022 study with George Church as co-author demonstrated CMV-based TERT gene therapy extended mouse lifespan by 41.4%. Then, in 2025, the paper was retracted after an internal investigation.

The pattern is established like this: self-experimentation → offshore administration → public disclosure → data platform pivot. CRISPR kits are available online for under $100. Josiah Zayner publicly injected himself with CRISPR targeting myostatin in 2017 and sells $20 DNA/CRISPR kits through The ODIN Project. The FDA issued warnings; California passed a CRISPR law requiring “not for human use” labels; Zayner was investigated and the case closed without action. Today, gene therapy enhancement is likely un-regulatable.

The enforcement challenge extends beyond current capacity. Jurisdictional arbitrage is established (Colombia, Mexico, offshore clinics). Technology democratizes its use (CRISPR kits under $100, community labs proliferating). Self-experimentation falls in FDA’s regulatory blind spot (they regulate products, not self-administration). Demand is structural (global peptide market projected to exceed $70 billion by 2030). And now, the underground infrastructure (grey market) is mature.

The peptide grey market prefigures gene therapy enhancement markets: same international suppliers, same informed consumer base, same risk-tolerant practitioners, same “research only” labels, same jurisdictional arbitrage — just with more permanent and dramatic effects. As one legal analysis notes: “Peptides are not fringe science anymore—they’re the future of regenerative medicine. But innovation has outrun legislation, leaving doctors, patients, and policymakers trying to navigate rules written for a different era.” The “Not For Human Consumption” label represents the legal fiction at the center of a parallel pharmaceutical infrastructure: the FDA enforces against the most blatant violators while billions of doses flow from Chinese API manufacturers. Telegram communities develop sophisticated third-party testing while warning letters cite Facebook advertisements. The coherence argument (that bodily autonomy for aesthetic hormone modification logically extends to all forms of self-determination) remains unaddressed by a regulatory apparatus still operating from 1980s anti-doping frameworks.

The trajectory is clear: oral GLP-1s democratize access further, myostatin inhibitors add muscle preservation to fat loss, gene therapy moves from wealthy self-experimenters to offshore clinics to eventually mainstream application. The infrastructure built for grey market peptides, like international sourcing, community knowledge networks, blood test monitoring, jurisdictional arbitrage — scales to more radical interventions. The philosophical question isn’t whether people will modify their bodies radically, but whether any coherent principle can distinguish which modifications deserve restriction and which deserve celebration. My take is that I hope this culture continues to scale into macroculture, enhancing agency and scientific-medical literacy at the expense of a few people who might do their math or risk calculation wrong and potentially mess the entire thing up for the rest of us.

To tie it back in with the theme of this publication — this stuff is going macrocultural, and at such a large scale that regulation may be incapable of stopping or slowing it’s rise.