What Are Peptides?

An Essay on Injecting Signals and What Comes Due

This essay reads what the manufacturers’ own approved labels and the peer-reviewed analytical literature say about a class of drugs marketed as “just what your body already makes.” The labels use the vocabulary of conventional pharmacology and immunology, and where I quote them or report their measurements I use their terms. In my own analytical voice I hold to a different framework, one that treats symptoms as intelligent reports from a body responding to insult and treats the injection of foreign signaling molecules as an insult in its own right. The register shifts should be visible on the page. Where a label says “anti-tirzepatide antibodies developed in 51% of patients,” I quote the label; where I interpret what has happened to those patients, I describe the injection of a foreign protein producing a response that intensifies with repeated exposure. The measurement is the measurement. The framework for reading it is a separate matter, and one the labels themselves admit they cannot resolve.

This essay was prompted by Luke Cadell’s piece “Peptides Sounded Revolutionary, Until I Saw The Full Truth” at Holistic Healing. Cadell raised the question this essay works through.

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Belgian researchers at Sciensano and Ghent University tested ten of the most falsified injectable peptides from illegal internet pharmacies. Every product contained arsenic. Speciation confirmed the inorganic form, which is the more toxic form. In some samples the concentration reached ten times the International Council for Harmonisation toxicity limit for parenteral drugs. At least one sample contained lead. The peptides tested included ipamorelin, CJC-1295, thymosin β4 (the parent molecule of what athletes inject as TB-500), sermorelin, GHRP-2, GHRP-6, AOD-9604, epithalon, oxytocin, and Melanotan II. The cysteine-containing peptides in the sample ran between 5% and 75% purity.¹

The people injecting these products are drawing them into insulin syringes at their kitchen tables. The vials arrive in the mail with a bottle of bacteriostatic water and a protocol copied from a forum. The label says “for research use only.” The forum says to inject twice a day.

The FDA-approved end of the same market runs cleaner on purity and dirtier on the manufacturers’ own admissions. In the Mounjaro trials, the manufacturer’s assays detected what the label calls anti-tirzepatide antibodies in 51% of treated adults. Of those patients, 34% produced proteins that also bound the patient’s own glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide, and 14% produced proteins that also bound the patient’s own glucagon-like peptide-1. In the Zepbound trials, the antibody rate reached 64.5%. The label states that no clinically significant effect of these antibodies has been identified, and that available evidence is insufficient to characterize the effects.² ³

Both ends of the market share a selling proposition. The proposition is that peptides are what your body already makes.

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The Unvaccinated — Live This Thursday

Truth Be Told airs this Thursday, September 17th. It’s a six-hour livestream. My one-hour presentation, The Unvaccinated, opens it.

About forty-five minutes on the question the medical establishment has treated as settled for a century, and never actually asked: are the vaccinated healthier than the unvaccinated?

Vaccination is the subject closest to my heart, and this is another chance to spread the word. The format preserves the pen name.

Five parts. The four studies that have quietly demolished the mainstream story. Why the question was avoided for a hundred years. What is actually in the vials. A different way of seeing cancer. And why the vitamin K shot — the first injection most children ever receive — matters more than any single argument I can make.

Start times: 12pm EST / 11am CT / 10am MDT / 9am PST / 6am HST / 4pm UTC — use timeanddate.com if you need to convert to your local time.

Tickets are here. Use code UNBEKOMING for $5 off (applies automatically at the link). Replay available afterwards, so timing isn’t a barrier.

If you already have a ticket, log in at that same link on the day to watch.

See you Thursday.

The Category and the Claim

A peptide is a short chain of amino acids. Proteins are the long chains. The body produces thousands of peptides continuously. Insulin is a peptide. GLP-1 is a peptide. Growth hormone releasing hormone is a peptide. Collagen fragments are peptides.

The pharmaceutical and gray-market industries have converged on a shared marketing move. Because peptides are endogenous signaling molecules, injecting a synthetic analogue is presented as a form of physiological restoration. The pitch runs: you were producing this molecule at optimal levels when you were younger, or when your terrain was healthier, and the injection tops up what you now lack. Peptide clinics use the language of biological identity. Semaglutide is described as an incretin mimic. Tesamorelin is described as a growth hormone releasing hormone analogue. BPC-157 is described as a synthetic fragment of a peptide isolated from human gastric juice.

The move should be familiar. It is the vitamin paradigm reissued as injection.

The vitamin paradigm holds that the body requires discrete chemical compounds that can be manufactured industrially, isolated from any food matrix, and consumed as pills to maintain health. What the paradigm elides is that isolated compounds behave differently from the compounds delivered by whole food. A liver provides retinol alongside zinc, copper, B vitamins, and dozens of cofactors in proportions the body evolved to use. A capsule provides one molecule at a concentration no food ever supplied, without the cofactors that regulate its metabolism. The isolated compound has effects. The effects are not the same as the effects of the food.

The peptide paradigm makes the same move at the level of signaling. The body produces GLP-1 in response to a meal, at a level modulated by the composition of the meal, the state of the gut, the vagal tone of the person eating, and the stress load of the moment. The body then degrades GLP-1 within minutes. The signal is transient by design, calibrated by design, and integrated with every other signal running through the same tissues. Semaglutide is a synthetic analogue of GLP-1 modified to resist the enzyme that degrades the endogenous molecule. It is injected weekly at a concentration that saturates the receptor for the entire dosing interval. The molecule the label calls a GLP-1 analogue is not what your body makes. It is a chemical construct designed to override the calibration the body applies to its own signal.

Herbert Shelton described the mechanism a century ago. When the body signals distress through symptoms, the symptoms are the intelligent report of a compromised terrain. Suppress the symptoms and the terrain conditions persist. The suppression adds new toxic burden. New symptoms emerge. These are suppressed in turn. The acute becomes chronic. Shelton described this sequence in the context of catarrhal inflammation and pharmaceutical antihistamines. It applies with equal force to injected signaling molecules.⁴

The paradigm question that runs through what follows is this. When you inject a peptide, what signal are you silencing, and what was the signal reporting?

Metabolic Signaling

Semaglutide produces weight loss. This is not in dispute and the essay does not dispute it. The trial data show it, the users report it, the scale numbers do not lie. A drug prescribed to more than a tenth of American adults is prescribed because it does the thing it is prescribed to do. When a user takes semaglutide for a year, on average they weigh less at the end of that year than they did at the beginning. That is a real effect produced by a real mechanism operating on a real receptor. The essay’s project is not to talk anyone out of the observation that they lost weight.

The largest peptide market in the world sits on that observation. Semaglutide sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy has generated more than a hundred billion dollars in cumulative revenue for Novo Nordisk. Tirzepatide sold under the brand names Mounjaro and Zepbound has generated more than fifty billion for Eli Lilly. The compounded and gray-market shadow of this market runs into the millions of patients, with estimates from industry executives placing the total on compounded semaglutide alone at between one and two million users at peak.⁵

The paradigm question is what sits alongside the weight loss, and what remains after the weight loss.

The compounded market is where the analytical chemistry lands hardest. Researchers at Semmelweis University and the University of Pécs purchased semaglutide online from illegal sellers, put the products through liquid chromatography with mass spectrometry, and assessed them against United States Pharmacopeia standards for sterility and bacterial endotoxin. The purity of the samples ran between 7.7% and 14.37% against a label claim of 99%. Bacterial endotoxin was detected in every sample tested, at concentrations between 2.16 and 8.95 endotoxin units per milligram.⁶

The same research group, in a companion paper, purchased different online semaglutide samples and found them exceeding the labeled content by 29% to 39%. The overdose products and the underdose products were purchased from the same market segment.⁷ The two findings taken together describe the actual condition of the compounded and gray-market semaglutide supply. A patient injecting a weekly dose from an online vial does not know whether the vial contains 8% of the labeled compound, 130% of it, or a bacterial endotoxin load high enough to produce systemic inflammatory response. The compounded semaglutide market during the 2022 to 2024 shortage priced these products at $150 to $300 per month against $1,000 or more for the branded equivalent, and the price gap drove between one and two million American patients into that supply.⁵

The FDA-approved product is the cleaner half of this market. In the immunogenicity sections of the Mounjaro and Zepbound labels, the manufacturers report that 51% and 64.5% of treated patients respectively developed anti-tirzepatide antibodies during the 40 to 104 week treatment periods. A substantial subset of these patients produced proteins that bound not only the injected drug but the patient’s own GIP and GLP-1, the hormones the gut releases after meals to signal insulin release, appetite suppression, and gastric emptying. The Zepbound label reports that hypersensitivity reactions occurred in 6.2% of antibody-positive patients versus 3% of antibody-negative patients, and injection-site reactions occurred in 11.3% of antibody-positive patients versus 1% of antibody-negative patients, an elevenfold difference reported in the same label that concludes no clinically significant effect has been identified.² ³

Charles Richet won the Nobel Prize in 1913 for demonstrating that the injection of a foreign protein produces a response that intensifies with each subsequent exposure. He called the phenomenon anaphylaxis. The mechanism he identified is the mechanism the tirzepatide labels are documenting in a fifth of the American adult population. The body responds to the repeated injection of a foreign protein by producing proteins that recognize and bind the injected molecule. A substantial subset of those proteins also bind the patient’s own signaling hormones. The labels acknowledge the measurement and admit that they cannot characterize what it means for the patient’s long-term regulation of appetite, insulin, or digestion.

That is the establishment measuring Richet’s sensitization mechanism, in the establishment’s own approved labels, and telling doctors it does not know what it means.

The paradigm reading of the metabolic peptide market operates at a different level than the observation that the drug produces weight loss. That the drug produces weight loss is a matter of pharmacology. The paradigm question is whether producing weight loss addresses the terrain conditions that produced the excess weight in the first place. These are two separate questions and the answer to the first does not answer the second.

Hunger is a signal. It reports on the terrain conditions of the moment: the state of the gut, the composition of recent meals, the stress load, the sleep debt, the toxic burden being carried. When those conditions produce persistent hunger and weight gain in a person eating processed food, the report is accurate. Silencing the signal with a weekly injection does not correct the terrain conditions that produced the signal. It overrides the receptor. The person eats less. Weight comes off. The terrain conditions remain what they were. The processed food is still the processed food. The insulin resistance is still the insulin resistance. The sleep debt and the toxic burden are still what they were. The user has lost weight without the terrain corrections that would allow the weight to stay off after the receptor is no longer being overridden.

What the labels also report is what happens when you take the drug for years. Fetal growth reductions and structural abnormalities appear in every animal species tested at clinically relevant exposures.⁸ Thyroid C-cell tumors appear in every rodent lifetime carcinogenicity study at exposures at or below human dosing, with the labels stating that the human relevance is unknown and cannot be determined by clinical studies.⁸ Fracture rates in the Wegovy cardiovascular outcomes trial rose fivefold in women over 65 and quadrupled in patients over 75.⁹ Post-marketing reports across the class include ileus, intestinal obstruction, severe constipation including fecal impaction, and acute pancreatitis including hemorrhagic and necrotizing pancreatitis “sometimes resulting in death.”⁹

The mechanism of cardiovascular benefit, for which Wegovy is now approved, is stated in the label as “not established.”⁹ The mechanism of kidney benefit, for which Ozempic is approved in diabetic chronic kidney disease patients, is stated as “not established.”⁹ The mechanism of action in metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis, for which Wegovy holds accelerated approval, is stated as “not fully understood.”⁹ These are the drugs’ own labels reporting the outcomes and admitting that the pathways producing the outcomes are not known.

The rebound after cessation is documented in the same trial literature. When patients stop the drug, the appetite signal returns, the weight returns, and a substantial share of the weight that returns is not the tissue that was lost. The lean tissue does not come back on the timeline the fat comes back on. The patient stopping semaglutide is not returning to their pre-drug baseline. They are returning to their pre-drug appetite regulation on top of a different body composition, with a gallbladder that may have developed disease during treatment, with a residual antibody response to the injected molecule, and, if the manufacturer’s warning is to be taken seriously, with a five to seven week window during which the drug remains in circulation regardless of whether they are still injecting it.⁹

Growth Signaling

The longevity clinic patient is typically in their forties or fifties. They walked in because they wanted to sleep better, lose the abdominal fat that arrived after forty, and feel the way they felt in their twenties. The clinician told them their growth hormone pulses have declined with age, which is true, and that restoring the pulses is a matter of injecting a peptide combination nightly at bedtime. The two most common are CJC-1295 and ipamorelin, injected together, subcutaneously, before sleep. The clinic bills three thousand dollars a quarter. The patient injects for eighteen months, watches the scale drop three kilos, notices the sleep improve, feels stronger in the gym, and tells friends the peptides changed their life.

This is the reader the growth section is written for. What follows is what the establishment’s own approved-product data show about the mechanism the clinic is activating, and what the terrain reading says the pulses were doing before the clinic overrode them.

Egrifta is an FDA-approved growth hormone releasing hormone analogue manufactured to Good Manufacturing Practice standards. Its generic name is tesamorelin. It is prescribed to reduce excess abdominal fat in HIV-associated lipodystrophy, and it operates through the same mechanism CJC-1295 activates: signaling the pituitary to release growth hormone. In the combined Phase 3 clinical trials submitted to the FDA, 49.5% of patients treated with tesamorelin for 26 weeks and 47.4% of patients treated for 52 weeks developed anti-tesamorelin IgG antibodies. In the subset of patients who experienced hypersensitivity reactions, the antibody rate reached 85.2%. Cross-reactivity to endogenous growth hormone releasing hormone was observed in approximately 60% of patients who developed anti-tesamorelin antibodies. Neutralizing antibodies to tesamorelin and to human GHRH were detected in vitro at week 52 in 10% and 5% of patients respectively.¹⁰

That is the clean end of the growth peptide market. A licensed product, made under regulated manufacturing conditions, produces sensitization in approximately half of patients, with the majority of that sensitization extending to the patient’s own signaling hormone. The label reports the finding and continues the indication.

Charles Richet’s 1913 sensitization mechanism operates in the tesamorelin case at the same level of specificity it operates in the tirzepatide case, but on a different signaling molecule. The tesamorelin label documents the mechanism in half of patients on an approved GHRH analogue over a year. The longevity clinic patient injecting CJC-1295 nightly is being exposed to a synthetic GHRH analogue with a similar mechanism, from a compounded or gray-market supply chain, with an immunogenicity profile that has not been measured because the trials that would measure it do not exist. The inference from the tesamorelin data to the CJC-1295 case is not certainty. It is the reasonable expectation that a lower-purity, aggregate-laden version of the same class of molecule, injected nightly rather than weekly, will produce equal or greater sensitization over an equivalent period.

MK-677, marketed under the name ibutamoren, is the orally active alternative that longevity clinics offer to patients who do not want to inject. It mimics ghrelin rather than GHRH, but it produces the same downstream effect of elevated growth hormone and IGF-1. In the year-long controlled trial in older adults, fat-free mass increased by approximately one kilogram. Strength did not increase. Fasting glucose rose. Insulin sensitivity worsened.¹³ Growth hormone opposes insulin at the metabolic level. When endogenous growth hormone pulses at night in response to the body’s own signaling, this opposition is transient and calibrated to the overnight fasting state. When growth hormone stays elevated continuously in response to a nightly injection or a daily oral secretagogue, the insulin resistance stays elevated continuously. In shorter studies of MK-677, fasting glucose rose sharply within weeks. Case reports describe young users developing frank diabetic-range glucose within a month.

The tesamorelin label carries a warning that the long-term effects of maintaining elevated IGF-1 are unknown, and that new or returning cancers are a concern because growth signals do not selectively grow the tissues the patient wants grown. Growth hormone and IGF-1 drive cellular proliferation across all tissues that carry their receptors. The label does not require the manufacturer to identify which tissues will proliferate. It requires the manufacturer to acknowledge that proliferation is a known consequence of the mechanism the drug is designed to activate.

The paradigm reading returns the essay to the longevity clinic patient. The pulse of endogenous growth hormone is a signal. It reports on the body’s needs at the moment of the pulse: overnight repair, fasted-state fat oxidation, tissue turnover during rest. The decline in pulse amplitude with age is real, but it is not a defect. It reflects a body operating in a different terrain than it operated in at twenty-five: different sleep, different nutritional status, different toxic burden, different energy demand. Injecting a peptide that produces continuous growth hormone elevation is not restoration of the youthful signaling pattern. It is override of the current signal’s calibration, using a synthetic analogue that the body will produce a response to, from a supply chain the patient has no way to characterize.

The patient reports feeling better on the peptide. The scale shows more lean mass on DEXA. The mirror shows a marginally different body composition. What the tesamorelin label admits it does not know is what happens to the pancreas, the thyroid, the tissues that carry the IGF-1 receptor, and the calibration of the patient’s own growth axis after years of override. What the compounded and gray-market versions of these peptides add is what is in the vial, which the analytical chemistry documents is not what the label says.

Repair and Cosmetic Signaling

BPC-157 is a fifteen amino acid peptide the marketing describes as a fragment of a larger protein isolated from human gastric juice. TB-500 is a synthetic fragment marketed as a version of thymosin β4, a peptide involved in tissue repair. Both are injected by athletes, combat sports competitors, and gym populations to accelerate recovery from ligament, tendon, and joint injuries.

The anecdotal reports on these substances are extensive and largely consistent. A nagging shoulder that had resisted eight weeks of rest resolves in three. A grade one tendon strain that would have required a competitive layoff becomes trainable. A grade two ligament tear recovers on a timeline that the athlete’s previous experience of similar injuries did not predict. These reports come from combat athletes, jiu-jitsu practitioners, powerlifters, general orthopedic patients, and clinicians running unlicensed practices, and they have been accumulating for more than a decade. Dismissing them is not honest. Something is happening in the tissue when these substances are injected, and that something is what the users are paying for.

The peer-reviewed human evidence for BPC-157 in particular is thin at best and effectively non-existent for the tissue-healing claims that drive the market. This absence is not neutral. In a regulatory and research ecosystem that funds trials principally where a patented molecule can be brought to market at high margins, substances that cannot be effectively patented and that are already sold cheaply through unregulated channels do not attract trial funding. The absence of studies of BPC-157 for tendinopathy in athletes is not evidence that the substance does not work. It is a predictable feature of who pays for what research and why. This is the same pattern that surrounds every low-cost, off-patent, or unpatentable therapy that competes with expensive interventions. The studies do not exist because the studies would not be profitable. The users are running the real-world trial on themselves and reporting the results into a discourse that the peer-reviewed literature does not enter.

The paradigm concerns in what follows do not rest on denying that the substance produces tissue effects. They rest on two distinctions that stand independent of whether the molecule works exactly as the users report.

The first distinction is between the molecule and the vial. The Belgian analytical work I opened with included thymosin β4, the parent molecule of TB-500, purchased from illegal internet pharmacies of exactly the kind combat athletes and orthopedic patients buy from. The thymosin β4 samples were not among the lowest-purity products in the study, but they came from the same sample set in which every product tested contained inorganic arsenic at up to ten times the parenteral toxicity limit and at least one product contained lead.¹ No peer-reviewed analytical study exists for BPC-157 specifically, and the absence is worth stating plainly. What can be said is that BPC-157 is sold through the same channels, by the same vendors, and under the same “for research use only” framework as the peptides that have been tested. The elemental contamination findings from the tested peptides apply to the peptides sold alongside them by inference from shared supply chain, not by direct measurement.

The athlete whose tendon healed on BPC-157 was injected with the molecule and with whatever else was in the vial. The healing may be real. The arsenic is also real. Both are true at once, and neither undoes the other. The paradigm concern at this level is not that the molecule does not work. The paradigm concern is that the product being injected is not the molecule, and the athlete has no way to know what fraction of the injected volume is the labeled compound, what fraction is other peptides, what fraction is elemental toxicants, and what fraction is bacterial endotoxin. The healing effect the user is buying is being paid for with an accumulation the user cannot see.

The second distinction is between the tissue effect and the terrain question. Even granting that BPC-157 accelerates ligament repair exactly as the anecdotal reports describe, the acceleration operates at the level of the tissue. It does not operate at the level of the reason the tissue was injured. A shoulder injury in an athlete is a signal. It reports that the training load exceeded the recovery capacity, that the tissue was asked to do more than the current terrain could support. The pain and the inflammation are the body’s repair response in action, and they enforce the layoff that allows the repair to complete. Injecting BPC-157 to accelerate return to training does not correct the mismatch between load and recovery. It resolves the tissue-level presentation of the mismatch while the mismatch itself remains in place. The athlete returns to the same load pattern with a repaired tendon, an ongoing sleep debt, an ongoing mineral deficit, and an ongoing training program that was designed for a recovery capacity the athlete does not actually have.

Shelton described this trajectory with particular attention to the young and the athletic. Repeated suppression or acceleration of acute reparative processes, without correction of the underlying terrain conditions producing the injuries, drives the eventual failure of the tissue. The athlete’s shoulder is repaired and injected again for the next flare, then the elbow, then the knee, then the low back. The trajectory does not resolve. It compounds. What was an acute injury manageable with rest becomes a chronic pattern managed with continuous intervention. This is not an argument against tissue repair. It is an argument that tissue repair, in the absence of terrain correction, is not sufficient to stop the sequence.

Combat sports populations are particularly exposed because the underlying terrain conditions are severe by the nature of the sport. Head impacts contribute to a persistent inflammatory load. Training volumes exceed recovery capacity by design. Weight cutting produces cyclical dehydration and electrolyte disturbance. Sleep is disturbed by travel, cortisol, and the stress of competition. The BPC-157 injection may repair the specific tissue site. The terrain conditions that produced the injury remain what they were, and often will produce the next injury within the next training cycle.

The two distinctions run together. The athlete is injecting a solution of uncertain composition into a terrain that was reporting through the injury. The molecule may do what the anecdotal reports say it does. The vial is not the molecule. The tissue is not the terrain. Granting the strongest version of the pro-peptide case, that the molecule works exactly as reported and that the peer-reviewed literature is silent because the ecosystem does not fund honest study of unpatentable substances, the paradigm concerns do not go away. They operate at levels the tissue-level effect does not reach.

The cosmetic branch of the peptide market provides the most vivid example of what the purity findings look like in a single product. Melanotan II is a synthetic peptide analogue of alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone. It is injected to darken the skin without sun exposure. The label claim of the online product is 10 milligrams per vial. When Norwegian researchers purchased Melanotan II vials from three online shops in 2015 and analyzed them by liquid chromatography with mass spectrometry, every vial contained less than the labeled amount, ranging from 4.32 to 8.84 milligrams. Two of the three shops’ vials contained unknown impurities at 4.1% to 5.9% of the total peptide content. The purity of the identified product ran between 74.8% and 96.2%.¹⁴

The pigment system that Melanotan II activates is the pigment system that melanoma uses. Case reports in dermatology literature describe the eruption of new atypical moles and the darkening of existing moles in Melanotan II users. Habbema and colleagues published a case series describing dysplastic nevus eruption and melanoma temporally associated with Melanotan II use.¹⁵ Additional case reports describe rhabdomyolysis with creatine phosphokinase peaking above 17,000 international units per liter, ischemic priapism requiring surgical shunting, renal infarction, and posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome. The tanning was the effect the user was buying. The pigment system activation is a real effect the substance produces on real tissue. The additional consequences arrive because the pigment and vascular effects operate on tissues the user did not intend to target, from a vial that contained an uncertain fraction of the labeled compound and an uncharacterized set of contaminants at up to 6% of the peptide content.

The Vial and the Regulator

The peptide supply chain the three category readings converge on is not a single market. It is three markets with different manufacturing standards and different documented failure modes, and the paradigm concerns operate differently across them.

The first tier is the FDA-approved products manufactured to Good Manufacturing Practice standards. These are the Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound, Egrifta, and Trulicity vials dispensed by licensed pharmacies from branded manufacturers. Contamination of the sort the analytical chemistry finds in gray-market products is not the concern at this tier. What is the concern is what the manufacturers themselves document in their labels: the sensitization findings, the thyroid tumors in every rodent lifetime study, the mechanisms of benefit the labels state are not established, the long-term consequences the labels admit are insufficient to characterize.

The second tier is compounded products from state-licensed pharmacies operating under section 503A of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. During the 2022 to 2024 GLP-1 shortage this tier reached one to two million American patients on compounded semaglutide, at price points of $150 to $300 per month against $1,000 or more for the branded equivalent.⁵ The compounded products are not FDA-approved and 503A pharmacies are not required to report adverse events to the FDA unless they are also outsourcing facilities under section 503B. Documented failures at this tier include the 2012 New England Compounding Center outbreak and the more recent Tailor Made Compounding case, in which a Kentucky compounding pharmacy pleaded guilty to distributing unapproved peptides including BPC-157 and was ordered to forfeit approximately $1.79 million.

The third tier is the gray-market vendors selling peptides under a “for research use only” label. These vendors do not compound. They import bulk peptide of variable purity from overseas manufacturers, repackage it, and ship it to customers with instructions on injection dosing and reconstitution. The Belgian and Hungarian analytical work applies most directly to this tier. Janvier and colleagues at Sciensano and Ghent tested ten of the most falsified peptides purchased from illegal internet pharmacies, including ipamorelin, CJC-1295, thymosin β4, oxytocin, sermorelin, and Melanotan II. The cysteine-containing peptides in the sample ran between 5% and 75% purity. Every product tested contained inorganic arsenic, at up to ten times the International Council for Harmonisation parenteral toxicity limit, and at least one sample was contaminated with lead.¹ Online semaglutide from illegal sellers, tested separately by Ashraf and colleagues, ran between 7.7% and 14.37% purity against a 99% label claim, with bacterial endotoxin detected in every sample tested.⁶ A companion study of different online samples found products exceeding labeled content by 29% to 39%.⁷ Arsenic and lead sit in the pharmacopoeial category of class one elemental impurities, the class regulated in injectable products at strict daily exposure limits precisely because they are known human toxicants. The gray-market products exceeded those limits by a factor of ten.

The regulatory record is where the establishment prosecutes itself across all three tiers.

The FDA’s Category 2 placement of BPC-157, CJC-1295, and ipamorelin in September 2023 was based on the agency’s own assessment that these substances presented significant safety risks in areas including immunogenicity, peptide-related impurities, and complexities in characterizing the active ingredient. The agency’s stated concern for BPC-157 was that it lacked sufficient information to know whether the drug would cause harm when administered to humans.¹¹ In July 2026 the FDA’s Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee voted 8 to 6 with one abstention to recommend that BPC-157 be added to the Section 503A Bulk Drug Substances List, which would create a legal compounding pathway for the substance. The vote was against the FDA staff’s own written recommendation. The panel voted against staff for BPC-157, KPV, TB-500, and MOTS-c across two days. The recommendation is non-binding, the formal notice-and-comment rulemaking process has not begun, and no rule adding these substances to the 503A list had issued at the time of writing.¹² The scientific concerns the FDA articulated in 2023 have not been withdrawn. What the July 2026 vote reflects is that inside the establishment there is now open contest between the compounding industry’s push for legal peptide access and the agency’s own scientific assessment of the substances.

In September 2025 the FDA escalated enforcement against unapproved products. The agency issued more than fifty warning letters to sellers of compounded and gray-market GLP-1s and other peptides, with most sent on September 9, 2025, and the total reaching more than fifty-five by September 16. The letters targeted semaglutide, tirzepatide, retatrutide, BPC-157, and various selective androgen receptor modulators.¹⁶ The campaign continued into 2026 with additional batches of warning letters to telehealth companies marketing compounded GLP-1s. A published content analysis of 141 warning letters issued to compounding pharmacies between 2017 and 2022 found adulterated drug products cited in 130 of them, misbranding in 103, and unapproved new drug status in 42.¹⁷

The criminal record against the third-tier gray-market vendors has developed rapidly. In June 2025, FDA agents executed a search warrant on the warehouse of Amino Asylum, one of the largest gray-market peptide vendors in the United States. Its founders Matthew Kawa and Jennifer Stechkober pleaded guilty in the Northern District of Indiana on December 10, 2025 to introducing unapproved drugs into interstate commerce and illegally importing merchandise. The company had sold peptides labeled “Research Use Only” to more than 54,000 customers, importing products from China and India while providing dosing instructions and injection supplies that indicated intent for human use. The Department of Justice’s sentencing memorandum noted that some of the products marketed as selective androgen receptor modulators had tested positive for testosterone. On July 30, 2026, Kawa was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison, ordered to forfeit $5 million in proceeds, and required to pay more than $78,000 in restitution. Stechkober received 16 months. The presiding judge described the business as leaving “an incredible trail of harm” for its customers.²¹

The regulatory concern about injectable compounding has a specific historical anchor. In 2012 the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Massachusetts distributed contaminated preservative-free methylprednisolone acetate to twenty states. The contamination produced 753 documented fungal infections and at least 64 deaths, with the primary pathogen identified as Exserohilum rostratum. FDA testing of one affected lot found 83 of 321 vials containing “greenish black foreign matter” and 100% microbial growth in the 50 vials cultured. Approximately 14,000 patients were exposed. Barry Cadden, the owner of the compounding center, was convicted on charges including racketeering and mail fraud, initially sentenced to nine years and resentenced to fourteen and a half years after appeal. Glenn Chin, the supervisory pharmacist, was convicted on all counts and sentenced to more than eight years, later also pleading no contest to involuntary manslaughter in Michigan.¹⁸ The Drug Quality and Security Act of 2013 created the modern 503A and 503B regulatory framework in direct response to the outbreak.

The NECC precedent is what happens when injectable compounding fails. Sixty-four people died. The compounder went to prison. The framework the FDA is currently using to prosecute the peptide sellers exists because of what happened in Framingham in 2012.

The compounded and gray-market peptide supply chain now operates at scales the NECC supply chain never approached. The overdose signal from poison control centers rose from approximately 200 semaglutide-related calls per year before 2020 to nearly 3,000 in the first eleven months of 2023, a more than fifteen-fold rise driven substantially by dosing errors on compounded product dispensed in vials rather than prefilled pens. Total GLP-1 receptor agonist exposures reported to poison centers rose from 2,284 in the first half of 2023 to 3,866 in the first half of 2024, a 69% year-over-year increase.²⁰

The Vial

The person injecting a peptide is injecting into a terrain. The terrain is what the industry, the regulator, and the compounder cannot see. The terrain is what the label admits it cannot characterize. The terrain is what the peptide is, in every category of use, designed to act on without correcting.

The weight came off. The tendon healed. The skin darkened. The mirror showed a marginally different body. Each of these effects is real, and the essay does not undo them by naming them. The paradigm question is a different question. It runs at two levels the tissue-level effect does not reach. The first level is what is actually in the vial being injected, and the answer at that level is that no user injecting from the compounded or gray-market supply knows what they are injecting, because the analytical chemistry that has been done shows purities between 5% and 75%, arsenic at ten times the parenteral toxicity limit, endotoxin in every sample tested, and unknown impurities the tests could identify but not characterize. The second level is what the body was reporting through the symptom the injection resolved, and the answer at that level is that the report was accurate, the terrain conditions producing it were what they were, and resolving the report does not correct the conditions.

What accumulates during the masking is what the labels admit they cannot fully characterize. In the tirzepatide labels, sensitization to the injected molecule with cross-reactivity to the patient’s own signaling hormones, in more than half of treated patients. In the tesamorelin label, the same sensitization pattern in half of patients with GHRH cross-reactivity in the majority of those. In the semaglutide labels, structural changes at the tissue level in three animal species and a mechanism of cardiovascular and kidney benefit that the manufacturers acknowledge is not established. In the MK-677 literature, chronic insulin resistance and rising blood sugar as the direct consequence of the growth signal being turned on around the clock. In the BPC and TB-500 literature, effects on tissue repair that the users report and the peer-reviewed record does not investigate, alongside effects on angiogenesis that the animal literature documents and the long-term human trials do not exist to assess.

What accumulates on top of the pharmacological effects is what is in the vial. In the FDA-approved products, a molecule the label acknowledges will produce sensitization in a substantial majority of patients. In the compounded products, an unknown percentage of the labeled molecule, with bacterial endotoxin detected in every sample the peer-reviewed literature has tested. In the gray-market products, a solution contaminated with inorganic arsenic at up to ten times the injectable toxicity limit, plus lead in some samples, plus unknown impurities at percentages the analytical chemistry has documented but never fully characterized, plus, in one documented case, testosterone in a product marketed as something else.

The Paradigm Peptides case handled 54,000 customers over the years the business operated. Each of those customers received a vial in the mail with a “for research use only” label. Some of the products marketed as selective androgen receptor modulators were later found to contain testosterone. At least one customer developed steroid-induced psychosis attributed to a product he believed was something else. The founders pleaded guilty. The lead defendant was sentenced to seventy months. The judge described the business as leaving an incredible trail of harm.

That is one vendor. There are others. The gray-market peptide supply chain is not a marginal phenomenon operating at the fringe of the culture. It is a market that reached, on the compounded semaglutide side alone, one to two million American patients at peak, and on the research chemical side, tens of thousands of customers per vendor across dozens of vendors. Each user drew the vial into an insulin syringe, at night, in a bathroom or a bedroom, after work. The vial came in the mail. The label said research use only. The forum said inject twice a day. The tendon felt better in three weeks. The scale read two kilos lighter after eight weeks. Both are real. The user did not know what percentage of what they were injecting was the labeled compound. They did not know whether the solution contained arsenic at ten times the parenteral limit, or endotoxin at levels sufficient to produce systemic inflammatory response, or the wrong molecule entirely. They did not know whether the sensitization their body was developing to the injected foreign protein would, in five years or ten, cross-react with the signaling molecules their body needed to regulate its own appetite, its own growth, its own repair. They did not know whether the terrain conditions the injection did not correct would produce the next injury in the next training cycle, or the next weight gain in the year after cessation.

What they knew was what the label told them. The label told them this is what your body already makes.

The Belgian researchers found inorganic arsenic in every sample. In one case a customer’s SARM was testosterone. The vials, in every tier of this market, are labeled the same as the ones being drawn into the syringes tonight.

How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old

Imagine you have a bicycle. The chain keeps falling off because it’s loose. You could pedal harder each time, and the harder pedaling would get you moving again, and sometimes it would even snap the chain back on for a little while. So the pedaling works, in a way. You do move forward.

Peptides are like pedaling harder.

The user gets moving. The tendon heals faster. The scale reads lighter. That is real. The peptide is doing something.

But the chain is still loose. Nobody has fixed the chain. And every time you pedal harder, you wear the pedals down a little bit, and your legs get tired, and after a while your body starts building up little defenders against the pedaling itself. Some of those defenders sometimes get confused and start attacking the parts of your body that talk in the same voice as the pedals.

There’s another problem too. The pedals people are pedaling with don’t come from a bike shop. They come from someone in another country who put them together in a garage. When scientists took some of the pedals apart to see what was inside, they found bits of metal that shouldn’t be in pedals at all. Some of the pedals had ten times more of a poison called arsenic than any pedal is ever supposed to have.

So the pedaling works. The bicycle moves. That is not a trick. That is real.

But nobody fixed the loose chain. The pedals are wearing down. Your legs are getting tired. Your body is learning to attack itself. And the pedals themselves have poison in them.

The bicycle is still moving. Just for a while longer than you might think.

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In Print

The Unbekoming library is available in paperback, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide. The shelf begins with the paradigm question underneath everything else — No Virus, the isolation problem, the collapse of virology’s foundational claims, and a disease-by-disease reappraisal — and moves through the suppressed compounds mainstream medicine set aside: The DMSO Book, Chlorine Dioxide: The Forbidden Remedy, The Iodine Book, and The Hydrogen Peroxide Book. Two more recover what’s still on the kitchen shelf: Baking Soda and The Castor Oil Book. Two more recover the minerals modern soil, water, and processing quietly stripped from the diet: The Magnesium Handbook and The Boron Book. Sitting alongside these is No Contagion, co-authored with Jamie Andrews — the case against germ theory itself, catalogued through 258 failed contagion experiments.

The critique books cover what medicine, dentistry, psychiatry, and veterinary practice have become. The Unvaccinated treats the completely unvaccinated as a comparison group across twenty chapters and five appendices. Medicalized Motherhood follows a woman through 123 documented interventions from teenage pill to postpartum discharge. Drilling for Profit treats cavities, gum disease, and crooked teeth as the dietary problem they are. What Your Vet Can’t Tell You applies the same critique to pets. Escape from Psychiatry documents the fabrication of the DSM and the specific damage of every major psychiatric drug class. The Vitamin K Injection covers what happens in the first hours of a newborn’s life.

The full shelf is at lulu.com/spotlight/unbekoming. A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will — the skeptical relative, the friend who won’t click a link but might open a book, the visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.

References

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2. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Mounjaro (tirzepatide) injection, for subcutaneous use. Prescribing Information. Eli Lilly and Company. Revised December 2025. NDA 215866.

3. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Zepbound (tirzepatide) injection, for subcutaneous use. Prescribing Information. Eli Lilly and Company. Revised February 2026. NDA 217806.

4. Shelton HM. Natural Hygiene: Man’s Pristine Way of Life. Dr. Shelton’s Health School; 1968.

5. Kroon L. Compounded GLP-1 pricing and market scale during shortage period. UCSF School of Pharmacy commentary. Cited in KFF Health News, October 2024.

6. Ashraf AR, Mackey, Vida RG, et al. Analysis of illicitly distributed online semaglutide. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2024;26:e65440. doi:10.2196/65440

7. Ashraf AR, Mackey, Vida RG, et al. Content analysis of online-purchased semaglutide products. JAMA Network Open. 2024;7(8):e2428280.

8. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Ozempic (semaglutide) injection, for subcutaneous use. Prescribing Information. Novo Nordisk. Revised January 2025. NDA 209637.

9. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Wegovy (semaglutide) injection, for subcutaneous use. Prescribing Information. Novo Nordisk. Revised August 2025. NDA 215256.

10. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Egrifta (tesamorelin for injection). Prescribing Information. Theratechnologies Inc. NDA 22-505. Approved November 2010.

11. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Interim 503A Bulks List Category 2 Designation. Federal Register notice. September 2023.

12. U.S. Food and Drug Administration Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee. Meeting materials and voting record, July 23-24, 2026. Available at https://www.fda.gov/media/193711/download

13. Nass R, Pezzoli SS, Oliveri MC, et al. Effects of an oral ghrelin mimetic on body composition and clinical outcomes in healthy older adults: a randomized trial. Annals of Internal Medicine. 2008;149(9):601-611.

14. Breindahl T, Evans-Brown M, Hindersson P, et al. Identification and characterization by LC-UV-MS/MS of melanotan II skin-tanning products sold illegally on the Internet. Drug Testing and Analysis. 2015;7(2):164-172. doi:10.1002/dta.1655

15. Habbema L, Halk AB, Neumann M, Bergman W. Risks of unregulated use of alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormone analogues: a review. International Journal of Dermatology. 2017;56(10):975-980.

16. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Warning Letters to GLP-1 and peptide sellers, September 2025. Available at fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-criminal-investigations/warning-letters. See also Wilson Sonsini analysis, “FDA Sends Warning Letters to More Than 50 GLP-1 Compounders and Manufacturers,” September 2025.

17. Content analysis of FDA warning letters to compounding pharmacies, 2017-2022. PubMed Central PMC9666930.

18. United States v. Barry J. Cadden. U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Case No. 14-cr-10363. Verdict and sentencing records, 2017-2018.

19. United States v. Tailor Made Compounding LLC. U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Kentucky. Guilty plea and forfeiture order of $1,788,906.82. Reported in DOJ enforcement records.

20. America’s Poison Centers, cited via National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, “Poison Control Centers Report Sharp Increase in Calls Related to Semaglutide Medications,” March 2024, and Scripps News, “America’s Poison Centers: 69% rise in calls from drugs that cause weight loss,” August 2024. National Poison Data System quarterly reports.

21. United States v. Matthew Kawa and Jennifer Stechkober. U.S. District Court, Northern District of Indiana. Guilty pleas December 10, 2025. Sentencing July 30, 2026 (Kawa, 70 months; Stechkober, 16 months). Case documented in CBS News, “Judge sentences peptide vendor to nearly 6 years in prison,” July 2026, and DOJ public case information.