In 2006, a biotech firm thought that they had discovered the holy grail of human performance.

They had a compound that could elevate growth hormone for days with a single injection.

But they abruptly shut the entire program down.

Why? Because a healthy subject died of a heart attack.

That drug was C.J.C. 1295.

And today, that exact same compound is being sold by the gallon on the internet to biohackers

and 20-year-old lifters trying to get jacked.

Welcome back to the Barboh Medicine podcast. I'm Dr. Jordan Feigenbaum, and today we're going to do a forensic audit of the entire peptide market. They're often billed to be safer and more effective than anabolic steroids, and these compounds have been moving from the underground forums into mainstream longevity clinics, and we need to look past the hype. Now, our goal today isn't to dismiss peptides out of hand, but to apply the same standard we use for everything else. What does the human data actually show? Are the results meaningful, or are we just looking at mechanisms in petri dishes? And to help us separate the signal from the noise, I'm joined by the second most handsome doctor in North America, Dr. Austin Baraki. Now, Austin, before we get into these specific molecules,

we have to address why this topic is blowing up right now. In late 2023, the FDA essentially

declared war on the peptide supply chain, moving dozens of popular compounds to a restricted list.

Now, there's a massive amount of confusion here regarding what is actually legal, what is

banned, and what is just plain dangerous. To set the stage, we need to distinguish between three different bodies, the DEA, the FDA, and WADA. Austin, can you break down the difference for our listeners between a drug being scheduled for criminal activity versus a drug being restricted by the FDA for safety? Yeah, I think a lot of the drugs that people think of as being, quote, unquote unquote illegal are in that list of what are called

scheduled controlled substances. The DEA is kind of responsible for that. There is a kind of a tiered

classification of one through five. And these relate to varying degrees of abuse potential

addiction versus potential medical use and the degree of like monitoring that might be needed if somebody

is to use some of these depending on what level they're scheduled at.

These are things on the extreme like heroin, for example.

Even cocaine technically has some legitimate medical uses still today.

Testosterone is unfortunately on this list.

I don't really think it should be, but it is.

Xanax definitely should be on this list, opioids, things like that. These are things that, A, require a special DEA license, like one that I have, to prescribe, you know, within certain restrictions and limitations and oversight regulation. But possession of these without a prescription is usually considered a crime. And now, if you contrast that with a lot of these peptides, the DEA is not really paying attention to these at the moment. They're not scheduled. They're not on this list. There's not like a way that somebody with a DEA license can specifically prescribe you BPC or any one of these peptides. They're just not on that list at all. So what you're saying is that the DEA isn't kicking down your door for having BPC 157, but the FDA

has effectively nuked the supply chain. In recent years, you could get these from compounding

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