Gray market peptides are the new Silicon Valley party drug.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

In an industry known for pushing the bounds of human innovation, tech elites are now trying to push the bounds of their own bodies.

The hot new biohacking trend is injectable peptides, sort of like the ones found in GLP1 medications like OZMPIC.

But these are not approved by the FDA. These gray

market peptides, largely from Chinese manufacturers, are being used by tech workers not just to

lose weight, but to optimize their health and performance in all manner of ways. Independent journalist

Jasmine Sun recently wrote about this

for The New York Times. Most folks these days actually know peptide as the P-N-GLP-1s, which are

glucagon-like peptide agonists. So the gray market Chinese peptides, people are buying and

injecting, have all sorts of purported benefits from

weight loss to fitness to productivity. But I think because of the eczempic craze, folks started first

thinking, can I get cheaper a zempic straight from Chinese manufacturers rather than buying the more

expensive kind? And then once they did that, they wondered, well, maybe there's a magic shot I can buy for skincare or for productivity or for all of these other benefits. And so people

are now experimenting with a much wider range of less tested, non-FDA-approved peptides that

promise to do things like increase your muscle growth, help you sleep better, all sorts of

things. So we've been calling these gray market peptides because, as you note, they have not been

approved by the FDA. Where do they kind of fall in the regulatory landscape?

It's a very interesting landscape. Yeah. So personal use is legal in the sense that an individual, an adult in the U.S. can inject themselves with whatever they want in this case. They're not like on the DEA list or anything like that. However, when people are buying these peptides from Chinese drug manufacturers, they're usually purchasing them as quote-unquote research chemicals. And so these are

meant to actually be sold to scientists who are doing science experiments with the peptides.

They are often explicitly labeled on the vials, quote-unquote, not for human use. However,

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