In buildings scattered between Shenzhen, Changsha and Beijing, Chinese salespeople remotely sell substances that many of them would never dare to inject into their bodies. Their merchandise: peptides, these short chains of amino acids presented online as miracle solutions for sleeping better, losing weight, boosting your memory, healing faster or even rejuvenating your skin. The promise of a perfect body, delivered in freeze-dried bottles.
The explosion of this market owes enormously to the global success of GLP-1 type weight loss drugs, such as semaglutide or tirzepatide. Their effectiveness has paved the way for a broader fascination with peptide-based therapies, seen as the future of more targeted, gentler medicine. In reality, most of these compounds are banned for human use by Western health authorities, or simply unaffordable through regulated medical channels.
Result: demand is shifting towards online sellers, largely based in China. Former paper traders or suppliers of pharmaceutical raw materials converted, there are nearly a thousand of them today targeting foreign customers. Competition is raging and prices are falling drastically: a few dozen dollars are enough to obtain doses that cost more than ten times more in the United States.
On TikTok, Telegram or WhatsApp, influencers and biohackers budding touts BPC-157, also called “Wolverine’s drug”, thanks to its supposedly regenerative effects, or Pinealon, supposed to boost sleep and memory. Within the so-called communities of “looksmaxxing”we experiment, we microdose, and we share injection tutorials. Peptides come in powder form, to be reconstituted yourself, often without any medical supervision, according to the Financial Times.
Behind this proliferation of sellers lies a highly concentrated supply chain: a handful of factories produce the majority of substances, before they pass through several carefully opaque intermediaries. Fictitious addresses, unreachable numbers, cryptocurrency payments: everything is designed to be untraceable if these molecules were to trigger unwanted side effects.
Chinese authorities are mainly cracking down on domestic sales. The peptides sent to the West are almost impossible to find on the local market. Those who export them often refuse to touch them. “I’m overweight, but I would never touch thatconfides one of them, laughing. It’s Westerners who are obsessed with it. I just sell.”
Doctors are concerned about this trend towards self-medication. Incomplete purity tests, risks of contamination, unknown transport conditions, buying peptides without a prescription is like playing Russian roulette with your health.
