Founder Wellness

Silicon Valley’s New Favourite Drug

Are peptides safe? It depends entirely on which peptide you are talking about, who manufactured it, and whether you

By Conor Healy

May 5, 2026

Are peptides safe? It depends entirely on which peptide you are talking about, who manufactured it, and whether you bought it from a doctor or a Discord server in China. That last option is more common than you might think.

At a Fourth of July party in San Francisco last year, a group of tech workers got talking about their Chinese peptide dealers. Not ironically. As normal conversation, the way people compare gym routines or productivity apps. Jayden Clark, a self-described gym bro who had seen injection trends come and go in bodybuilding, had not expected to hear about them from AI researchers. But there it was. Everyone at the party had a source. US imports of hormone and peptide compounds from China nearly doubled in 2025, reaching $328 million in the first three quarters alone. Online advertising of unauthorised peptide formulations grew nearly eightfold between 2022 and 2024, according to Gerard Olson, director of research at LegitScript. The global peptide therapeutics market is projected to exceed $75 billion by 2030.

Most of the compounds driving that growth have no FDA approval for human use.

What Peptides Are and Why Everyone Wants Them

Peptides are short chains of amino acids that act as signalling molecules, regulating everything from hormones to inflammation to metabolism. Your body already makes them. Insulin is a peptide. Oxytocin is a peptide. The synthetic versions now circulating through Silicon Valley Discord servers are a different proposition.

At the regulated end sit GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, FDA-approved weight loss treatments with decades of clinical data behind them. These are safe. These work. Then there is everything else: BPC-157 for muscle repair, epitalon for sleep and longevity, retatrutide for weight loss despite still being in clinical trials, and melanotan II, which gives you a tan without sun exposure. One OpenAI researcher publicly described off-label oxytocin as “Ozempic for autism.”

The appeal is not complicated. As Jayden Clark put it to the New York Times: “Why be really consistent at the gym for six weeks if I could instead work 16 hours at my research job?” The peptide is the shortcut. In a culture that rewards optimisation above almost everything else, the shortcut is the point.

The Supply Chain Runs Through Discord

The route from Chinese factory to human bloodstream bypasses every regulatory checkpoint that normally governs drug delivery, and it is remarkably easy to navigate.

Ezra Marcus, reporting for New York Magazine, traced it himself. He joined a Discord server, found a representative from a Chinese manufacturer, and bought ten five-milligram vials of retatrutide for $150 in Bitcoin. The same compound through a legitimate US intermediary costs around $200 per vial. Two weeks later the package arrived, stamped “for research purposes only,” a phrase that functions, as the New York Times described it, as “a thin legal fiction.”

Users dissolve the powder in sterile water, fill an insulin syringe bought from Amazon, and inject. A 2023 study found that a significant percentage of peptides sold online contained impurities or differed from their stated contents. In mid-2025, multiple people were hospitalised after receiving peptide injections at an anti-aging event, with investigations pointing to contamination.

A San Francisco supplier told the New York Times that its average customer was “closer to a Starbucks barista,” and that tech workers were the early adopters “because of the willingness to take ridiculous risks.”

Are Peptides Safe?

For GLP-1 drugs the answer is broadly yes, backed by decades of trials. For almost everything else circulating in Silicon Valley, the honest answer is that nobody knows, because the studies have not been done.

Eric Topol, cardiologist and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told the Good Work documentary: “If they really were good citizen scientists, they would know what the criteria are: randomised, placebo-controlled trials; peer-reviewed publications independent of the company. We don’t have any of those studies for most of these peptides.”

Dr Aaron Kesselheim, a Harvard Medical School professor and expert on medical regulation, was equally direct with the New York Times. “I think these people are doing things that are bad for their health based on the evidence, which is that there is none.”

The believers are unbothered. David Petersen, tech investor and co-founder of Flexport, has used peptides since 2018 and describes a New York biohacker meetup where each week someone brings something new and everyone injects it. He compared the atmosphere, cheerfully, to “a bunch of heroin addicts.” Tori Pastore, a San Francisco marketing consultant who hosted a peptide-themed rave, started taking retatrutide after her insurance refused to cover Ozempic because her BMI was 34.7 rather than the required 35. She dealt with severe side effects for months. She told the Good Work documentary it was worth it.

Max Marchione, co-founder of health startup Superpower, predicts peptides will become a trillion-dollar category. “Most things that are new start fringe and then slowly become mainstream,” he said. Dr Paul Abramson, a concierge doctor in San Francisco, told the New York Times he saw a significant uptick in peptide use in 2025, particularly among young men in tech, with patients microdosing GLP-1s for everything from alcoholism to excessive gaming.

The Business Case Taking Shape

Venture capital is already moving into the space. Startups including Peptide Sciences and Tailor Made Compounding are attracting investment from founders who see professionalising access as the play, building regulated supply chains before the FDA is forced to act.

For anyone building in health, pharma, or consumer wellness, the peptide market is a case study in demand forming faster than regulation can follow. The compounds are already in millions of bodies. The supply chain is established. The question is what it becomes when regulatory scrutiny arrives, and whether the companies inside it have built something defensible or something built entirely on a gap that will eventually close.

The people currently injecting powders from Discord servers are, in a meaningful sense, running the first wave of market validation for what may eventually be a legitimate industry. Whether they are the first crazy guy to drive a car, or the first person to give their baby opium, as one reporter in the Good Work documentary put it, is a question clinical science will take another decade to answer.

In the meantime, everyone in San Francisco has a peptide dealer. The question is whether they got theirs from a doctor, a Discord server, or a party on the Fourth of July.