Welcome to the world of Chinese peptides, where American consumers inject themselves with research chemicals in pursuit of weight loss, muscle recovery, and the elusive promise of optimization.

Today on ChinaTalk, we’re trying out a new narrative podcast format to investigate the explosive rise of gray market peptides and the Chinese pharmaceutical ecosystem that turned this biohacking trend into a market worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Please let us know if you want more episodes like this.

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What are Peptides?

Jasmine Sun: People are getting so into this trend in Silicon Valley that they’re even hosting parties — peptide raves, for example — sponsored by suppliers, where they teach you how to mix and inject your own peptides and then throw a rave with loud techno and organic chemistry structures projected behind the DJ.

I went to one in December just to check out the underground peptide scene, and it was actually pretty fun. It was really just a party with a high school chemistry lab beforehand.

Lily Ottinger: That was Jasmine Sun, author of the New York Times article about peptides that inspired this podcast. Before we go further, we need to understand what we’re actually talking about when we say “Chinese peptides.” We talked to Hamilton Morris, the science journalist and chemist known for his Vice series on psychoactive drugs, and learned that the word “peptide” is almost meaninglessly broad.

Hamilton Morris: A peptide is a string of amino acids — more than two amino acids joined together and fewer than fifty, at which point it becomes a polypeptide. Within that umbrella, you have a borderline infinite number of potential pharmacologies. It’s almost like saying, “What do you think of pills?”

There are opioid peptides, dissociative peptides, all kinds of hormonally modulating peptides, and peptides that have potential performance-enhancing effects in an athletic context.

Lily Ottinger: To put this in perspective, insulin is a peptide (actually, it’s two peptides). Ozempic’s active ingredient, semaglutide, is a peptide. The growth hormones in your body are peptides. When we talk about Chinese peptides, we’re talking about a vast universe of different substances with wildly different effects — from FDA-approved