Untested drugs called peptides are enjoying a surge in popularity — driven largely by social media influencers. Now, some lawmakers want the government to endorse peptide use by military troops and veterans.
Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, has filed two pieces of legislation promoting peptides, which supporters claim can build strength, delay aging, and treat PTSD and other conditions.
She added language to the House version of the annual defense policy bill to keep the Defense Department from putting any legally available peptide on its banned-supplement list. And she introduced separate legislation that would order the Department of Veterans Affairs to study peptide therapies for veterans.
Peptides are short chains of amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — that can tell cells and organs what to do. The body makes many naturally, while others are made synthetically for medicines and supplements.
Some that have FDA approval play major roles in healthcare, such as insulin and the wildly popular GLP-1 drugs used for weight loss and to treat type 2 diabetes.
But a host of other peptides promoted by various influencers haven't passed the lengthy and expensive clinical trials that lead to FDA approval and show they are safe and work as intended. About nine out of 10 drugs that go through that process never make it to market.
Because they haven't been approved by the FDA for use as medicine, many popular wellness peptides are sold as research chemicals labeled "not for human use." But they're promoted on social media and by wellness clinics and online vendors for supposed abilities such as healing injuries quickly, building muscle, improving skin tone, and slowing aging.
Mace points to the GLP-1s, which emerging evidence shows have a host of potential benefits, such as treating addiction for alcohol and even gambling. She said many other peptides show the same kind of promise.
"Why do we have to wait a decade for a study to come through that's going to benefit some pharmaceutical company when they're available on the market right now?" she said in an interview. "Plenty of people have used them and had success using them."
She said that she uses several herself and reeled off a list of half a dozen she's taken, mainly to help with PTSD. They include two that make up the combination known as the "Wolverine Stack," named for a comic book and movie character whose superpower is fast healing and regeneration.
"I've been using those and found them pretty helpful to me personally," she said. "And so, when you think about the worst conditions that a soldier is under, there's no reason why we should be denying them these sorts of things."
Her views echo those of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said he wants the FDA to end what he referred to as its "war on peptides."
Earlier this year on Joe Rogan's podcast, Kennedy said he -- like Rogan -- has used them.
"I'm a big fan of peptides," he said. "I've used them myself and used them with really good effect on a couple of injuries."
Under Kennedy, the FDA has been taking steps that could lead to it allowing compounding pharmacies to produce untested or lightly-tested peptides. FDA scientists advised against expanding the availability of the untested drugs, but an FDA advisory committee endorsed the idea in July, saying half a dozen should be added to the compounding list. The Associated Press said the committee included several members with ties to clinics, telehealth companies, and online promoters who profit from the peptide boom.
Groups including the American Medical Association are leery of the idea of legalizing peptides that haven't gone through the traditional testing system for FDA approval. And some say encouraging troops to use them is a bad idea.
"They're a particularly vulnerable patient community for performance enhancing drugs that are unsafe and unproved," said Shabbir Imber Safdar, executive director of the Partnership for Safe Medicines, which studies the safety of the pharmaceutical supply chain.
"People in the service want to achieve maximum performance as individuals who are often physically in demand," he said, "and these drugs - and before it, various forms of unsafe steroids - have been used by service members in order to achieve peak physical condition, but it's very dangerous."
Buyers often get the untested peptides from a Wild West of sources, and one thing Safdar and Mace agree on is they'd like to see the pipeline for peptides become safer. But they have significantly different thoughts on how to do that.
Mace notes that many users obtain peptides through sources with unknown supply chains. She says having compounding pharmacies sell them, which is the direction the FDA seems to be taking, would make the sources of the drugs clearer.
Safdar, though, says compounding pharmacies aren't regulated like pharmaceutical companies and allowing them to sell the peptides doesn't ensure the products will be safe.
"The ingredients for these peptides are coming from primarily a lot of Chinese manufacturers, some of whom have been linked to previously making fentanyl and fentanyl precursors that have killed hundreds of thousands of Americans," he said. "Some of them are FDA inspected, some of them are not, and the compounders who buy ingredients sometimes buy from non-FDA registered factories that have never seen an FDA inspector."
An estimated one out of every 250 potential drugs that goes into pre-clinical testing eventually proves safe and effective enough to be approved. Even those that make it to clinical trials with humans have only about a 10 percent chance.
Safdar calls the surging interest in the unregulated peptides part of a trend to discount scientific evidence and value charisma and persuasiveness.
"You don't even know the short-term effects because you've not had any human trials," he said. "But the long-term effects are going to be particularly mysterious, and there's definitely sterility risks with how they're being made now."
Mace's VA peptides bill is sitting in a committee now. She says its chances of passage are unclear, but that it was important to get the conversation started. Meanwhile, the final wording of the bill that would allow service members to use untested peptides still has to be negotiated between the House and Senate.
This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.
