Chinese Peptides Are Bad, Actually
Don't take drugs that no one understands
No, “Chinese Peptides” are probably not a good idea, regardless of whether they are placebos or not. But what bothers me even more than faulty drugs? Fauly epistemics.
For starters, it’s better to bucket interventions by target, not modality. Eg glp1s vs peptides.
The difference between supplements and drugs isn’t that one has efficacy and tox and the other has none, but rather 2 sets of regulatory pathways and marketing norms.
The first big biologic was a peptide (insulin). When the field moved fastest it was on the backs of doctors and patients just trying stuff in humans early and recording results. This occasionally led to some awful outcomes which is why there are rules now, but maybe current tradeoffs are wrong.
For self-experimentation to provide useful signals though it needs to be recorded in a controlled trustworthy way which isn’t really happening. The current peptide thing is more of a cultural/political thing of people opting into a (much) higher risk regulatory regime. I think some middle ground is surely what they’d prefer and it’s a signal people should listen to about relaxing some self-experimentation.
I think Matt Levine has a joke thought experiment about the “dumb investment license” — that you could get rid of qualified investor laws for private companies and just require anybody who invests in some crypto scam to sign a big one sheet of paper that says “I’m dumb for making this investment” then lets them do the investment. Something like that would better for peptides where you first have to do a written acknowledgment that what you’re injecting could do nothing or could do long term damage.
My personal feeling around all this is that I want to elect into common medical problems. I don’t want to take a 10 part supplement regime that gives you some weird shit in the future that me and 30 other SF bros will have but no one will find the time to cure.