Dale was a few months into using Mounjaro when he started to wonder whether there was a cheaper way to lose weight. The 38-year-old had gotten heavier during the pandemic, after returning from the army and getting a job as a long-distance HGV driver. “Gyms weren't open. You couldn’t really do anything,” he says. “I just got lazy and got fatter than I wanted to be.”
The GLP-1 drug helped him shed the extra pounds, but when the price of the medication rose in September 2025, he decided to look into options. Dale joined a Discord group, where people were discussing an online “grey market” of cheaper drugs. He thought: “If there are that many people in [the Discord chat] and they’re all raving about all the products, then how bad can it be?” He decided to buy two peptides: BPC157 and CJC-1295 combined with Ipamorelin — peptides that are not licensed for human use in the UK.
Dale is one of a number of people who have decided to inject themselves with unlicensed peptides — short chains of amino acids that occur naturally in the body and help to regulate energy, mood and metabolism. Reports of peptide use among hardcore gym communities to boost muscle growth and help recovery from workouts go back over a decade. But experts say that in recent years the practice has shifted into the mainstream, as biohackers and wellness influencers tout their ‘anti-ageing’ and performance benefits.
The global peptide-therapeutics market has ballooned to more than $50 billion in annual sales, with predictions to nearly double again in roughly the next ten years. In the UK, Google searches for peptides are surging, with 255,000 videos hashtagged peptide on TikTok worldwide. Peptides, proponents say, can improve skin and sleep. They can boost energy, cognition, immune systems, libidos.
“The first indication I had of [peptide use coming into the mainstream] was in 2020, when I was in a gym and a guy was saying he was using BPC157 to help with an injury,” says Dr Luke Turnock, a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Lincoln, who has co-authored research into the explosion of interest in synthetic peptide hormones. “Now you get all kinds of influencers talking about peptides, openly sharing affiliate links for where they get their peptides from, and they get kickback from it.”
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In November, Clavicular, a 20-year-old social media influencer pioneering the “looksmaxxing” movement, shared a video of himself injecting his then girlfriend with fat-dissolving peptides. It followed reports that a Bay Area telehealth-for-longevity startup was offering employees free peptide injections on Fridays. Then, in December, a “peptide rave” took place in a co-working space in San Francisco, where partygoers could mix their own peptides.
“I kind of see it as like a stock,” Sam*, a 22-year-old UK-based student, who decided to start using a synthetic peptide called Retatrutide, told me. Retatrutide is a GLP-1 medicine in clinical development which has not yet been approved for human use in the UK. “As soon as it hits the market, [prices are] going to shoot,” he says. “If you get on it before, you're ahead... You've already got your suppliers, you know who you're going to get it from, you know how it all works.”
Sam decided to purchase the drug after breaking three ribs playing football. He was already insecure about his body, but stuck at home, unable to exercise, he began to feel worse. It didn’t help that family members would comment on his body, telling him he shouldn’t have dessert or asking him when he was going to lose weight.
“It's affected me a lot,” he says. “I'm just not comfortable with myself.” These days, Sam injects Retatrutide into his lower abdomen once every four days. He says that he’s since lost weight, but he hasn’t spoken to his family or most of his friends about what he’s doing. “It's a bit like recreational drug use,” he says. “It's more of a taboo”.
In the UK, it’s legal to buy and own grey-market peptides, but they’re not approved for human use. This means that peptides are often bought in vials labelled “for research use only”, often manufactured in factories in China, then marketed and sold on the likes of Discord, Telegram and TikTok.
However, clinics in the UK offer peptide therapy using unlicensed peptides such as BPC-157 and TB-500, a combination sometimes referred to as the “wolverine stack”. According to Paul Britton, founder of Britton and Time Solicitors: “a clinic running a general menu-based or heavily marketed peptide therapy service is on very shaky ground.”
“If the clinic is publicly promoting unlicensed peptide injections as a treatment service, the offer itself may already breach medicines advertising rules, even before you get to supply and administration.”
Dr Syed Omar Babar, an A&E consultant and the director of Healand Clinic that offers peptide therapy using unregulated peptides, says that he can't tell patients that unregulated peptides can treat a certain condition, however he can tell them which products are available.
“We cannot and do not say that peptide can TREAT any conditions — this would be in breach of MHRA and ASA regulations,” he said.
With a patient’s full consent and understanding that these peptides are not for human use, he can recommend peptide therapy.
“Whoever is embarking on this journey needs to be fully aware that this is an unlicensed product,” says Dr Babar.
“We don't know what the long term effects are,” he says. “As long as you're happy with that, you can use them”.
He adds: “The Healand Clinic does not promote or advertise peptide therapy. It is one of the options available to patients amongst a wide-ranging list of options.”
At present, the law around unlicensed peptides appears to be murky. In February, over 2,000 doses of unlicensed weight loss medicines such as retatrutide and tirzepatidwere seized from an agricultural building in Newton and a residential property in Lincolnshire, but no arrests were made.
“What I find interesting is in the rare occasions that the MHRA and the police have raided a location, nobody seems to get arrested,” says Dr Turnock. “It's like, okay, it's illegal enough that you are conducting raids and seizing product, but no one's actually getting prosecuted.”
Britton urges the MHRA to issue clearer guidance regarding unlicensed peptides. “The salient point is that the MHRA needs to look at this with urgency and before someone gets hurt,” he says.
“The real gap is not a total absence of law, but a lack of clear classification, visible enforcement and a rule that stops clinics using unlicensed ‘specials’ as a routine retail business model.”
For aesthetic doctor Ben Taylor-Davies, the fact that doctors are offering medical treatments using these unlicensed drugs is “really surprising and disappointing”.
He said: “We have no data supporting the safety in humans, literally none.” While it’s possible that peptide therapy can be useful, “right now, we can't use them in humans safely because we don't know that we're not causing potential short-term and long term health complications.”
Unregulated drugs often haven’t undergone clinical trials which confirm their safety and efficacy. “If something has not been tested, manufactured and approved as a drug for human use, we actually don't know what it is that we're injecting,” Dr Taylor-Davies said. Recent analysis of grey-market peptides found that 8 per cent may be contaminated with bacterial endotoxins.
One doctor and director of a UK clinic that offers peptide therapy, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, told me he had concerns about how certain practitioners in the UK were administering peptide therapy, such as not doing blood tests beforehand.
“If you have an underlying medical condition you don’t know about, say you have a bad thyroid,” he says, “If we put a peptide in you, and we don't know what your thyroid looks like, it could do some serious damage.”
Without prior blood tests, peptide use can have major health risks. Since these proteins are linked with tissue growth, they can accelerate the expansion of pre-existing cancers. Peptide use can also lead to acromegaly, an excess of growth hormone that contributes to enlarged bones, cartilage and organs.
“People that are using these peptides are essentially treating themselves like human guinea pigs,” says Taylor-Davies. “The idea that someone is blindly putting their faith in something and they have no idea what it is they're injecting, I find absolutely terrifying.”
*Name has been changed
