It seems we are treating Peptides like drugs here. It's my opinion that amino acids regardless of how they are chained do not belong under and stricter regulation than food given I eat peptides every day from my food. Then again I do not believe in the concept of prescription drugs. Everything with a NDC code should be at the grocery store and I should be able to stock up on it without permission especially given how fragile global shipping is these days. Drugs risks do not enter into the picture given the fact I can buy ammonia and bleach along with a myriad of other dangerous compounds. Worse, I could crush up apple seeds from the veggie isle. One can also make just about anything using fourth thieves vinegar. Maybe put expensive high demand things like cocaine behind locked glass along with the underwear and condoms.
As a side note more dangerous than any drug is stopping a prescription drug cold turkey. Watch what happens when global trade to/from China and India are cut off for a year. Attitudes will change.
> given I eat peptides every day from my food
This is briefly addressed in the article, but basically it's one thing to eat a peptide and quite another thing to inject it. Your digestive system is extremely adroit at taking peptides and proteins and breaking them down into individual amino acids, which are then absorbed via "transporters" in the gut. (e.g. SLC6A14 for glutamate and cysteine.)
If you eat insulin, absolutely nothing will happen. If you inject just a little bit too much, you're dead.
So, generally: Ingested proteins/peptides aren't drug-like, whereas they can be extremely potent drugs if administered via injection.
Granted, there are exceptions. If you accidentally get a drop of botox into your mouth, you'll be okay, but if you drink a vial, you'll be poisoned. And people have been trying to make orally-active peptides and proteins for decades, with some noteworthy successes, however few and far between in the general case.
I agree with some of this. There are most certainly orally active peptides such as BPC-157 and its replacement PDA penta deca arginate that can repair the gut and still circulate throughout the body especially in those with leaky gut. People with leaky gut should be able to buy a clean source of BPC-157 or PDA without a prescription and without visiting dark alleys. It is very safe and tolerable.
GLP's are all the rage these days. Doctors seem to be giving GLP peptides out like candy and those are injected. People are looking like zombies. That said if doctors are going to be so liberal with them I should be able to buy it in the grocery store and slap it down on the conveyor belt. Again I can buy things far more dangerous than any prescription drug. There are very dangerous supplements, some that are shilled heavily on youtube. For example, Glycine (for me specifically used without a specific process) is more dangerous than heroine and the vast majority of doctors would have no idea what I am talking about.
> It is very safe and tolerable.
Can you point to the clinical trials that demonstrate this?
> Doctors seem to be giving GLP peptides out like candy and those are injected.
There have been several _thousand_ clinical trials that have shown GLP-1s to be safe and effective.
Also LOL at the notion "peptides are safe because GLP-1 exists".
Pretty much all venoms are mixes of short (10-15 base) peptide chains.
It's the naturalistic fallacy in an utterly perverse form ( and also goes to show why a regulatory system is good: the average person has no idea that they're dealing with or even common sense about it).
"Liquids are safe because water exists"
Injected BPC-157 to a wound is a magic healing potion as far as I'm concerned. That it's not more broadly available is a crime, imo. If I had a billion dollars, I'd push so many things through the FDA.
If you had a billion dollars, you would need many billions more to push even a single thing through the FDA!
This is entirely theorical, but the $2.6 billion figure that's commonly quoted accounts for all the failures as well. If I took something that's proven in Europe but wouldn't get a patent, it presumably would manage to pass FDA regulations, it's just that without the patent protection, there's no financial incentive for an existing company to do that.
> > given I eat peptides every day from my food
It’s also just a silly rhetorical technique. The ability to construct a grammatical sentence of that form does not constitute a valid argument.
“Restricting nuclear material is silly given that nearly all the stuff I interact with every day contains atomic nuclei.”
The regulation of drugs or most any consumer product is not due to the inherent danger of an item itself, but the danger presented to a consumer inside the context of societal mechanisms that influence behavior. You're right that many regulations don't make sense outside of a societal context -- but that's because they also don't exist outside of a societal context.
The reason we don't need tight regulations on bleach is because we don't have a societal issue causing people to drink it and hurt themselves... at least, not anymore: most of the locking lids on household cleaning chemicals are there by law.
I'm all for laxer regulation of substance control e.g. buying cocaine at the grocery store, but I think its also a bit misleading to describe arbitrary sequences of amino acids as if they're meaningfully comparable to food.
That's like saying that since neither one nor zero requires regulation, neither does software. Maybe software does or doesn't, but in either case its best based on the nature of the aggregate, not the nature of its components.
> It seems we are treating Peptides like drugs here
That’s exactly what some biological drugs are too - peptides!
And peptides are just short chains of amino acids. Almost all the other biological drugs are just longer chains of amino acids - antibodies, enzymes, antigens, some hormones, and others.
Derek is right that the safety risks are exponentially higher when you inject peptides - you basically skip a bunch of protective mechanisms like enzymes that quickly break them down if taken orally or routes.
As a former R&D scientist there is no way I’d inject any peptide that hasn’t at least gone through a phase 1 safety study in humans. Otherwise you have no idea what it could be doing to your body.
A good example was a drug that was quickly pulled from market for causing fatal anaphylactic reactions. It wasn’t even caught in the clinical trials!
At the same time, I think people have the right to take whatever substance they want. But I worry a lot of people aren’t aware of the risks.
>As a former R&D scientist there is no way I’d inject any peptide that hasn’t at least gone through a phase 1 safety study in humans. Otherwise you have no idea what it could be doing to your body.
A lot of people do not understand the trial system or the value of Phase 0/1 tests when it comes to the substances that they put into their body. And thanks to the influencer/grifter/biohacker ecosystem that exists, more people would put their trust in accidental evidence, from people who's incentive it is to make money off of them, while complaining about the pharmaceutical industry operates off of a profit motive.
Yeah, but my mum is an eye surgeon and she wouldn't get LASIK. That's just how it is with people involved in the field.
> It's my opinion that amino acids regardless of how they are chained do not belong under and stricter regulation than food given I eat peptides every day from my food.
I mean, why regulate anything? Everything is just different arrangements of hydrogen and time. It's so weird that certain arrangements of hydrogen and time try to claim to have things like "morals", and try to force other arrangements of hydrogen and time to not do arbitrary contrived concepts like "murder".
All is one. Just hydrogen and time. Therefore everything should be legal.
> Drugs risks do not enter into the picture given the fact I can buy ammonia and bleach along with a myriad of other dangerous compounds.
This is a deeply weird take. You think anyone ought to be able to buy, for instance, warfarin and freely take it without a doctor’s involvement? We should let parents self-diagnose diabetes and administer insulin without a prescription or discussion? We should just hope that patients heard their doctor say hydralazine and not hydroxyzine?
> As a side note more dangerous than any drug is stopping a prescription drug cold turkey.
Abject nonsense. It was very easy to stop my prescribed amoxicillin. It’s clear you don’t have any actual idea what “prescription drugs” are, in aggregate, and that should maybe inform your decision to have Big Opinions about them.
You think anyone ought to be able to buy, for instance, warfarin and freely take it without a doctor’s involvement?
Yes.
Triple yes! Most of the people buying it have been buying it and using it for years.
Why do you think only the people taking it would be buying it?
> Why do you think only the people taking it would be buying it?
I don't. But the cost of access is significant. And with pharmacies in India, China and Mexico willing to ship basically anything into America, it's a purely-cosmetic tax now.
Why? Why, specifically, do you think an adult without HF should be able to buy a random drug, likely by accident, and start taking it?
I guess I don’t hate everyone else enough to agree with that.
> This is a deeply weird take. You think anyone ought to be able to buy, for instance, warfarin and freely take it without a doctor’s involvement? We should let parents self-diagnose diabetes and administer insulin without a prescription or discussion? We should just hope that patients heard their doctor say hydralazine and not hydroxyzine?
Weird examples. You can buy insulin without a prescription today in the USA.
In much of the world -- including almost all of Asia, Africa, and much of Eastern Europe -- you can buy almost any drug without a prescription. The only exceptions are potent CNS stimulants or narcotics, and in some rare cases antibiotics.
This is legitimately a better system. Takes out the middleman.
In the US you can get any drug if you pay $120 and recite the magic words to a telemedicine "doctor."
Funny you mention this... I bumped into a VP of Merck at a conference and that's the exact example he gave: in the US, you can't adjust your own coumadin dosage without a M.D. consult, but here, have 200 doses of insulin to take home with you.
In much of the world -- including almost all of Asia, Africa, and much of Eastern Europe
Doctors in the US get a nice $200 to $500 per doctors visit, required to extend the prescription drug. I only notice because I pay cash. This is why they will argue against anything I am saying until they are code-blue in the face. I will leave them with my code brown.
In the US you can get any drug if you pay $120 and recite the magic words to a telemedicine "doctor."
That's how a number of us in a particular circle stock up on anti-biotics. That said anti-biotics are a last resort for me whereas I find doctors are quick to prescribe them.
Your argument is even worse lol. Obviously he's proposing that you can take your doctors note to the pharmacy and get what the doctor prescribed in addition to being allowed to self purchase behind the counter drugs.