Health Canada has won a court order barring a Quebec company from selling unauthorized injectable peptides in Canada.
The online products were being marketed to consumers seeking everything from faster muscle growth to weight loss and anti-aging.
Peptides are not new. Many are well-established, life-saving medicines. But a growing number of experimental and unregulated peptide compounds are now being sold online to consumers who may not understand their risks.
“We’ve just seen an advent of virtual online health clinics … there’s a lot of loopholes that are happening within that system,” said Kyle Ganson, a professor of social work at the University of Toronto who co-authored a recent paper on the rise of injectable peptides.
“We’re in this new era of the provision of health care and … policy [hasn’t] adapted to that new era quite yet.”
The longevity economy
Peptides are short chains of amino acids that occur naturally in the body. Some act as chemical messengers, while others help build proteins involved in metabolism, growth and tissue repair.
Some peptide-based drugs are well established.
Insulin, for example, is a peptide that has been used for almost a century. T-20 is a peptide prescribed to treat HIV. The widely popular GLP-1 drugs Ozempic and Mounjaro are also peptides that help treat diabetes and weight loss.
Ganson says the rapid rise of GLP-1s has helped normalize peptides in the public imagination.
“[GLP-1s have] sort of normalized peptides as a particularly safe, effective tool,” he said. That normalization has helped propel peptides beyond conventional medicine into the broader “longevity economy.”
“There’s been a continual evolution of, ‘How do we optimize our bodies? How do we live longer? How do we recover faster? How do we build more muscle?’” said Ganson. “[Peptides] is just the next iteration of that.”
But the problem is the science behind peptides varies widely.
Some of the popular peptides circulating online — such as BPC-157 and KPV — have little or no human evidence behind them. Retatrutide, a weight loss and metabolic peptide, has shown promising results in clinical trials, but has not been approved by regulators.
Consumers should think of peptides as existing on a continuum, rather than as simply as safe or unsafe, says Julia Nevski, a fourth-year medical student at Western University who runs an online harm reduction project focused on peptides.
Nevski points to melanotan — sometimes called the “Barbie drug” for its tanning and appetite-suppressing effects — as one example of a concerning peptide.
“The data isn’t just thin. It’s actually showing risks of moles and melanoma,” she said.
The uncertainty becomes greater when people combine multiple peptide compounds into so-called “stacks.”
“[Stacks are] concerning because not only are we taking peptides that aren’t studied … now we’re taking it a notch further and … making our own little recipes and combining,” she said.
“They could play off of one another. They could also play off on your own body physiology because you’re just going in blind, not taking into account [whether] you have any prior heart issues.”
The grey market
Consumers increasingly encounter very different categories of peptides in the same online space.
Ganson’s paper, published in JAMA, found that peptide-related hashtags had generated more than 130,000 Instagram posts and 230-million TikTok views by May 2026.
Influencers and biohacking communities may promote the peptides they use and their claimed effects — sometimes without disclosing they are being paid for their recommendations.
“More views for them means more income,” said Ganson. “They might give out codes to get different peptides … that they then get a kickback on.”
Ganson says influencers face no consequences for promoting an experimental compound.
“There’s no legal repercussion for someone going online and saying, ‘Hey, you should use these different products. Here’s my coupon code’,” said Ganson.
Consumers can also access peptides through Canadian and offshore telehealth clinics, compounding pharmacies, and chemical suppliers that are ostensibly targeted at researchers.
“Obviously, they’re aware that it will be for human consumption,” said Nevski.
Countering misinformation
The regulatory system has struggled to keep pace with these new channels of access.
In June, a Quebec court granted Health Canada a permanent injunction against Canlab Research to prohibit the Quebec company from selling unauthorized injectable peptides in Canada. Health Canada had previously ordered the company to stop, but it had not complied.
The agency has also issued public warnings about unauthorized injectable peptides. But for people already sceptical of pharmaceutical companies and regulators, these warnings can be easy to dismiss.
Nevski says she frequently encounters young people who question why an unapproved peptide should be considered dangerous when legal drugs such as alcohol and cigarettes carry their own risks.
“To some extent, their thoughts and concerns with this have some merit,” she said. “But they’re [perceiving an] ‘unapproved’ [status] as driven by financial incentive and not understanding that it’s still not safe.”
Ganson and Nevsiki both say the solutions need to start upstream.
“[We need] public awareness, public information and knowledge, supporting people with mental health concerns or body image issues,” said Ganson.
Nevski’s harm-reduction project, Substrate, aims to counter online misinformation.
But she says the problem is also that consumers do not know how to evaluate the evidence. A clinical trial, for example, can be enough to convince someone a peptide works.
“They just hear ‘trial,’ ‘published study,’ and they’re good,” she said.
Her goal is to teach young people how to assess claims about peptides on their own.
Consumers need to ask how old a study is, what it actually tested, whether the findings came from humans, and who funded the research, she says.
“The general public probably doesn’t know that these different factors and nuances are things to consider,” she said.
For Nevski, even small signs that the information is reaching people matter.
“On the [Substrate] TikTok, it’s great to see that even when one or two people … save or archive the post — that’s really satisfying and fulfilling to me.”
