Jasmine Sun

And, you know, I think to a lot of people it looks, I wouldn't say this is accurate, but it's kind of like a paradise of everything's functional and people are happy and it's so high tech.

But anyway, I think like as folks have warmed up to the idea of China as being potentially more technologically advanced, the fact that the peptides are Chinese probably gives them some extra power.

So I was looking into this.

I think it's actually quite a similar story to how China dominated manufacturing in so many other industries.

The Chinese government gave subsidies in like the eighties and nineties to a lot of local governments that were willing to invest in the drug supply chain.

And they start at the most basic elements of the supply chain.

So like very simple compounds and drugs, and have slowly been climbing up to like pharmaceutical manufacturing.

And then now they're doing a lot of biotech innovation.

But a lot of it is,

Low labor costs, a high concentration of like chemists and science and medical talent concentrated in the same place.

These industry towns where like everybody in this one town is some part of a drug supply chain.

So China is actually the world's peptide manufacturing hub.

And even if you are getting peptides from a lot of American companies, they are getting their raw materials from Chinese factories and then, you know,

testing and processing and like putting them into the, say the insulin pens or the syringes or things like that.

But people realized basically that if they wanted to cut out the middleman and do their own injection and do their own mixing of the peptides, they could go straight to the Chinese factories and buy them.

I don't think so.

I mean, to be clear, like I didn't like go to China for the reporting, but I asked some family friends who are in China.

I have some other friends in China who have been poking around and they seem to think the Americans are freaking crazy.

You guys are insane.

I don't know why you're doing this, but you know, China manufactures a lot of fentanyl and they're not doing that either.