PJ Vogt

I have to say, as a person trying to come to my own internal verdict on peptides, I notice my view of them changes based on where I encounter them.

A tech CEO trying some compound I've never heard of?

Fine.

Some Adonis young man with a syringe convincing teenagers online to buy his stack?

obviously not fine.

It's the issue so often with any drug, that it's not just the inherent riskiness or safety of the substance, it's the context around it.

As a general rule, when it comes to drug reporting, I try not to ask reporters whether or not they've taken the drugs.

The late, brilliant Mark Kleiman, who wrote a lot about drug policy, once said, quote, If you do drug policy and you're asked whether you use drugs, you've got two choices.

You can say, yes, I'm a lawbreaker.

Please come arrest me and ignore everything I say because I'm a bad person.

Or, no, actually, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

So I try not to ask reporters about their drug use on air.

But in this case, I broke my rule, and I'm glad I did because it led to some answers that helped me settle my thinking on these drugs, at least for the moment.

I asked Jasmine Sun whether she'd tried peptides.

It's funny, it's like your view is basically like, the nice thing about a gray market is because it exists somewhere in between legal and illegal.

You don't have a massive marketing push behind it.

You have something that for the people who are willing to tolerate a little bit more risk, it's like putting something on a high shelf, ideally.

And that while you yourself don't want to be in a single person research study with the only body that you'll ever have in life,

What is good about it happening in the culture that you're documenting is that some of those people might find something useful and then they might put it through the normal testing and regulatory hurdles where everybody else can benefit from it.

Jasmine's son.