Sports Doping by Mail? It Could Be That Simple

The next Olympic doping scandal could be delivered right to your doorstep. A trove of so-called research chemicals known as peptides, many of them banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency and some not approved for human use in the US, are available with the simple click of a button through online retailers, per the AP. One seller is Amazon. Another is Alibaba, a sponsor of the International Olympic Committee. The easy availability of the drugs combined with their hard-to-detect nature is precisely the toxic combination doping regulators and Olympic officials are trying to avoid. With the Milan Cortina Games just two months away, they are hoping to break a string of scandals involving the Russians and Chinese that have disrupted the Games, both summer and winter, since 2014.

Though online pharmaceuticals and supplements have for years been portrayed as a risk by anti-doping authorities, the influx of certain hard-to-detect peptides—chains of protein-building amino acids marketed to help with anything from anti-aging to workout recovery to weight and memory loss—presents a more difficult challenge. "These substances have proliferated," said Oliver Catlin, president of the Anti-Doping Sciences Institute, whose late father, Don, was among the godfathers of antidoping research. His research found hundreds of banned or illegal peptides available on the online market and an ever-shifting menu of items, with some of them removed after the AP started asking questions.

These so-called "research chemicals" are not approved by the FDA and are also banned by the WADA code, either under its "S2" category that encompasses peptides or under its "SO" classification, a catch-all category for "non-approved substances." Still, a number of them, including BPC-157, could be found on multiple online sites, including Amazon and Alibaba. Alibaba said it bars substances on the WADA banned list. Amazon said it requires products on its marketplace to be in compliance with the law. Both websites removed some drug listings when alerted by the AP, but a number of listings remained and some new ones popped up. The AP has more, including on why these peptides are so hard to detect.