Comedian Pete Davidson told Variety that he used black market peptides to put on fifteen pounds of muscle for the film "How to Rob a Bank," according to a report in Futurism. The two he named are BPC-157 and Sermorelin, taken alongside round-the-clock training and what he described as tons of protein.

BPC-157 is a synthetic peptide sold widely online, and Sermorelin is a growth hormone releasing compound. Both sit in what Futurism calls a massive grey area in biohacking, a market that is booming right now, where products are typically injected and marketed for everything from muscle gain to weight loss to injury recovery.

Why the admission matters

Davidson's point was about honesty, not pharmacology. "I just think it's really important for people to know that that's what I did," he told Variety, contrasting it with actors who credit a transformation to broccoli, rice and chicken.

That is a more useful contribution to the conversation than most celebrity fitness coverage manages. The ordinary version of this story is a press blitz about a 4,000 calorie diet and a convoluted workout, with the rest left out.

The grey market problem

Almost all of these peptides come from China, where Futurism reports they are produced cheaply, and the online markets that sell them are described as even more dubious than the compounds. They remain easy to buy under the "research use only" label, which technically means they are not for human use at all.

The legality is hazy rather than settled. That ambiguity is the entire business model, and it is why the category keeps growing without anyone being accountable for what is in the vial.

What is actually in the vial

Here is the figure that should stop anyone reading a transformation story: a recent Wired investigation cited by Futurism found that some products sold as peptides were not peptides. One sample sold as BPC-157 contained no BPC-157 at all.

BPC-157 is among the most popular compounds in the category, and Futurism notes that US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has vowed to make it easier to get. It is often stacked with TB-500 in a combination biohackers call the Wolverine stack.

Bottom line

Davidson says the peptides work, and Futurism allows that maybe they do. What the piece says nobody can know is what is actually in the product or what the long term effects are, and no amount of on-the-record candor from an actor closes that gap.