I Criticize Peptide Sellers. YouTube Terminated My Channel Over “Regulated Goods.”

I write about health for men around 50, and lately a lot of that has been the gray market in peptides: who sells unapproved drugs like retatrutide, and what a “research use only” label does and doesn’t mean. I criticize the sellers often enough that people online call me a “Big Pharma shill.” YouTube came to the opposite conclusion. In the early hours of November 10, YouTube terminated my channel without warning. The notice, which I screenshotted at 2:32 a.m., gave the reason as “Harmful or dangerous content” and explained it in one sentence: “Content that promotes or facilitates the sale, use, or creation of certain illegal or regulated goods isn’t allowed on YouTube.” It didn’t say which video. I appealed before 3 a.m., and at 3:36 a.m. YouTube emailed back that it had “reviewed your channel carefully” and “We won’t be putting your channel back up on YouTube.”

The channel was the video version of this site. Most of it was short summaries of posts: trial results, cancer risk by age, mistakes in published scientific papers. The channel covered four peptide-seller stories, in about half a dozen videos. One asked whether retatrutide is legal to buy. There’s no legal version to buy: Eli Lilly’s experimental weight-loss drug isn’t approved anywhere, and Lilly has filed at least 11 lawsuits against sellers since August. The others covered BPC-157 and the research-use-only market around it, a hacked small-town website that sent searchers to a WhatsApp group selling peptides, and NewBioRx, the store for the peptide brand that Sam Sulek, a bodybuilder with 4.6 million YouTube subscribers, says on camera he co-owns.

On November 10 I ran five YouTube searches (retatrutide, retatrutide peptide, buy retatrutide, BPC-157, research peptides) and went through the top 20 results for each. Most of it is doctors and news outlets explaining the trials and the risks, though some of the doctors’ videos are dosing guides, and even “buy retatrutide” mostly turned up warnings. The results also include a beginner’s guide to mixing and dosing retatrutide with 372,000 views. A wellness clinic’s video on reconstituting retatrutide (386,000 views) has a description selling $99 physician consultations for peptide therapy, with a discount code.

Smaller channels go further. One video unboxes what its creator calls one of their “wholesale research orders” (29,000 views), and the description says they first paid “around $150 for a single vial of reta” and this time “paid $12 for a single 20 mg vial.” Another names the UK peptide supplier its creator buys from and lists reasons to buy there, from price matching to free shipping over £100 (3,700 views).

Then there’s Sulek. On November 10 his channel was up, and eight of his nine most recent uploads (October 31 to November 8, with roughly 99,000 to 722,000 views each) list newbiorx.com in the description, as plain text below his sponsor links. The store lists vials labelled retatrutide at $145 for 16 mg and $205 for 30 mg, both in stock, on a page that says “Bodily introduction of any kind into humans or animals is strictly prohibited by law.”

The notice cited YouTube’s harmful or dangerous content rules on illegal or regulated goods. Those rules ban “facilitating the sale of regulated pharmaceuticals without a prescription,” and says that if you provide links or contact information “where pharmaceuticals can be purchased without a prescription, your channel may be terminated.” It applies to “clickable URLs, verbally directing users to other sites in video, as well as other forms.” The same page says a first violation usually gets “a warning with no penalty to your channel,” and that a channel can be terminated after three strikes in 90 days, “a single case of severe abuse,” or when it is “dedicated to a policy violation.” I had no earlier warning or strike.

My guess is that my own evidence got me flagged. My NewBioRx video showed the store’s product pages and prices, a cart with retatrutide and syringes in it, and the injection guide published under the NewBioRx logo, unblurred, because those were the evidence. Its thumbnail, which I made, put the guide’s photo of a needle going into skin under the words HOW TO INJECT, next to the store’s pen under DON’T INJECT. My video on the hacked town website opened on the sellers’ WhatsApp pitch of “thirty percent off my first order.” The tags on my Short about whether retatrutide is legal to buy included “buy retatrutide” and “peptide vendors,” and my BPC-157 video showed peptide sellers’ product pages. The policy counts links and contact details for places that sell prescription drugs without a prescription, so those screenshots matter whatever my intent was. To software, or to a reviewer moving fast, that looks a lot like the thing I was reporting on. The policy allows exceptions for “Educational, Documentary, Scientific, or Artistic (EDSA) context,” but only “sometimes,” and YouTube decides when.

If an older post here shows a “Video unavailable” box, that’s why. I’ll replace those with links to the written versions. The posts themselves, including the one on Sulek’s store, are all still here.

I don’t think anyone at YouTube set out to remove a channel investigating gray-market peptide sellers while leaving up videos on buying gray-market peptides and dosing retatrutide. I think the system couldn’t tell reporting on a seller from promoting one. My videos showed the sellers’ websites, products and sales pitches because that was the evidence, not because I wanted anyone to buy from them.

I don’t know whether a classifier, a human reviewer or both made the call. I’d appreciate another look from someone at YouTube who can watch the videos in context, and if specific images or details crossed a line, I’ll change them. The channel was youtube.com/@dadstrengthdaily, and I’m on X at x.com/dadstrengthday.

I want to keep reporting on this market. I don’t want to help anyone buy from it.

Disclosure: I own Eli Lilly stock.