Private rules, real consequences
The World Anti-Doping Code is not criminal law. It is a rulebook that athletes accept by competing, enforced through testing and tribunals, with sanctions measured in years of eligibility. That private character makes it stricter than law, not weaker: no presumption of innocence about presence, no interest in why a substance was in a sample.
The prohibited list updates every January and names categories as well as compounds. For peptides the decisive categories are S2, peptide hormones, growth factors and related substances, and the growth hormone secretagogue family within it. Those nets are drawn wide on purpose, catching compounds by mechanism even before they are named individually.
Strict liability completes the system: the athlete is responsible for what is in the athlete, full stop. Contaminated supplements, mislabelled products, a training partner’s vial, the tribunals have heard every version, and the ban lengths say how much the stories helped.
The set of peptides on the WADA Prohibited List is therefore larger than the names printed in it, which matters for anything synthesised after the text was drafted: the named examples illustrate a category’s boundary rather than drawing it. The list itself, published by WADA, is where a status is confirmed; the summary below is a reading of it, not a substitute for it.
Where our compounds sit under the code
Plainly, category by category.
Research supplier, not a sports one
We sell laboratory material for research. We do not market to athletes, we do not write "undetectable" copy, and compound pages carry WADA flags where they apply, the disclaimer at the foot of every page is not there for decoration.
Detection deserves a sober sentence: anti-doping science works backward from mechanism, retests stored samples as methods improve, and has repeatedly caught compounds years after their users believed the window closed. Betting a career on a detection gap is betting against a laboratory with a freezer full of your past.
And the obvious corollary: if you compete, the responsible reading of this entire website is academic. The knowledge base is open to you; the catalogue, effectively, is not. We are comfortable writing that sentence, which is perhaps the most useful thing this page tells you about us.
For researchers the anti-doping frame has one genuine use: it is a maintained inventory of the mechanisms sport treats as performance-relevant, and reading it beside the recovery area or the tesamorelin page shows that a compound’s research standing and its competitive status are unrelated questions. A substance can have thin evidence and a firm prohibition at the same time, because the code does not wait for the literature.
- The current list outranks this pageWADA revises every January. A static page is a snapshot; wada-ama.org is the instrument.
- Strict liability has no exceptions for intentHow it got there does not matter. That it is there does.
- Retesting reaches backwardStored samples meet improving methods. Today’s gap is next year’s case.
- Therapeutic use exemptions are narrowTUEs exist for documented medical need through proper channels, not as a retroactive explanation.
Context pages
Where this page connects to the rest of the site.
About the prohibited list
The sport questions we receive and decline to soften.