He bought a fitness supplement online to bulk up, but ended up losing his mind

Daniel Murphy thought he was taking a safe and tested dietary supplement that would help him put on muscle in the gym.

But over the following two years, his mental health spiralled to such a degree he ended up in a state of psychosis in which he believed his wife was trying to steal his business and his mother-in-law was going to kill him.

Unknown to Daniel, the daily pills he had been taking had been mixed with testosterone.

The 32-year-old is one of 54,000 consumers listed in a case against a multimillion-pound peptide company based in the US, which sold its products around the world.

The owner of Paradigm Peptides, Matthew Kawa, was jailed for five years and 10 months on Thursday after he admitted deliberately selling unapproved medicines, trying to deceive people about what they were and illegally bringing the products into the country.

His sister, Jennifer Stechkober, who also pleaded guilty to selling unapproved medicines, was sent to prison for a year and four months.

Both admitted they had lied about where the pills were sourced, their purity and their company’s testing procedures. Despite claiming the supplements were manufactured in the US, they were actually imported from China, India and several other countries. The pair also faked certificates of analysis, the documents that prove the safety and quality of a product.

Paradigm Peptides’ website had stated it “stringently” tested all their products to ensure “efficacy, purity and potency”, but the pair admitted not testing or analysing any of the products they sold, so they had not been aware they had been mixed with testosterone.

Testosterone is a steroid hormone, which the body naturally produces. It drives physical development, builds muscle, and controls sex drive, primarily in males, but it also supports health in females.

There is a synthetic version which doctors can prescribe, but which can cause liver damage, serious psychiatric effects and heart and respiratory problems if taken without medical oversight. It can also cause infertility in men and increase the risk of testicular cancer.

The Paradigm Peptides case is the biggest to rock the industry, an unregulated market which has exploded into the mainstream over the past 18 months.

Peptides are short chains of amino acids that our bodies produce and have long been used to treat medical conditions, including diabetes. More recently, they are being used in weight-loss drugs – GLP-1s.

Another type of drug sold by Paradigm Peptides was SARMs – Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators – which target specific tissues to increase muscle and bone mass.

Both these types of unregulated injectable drugs have become increasingly popular in the online wellness community – including among many young influencers.

Social media is inundated with people extolling the virtues of various substances – such as BPC-157, GHK-CU and TB 500 – all of which purport to help build muscle mass, help with tissue recovery, or improve skin health. They are not licensed, can only be sold for testing purposes and are not suitable for human consumption.

Three years ago, Murphy says he was in a good place. He was married to Laura, and they had built a “very stable, consistent, beautiful life” in the Smoky mountains in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Murphy had lost 130 pounds (59kg) and had “completed a major health transformation” through diet and exercise.

“I wasn’t into gym culture – I wasn’t a big gym bro or anything,” he explains. “But after I had lost all that weight, I wanted to start building muscle and these supplements seemed like a safe way of doing that.”

Murphy thought he was taking a daily dose of SARMs. Like peptides, they are not approved for human use and are seen as experimental drugs with a risk of serious liver damage, thrombosis and heart problems.

Murphy says he felt safe taking them because they were clearly labelled a “dietary supplement” and Paradigm claimed it had a contract with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on various blogs, but this was not true.

“Like other victims, I trusted that the products were safe,” he says. “They presented everything as research backed with claims of 99% purity – it was all a lie.”

Murphy started taking Paradigm’s SARMs in January 2023. During the first few months, he says they seemed to be having a positive effect: he was able to do longer workouts and had more energy. Encouraged by fake research articles he had read on Paradigm Peptides’s website, he then started taking other products too.

Insomnia and mania began to set in – and that triggered him, he says, to “burn down” everything he had built – his marriage, his friendships, and his business.

During the court proceedings, consultant psychiatrist and pharmacologist, Dr Erik Messamore, gave evidence to confirm that he believed Murphy had been suffering from a steroid-induced psychosis.