The Curious Case of the L-Carnitine in the COA

What we can learn from the rise and fall of Amino Asylum

The Curious Case of the L-Carnitine in the COA

Did you know that when it comes to strength-building, biohacking, and body optimization, peptides as we know them today were not the first of their kind?

There was a world that predated the gray-market peptide world as we know it today: the world of bodybuilding. You can call it what you’d like – the meathead scene, endurance and performance enhancement, getting shredded at the gym – but you’d be describing a Venn diagram with a wide surface area of overlap. Male athletes have historically taken substances such as testosterone, dianabol, and Human Growth Hormone (HGH) in order to build their physiques, increase their endurance, and heal faster after injuries. This is a practice that more or less began in the 50s, intensified during the Cold War (staying competitive with the USSR became an imperative for American athletes), and was met with a good deal of fear and moral panic from the 70s-90s only to intensify once again at the turn of the century.

However you might feel about the phenomenon of “doping” in athletics – whether by professional athletes or non-professional ones – there’s no contesting its prevalence, nor its influence on popular culture. What began in the gym scene, discussed on encrypted forums and purchased through illegal back channels, seems to have “jumped the walls” of the gym and become so widespread that it’s now scrawled across countless affiliate pages on social media, talked about on the news, discussed among members of the scientific research community, and touted on podcasts. Body optimization isn’t just for bodybuilders anymore: as we’ve seen countless times before, average Americans will show an active interest in cutting-edge health treatments, regardless of their price point – or their seeming outlandishness.

Luckily for average Americans, the medical industrial complex is more than willing to step right up and meet that interest. As I’ve recently reported here at Peptide Partners Corner, a series of powerful biological, medical, and sociocultural forces have joined hands to make it more possible than ever to directly purchase heretofore inaccessible healthcare treatments and have them delivered to your doorstep.

Telehealth, Ease of Access, and the Medical Consumer Boom

The biological? None other than the global pandemic that shut the entire world down and called for a large-scale overhaul of our country’s rapidly deteriorating healthcare system. In order to accommodate the CDC’s shelter in place guidelines, medical practitioners had to embrace telehealth on a scale we’d never seen before. This was great news for the disabled, the low-income, and those whose physical access to healthcare was otherwise impeded by bureaucracy or geographic remoteness. It was also great news for profiteers who saw the pandemic as a chance to expand their clientele: If I can’t physically examine you for this experimental treatment but I can get your verbal consent over Zoom, then I can book you for it anyway and charge $1,999 – sound good?

The medical? Even with stop-and-go funding and FDA strictures, research science still tends to move quicker than the healthcare system can accommodate it. The result: studies will surface indicating the radical benefits of treatments that are either not FDA-approved or not widely available. People with stubborn health problems will get wind of these studies and become set on trying them; soon enough, demand will far outstrip supply, and the prescribing doctor will be supplanted by the alternative health practitioner, the med spa nurse, the compounding pharmacy.

The sociocultural? It’s a biohacker’s world, and we’re either along for the ride or opting out – a move that’s beginning to look more and more like opting out of society altogether. Rapid advancements in the medical research, wellness, and longevity spaces mean that we no longer have to settle for a definition of health that means little more than “the absence of disease.” Now, consistent with the original definition of wellness as a state of holistic health or “vitality,” we have the tools to focus on optimizing our health instead of just maintaining it. The positive side of this looks like scientific findings and lifestyle changes joining forces to deliver more and more people a much higher quality of life. The negative side looks like countless people striving and striving for perfection, putting their bodies – and pocketbooks – through the ringer only to find that they’re perpetually one “magic treatment” away from finding their silver bullet.

Which brings us back to peptides and the bodybuilding community. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that strength and endurance training is all about optimization. How many reps can I manage in an hour? How much can I shorten my recovery time? How can I maximize the amount I’m lifting while minimizing the likelihood of injury? Any pro athlete is no doubt accustomed to treating their body like a Turing machine, inputting the right “stack” of rest, training, and nutrition in hopes of maximizing output; the bodybuilder is doing the same thing, except instead of training at an elite facility in the Swiss Alps with a team of coaches, he’s driving his Mitsubishi to the gym, blasting his lats, and then reading online forums about nutritional supplements and recovery times.

Though average by an Olympian’s standards, the bodybuilder still strives for excellence, and he talks to his friends at the gym about it, who talk to their friends about it, who talk to their girlfriends about it, and so on. Standards for physical fitness and physical beauty are swapped or equated. Health becomes nothing but vitality, and vitality becomes a moral imperative.

Having said all this, I’ve now set the scene for the story of erstwhile online peptide retailer Amino Asylum and one of the most notorious COA-related scandals of recent years. Depending on who you are – customer, Redditor, lab technician, federal agent – the story is either infuriating, tragic, exasperating, or routine. It’s also a story without a neat resolution, as the only player in possession of all the details – Amino Asylum founder Austin Carpenter – passed away in 2024 at the age of 32. It’s also a story, like the broader narrative of peptide use in the U.S., that began in the gym only to end someplace else entirely.

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Inside the Asylum

Amino Asylum emerged on bodybuilding and biohacking scenes around 2018, just barely predating the beginning of the global pandemic. It was an online vendor selling peptides, Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators (SARMs), and various other injectable wellness and longevity supplements within the RUO – or “research use only” – commercial framework.

The founder, Austin Carpenter, was a millennial man whose professional credentials belonged more to the world of sports medicine and kinesiology than that of tech and bio-optimization. He was a 2017 graduate of James Madison University, where he earned a B.S. in Kinesiology and Exercise Science. He worked for a time as a personal trainer and security guard before founding Amino Asylum, making his shift into the peptide scene that much less surprising: if you’re already spending your time helping individual clients optimize their strength and endurance, why not set up shop and cast your net wider?

As it turned out, Carpenter was in the right place at the right time. With some customer service savvy, a reputation for trustworthiness, and a dash of business acumen, he was able to effectively scale Amino Asylum during the peptide boom of 2021-2023. The Asylum became a go-to peptide vendor for the fitness and bodybuilding communities. And then, thanks to the modern miracles of Reddit and Discord, Carpenter’s business achieved breakthrough status.

As more and more Americans assessed the ravages of the pandemic, the slow-moving stutters of governmental bureaucracy, and the ever-widening wealth gap, interest in alternative treatments exploded. And as ours is a culture that prizes innovation and experimentation, not to mention being hyper-connected and communicative all of the time, people were as keen to get their health information from bodybuilders and high-performance athletes as from a primary care physician. Add to this heady brew the fact that the primary care physician was just as likely supplementing their health information with findings from the exercise/kinesiology space, and you’re off to the races.

It was a good time to be Mr. Carpenter; indeed, it was a good time to be one of Mr. Carpenter’s customers. Unfortunately, this heyday would also be short-lived.

The Fall

I have no doubt there are those of you reading this who will recall that Amino Asylum was recently shut down by the FDA. For some loyal customers, this may have come as a shock. But for many others, the writing had been on the wall for a long time.

When Amino Asylum burst onto the scene, the company paid lip service to FDA strictures on its website – “research use only” – while presenting itself quite differently on social media. Flashy posts about muscle building, libido improvement and fat loss. Affiliates crowing about the same. Whatever expertise Carpenter might have brought to the table in terms of kinesiology and health science was veritably invisible. And forget about research science, FDA guidance and oversight, or the critical symbiosis between advancements in healthcare and raising public consciousness with regards to wellness and longevity. What does empirical science matter when your customer base is growing exponentially?

Amino Asylum was making sales hand over fist, but doing so with the internet equivalent of several LOSE WEIGHT NOW! billboards. And worst of all, the company’s credibility had begun to slip.

A 2024 review of the company on the website MuscleandBrawn noted that a recent Janoshik COA on the Amino Asylum website showed no verification code at the bottom, no client information at the top, and no Amino Asylum watermark. “It is possible that Amino Asylum removed the code, client name, and watermark,” the reviewer speculated, “but it doesn’t really look all that good.”

Indeed it didn’t. If you’ve been following my reportage here, you may recognize these alterations as hallmarks of a recycled or falsified COA.

Suspicion was aroused on Reddit, enough for a handful of customers to send vials of injectable L-Carnitine sold by Amino Asylum off to be tested by reliable third-party laboratories. The results were damning. “Each vial had half the amount of mass it was being sold at,” a source close to the online peptide scene told me. “So their 600mg/ml vials were actually 300 mg/ml.” This is the bodybuilding supplement equivalent of charging customers $8k for a Brazilian Rosewood dining room table that’s actually made out of $10 plywood from Menards.

Trust was lost, and the peptide community descended into an uproar. It seemed only a matter of time before the FDA raid that would confirm what even the most loyal customers had begun to fear: in a rush to meet consumer demand, Amino Asylum had long ago ceased to be a safe, transparent, and well-monitored operation. They’d been operating so far out of the remit of nutra- and pharmaceutical regulations for so long that their business had become legally dubious, placing their consumer base in serious jeopardy.

And in the midst of all this, Austin Carpenter passed away. He was just 32, most likely in the prime of his life. The cause of his death was not made public, and it’s unclear whether it was in any way linked to the issues at Amino Asylum.

With Carpenter died the chance for a more nuanced look at the goings-on in his business. How did the rapid scaling of Amino Asylum impact his health? What about his own peptide usage: was it regulated and medically/scientifically sound, or unregulated, impulsive, experimental?

There is one question that can be answered without qualification: What can the Amino Asylum scandal teach us? Here, we need look no further than Peptide Partners’ founder for an answer: Never trust a supplier that doesn’t submit to third-party testing. Never trust a certification that cannot be independently verified.

Put another way: there’s no business opportunity or silver-bullet cure that’s worth jeopardizing the money and health you already have.