Doping at your doorstep: The next Olympic drug crisis could be coming through the mail

The next Olympic doping scandal could be delivered right to your doorstep.

A trove of so-called research chemicals known as peptides, many of them banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency and some not approved for human use in the United States, are available with the simple click of a button through online retailers. One seller is Amazon. Another is Alibaba, a sponsor of the International Olympic Committee.

The easy availability of the drugs combined with their hard-to-detect nature is precisely the toxic combination doping regulators and Olympic officials are trying to avoid. With the Milan Cortina Games just two months away, they are hoping to break a string of scandals involving the Russians and Chinese that have disrupted the Games, both summer and winter, since 2014.

Though online pharmaceuticals and supplements have for years been portrayed as a risk by anti-doping authorities, the influx of certain hard-to-detect peptides — chains of protein-building amino acids marketeed to help with anything from anti-aging to workout recovery to weight and memory loss — presents a more difficult challenge.

"These substances have proliferated," said Oliver Catlin, president of the Anti-Doping Sciences Institute, whose late father, Don, was among the godfathers of antidoping research.

Most of these peptides are so-called "research chemicals" that are not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and are also banned by the WADA code, either under its "S2" category that encompasses peptides or under its "SO" classification, a catch-all category for "non-approved substances."

The few substances specifically listed under the "S0" category — such as the popular BPC 157 — are placed there because the pharmalogical make-up of the