Cychlorphine is the latest lethal synthetic opioid to emerge, showing up in the death of Dante Paul Lacourte, 16, a victim of the drug. It was the first time San Francisco medical authorities had seen the drug in an overdose death.
It seems to happen all the time these days: Just when authorities start to get a handle on an addictive drug killing Americans, another one emerges—more potent and potentially more deadly than what came before.
“The worst possible way to find out a new drug is in the city is by an autopsy.”
It’s a cat-and-mouse game played by illegal drugmakers trying to stay ahead of laws meant to control the drugs they manufacture. Alter the chemical structure, and they have a new compound for authorities to chase.
And often a much deadlier one.
Heroin and morphine were bad enough and killed their share of users, but then came fentanyl, a synthetic drug the National Institute on Drug Abuse says is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine.
Overdose deaths soared.
Then there was carfentanil, roughly 10,000 times more potent than morphine and 100 times more potent than fentanyl.
Now we are faced with cychlorphine, up to 10 times more potent than fentanyl. It cannot be detected with standard test strips or routine hospital opioid urine screens, and reversing an overdose may require administering naloxone, the opioid overdose reversal medication sold under the brand name Narcan.
Cychlorphine is so powerful that it can take several doses of Narcan to bring someone back from the edge of death.
“Often, you just don’t have the time” to save a person dying from a cychlorphine overdose, Dr. Jon Sprague, a Bowling Green State University pharmacologist and toxicologist who works with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, told Freedom.
Dr. Sprague has decades of experience in studying the neurobiology of addiction and toxicology of drugs and was instrumental in writing the synthetic drug laws for the state of Ohio.
“With this one,” he says of cychlorphine, “we can’t treat it like a standard opioid overdose.”
When Jake Scoufos, 18, died in Oklahoma, he had his PlayStation still turned on and was holding his phone.
“He just laid over and died,” his mother, Malisa Hepner, said. “Like it was immediate.”
Cychlorphine is new to the illicit drug market but not to chemistry. Its origins date to pharmaceutical research in the 1960s, but it was never brought to market as a medicine.
The San Francisco death was not the first. Cychlorphine had already appeared in fatal overdoses in England, where multiple deaths were linked to the drug in 2025.
“We are starting to see more and more overdoses across the country,” Dr. Sprague told Freedom.
“What happens is that these drugs are identified typically by name and considered a Schedule I drug, so [illicit drug manufacturers] modify the chemical structure again,” Dr. Sprague said. “They just continue to play this chemistry game.
“They’re not synthesizing them to enhance potency but to skirt laws by making chemical modifications. They don’t test to see if it is more potent than fentanyl—they just change the chemical structure enough that it should be similar in activity. They just give it to people to take and that’s how they find out how potent it is.”
In other words, they find out when bodies start stacking up.
Stanford professor Keith Humphreys, a former drug policy adviser under President Barack Obama and senior research scientist with the Veterans Health Administration, put it bluntly: “The worst possible way to find out a new drug is in the city is by an autopsy.”
San Francisco police have also found cychlorphine in drugs seized during unrelated dealer arrests—evidence that it is already circulating in the city’s illicit drug supply.
Users can obtain illicit drugs through the “dark web” or local dealers, thinking they’re buying oxycodone or other opioids and finding out, too late, that the pills they took—even ones manufactured to look exactly like prescription opioids—contain fentanyl or cychlorphine.
Los Angeles researchers who analyzed samples sold as fentanyl found that the actual fentanyl in a gram varied from less than 1 milligram to almost 650 milligrams.
In other words, users have no idea what they are taking. With every pill they swallow, they are playing chemical Russian roulette.
Illicit drug manufacturers can replicate drug formulas from pharmaceutical research readily available in the dark corners of the internet.
“The patent walks through how these compounds are made and those folks making these compounds just use these patents to do so,” Dr. Sprague told Freedom. “Basically, it’s a cookbook.”
And the drugs being synthesized are frequently produced with no control over how much of any substance winds up in a pill.
“When clandestine laboratories make these pills, there is no quality assurance whatsoever,” Dr. Sprague said. “There’s no measuring. It’s using a spatula to dole it out, so you may get a tablet that is 100 percent cychlorphine and another tablet that’s pure filler.”
At least 24 states have reported overdoses or deaths involving cychlorphine.
“It is a war. People die,” Dr. Sprague told Freedom. “It is really frightening.”
New drugs, hard-to-detect drugs, more potent and harder-to-reverse drugs. Each chemical turn of the wheel leaves authorities confronting a compound they have not seen before and users swallowing pills whose contents they cannot know.
Once people start taking drugs, people start dying.
The best bet, the only smart bet, is to keep them from starting in the first place.
And that is the hard, cold and honest truth.
