It began, as many American stories of the last fifteen years begin, with the dead. In 2012 the deaths of the opioid crisis were moving away from prescription pills and toward heroin, and a pharmacologist named Laura Bohn was given a task the country badly needed done: find drugs that could manage pain more safely.
The government paid for the search. With funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Bohn and other scientists reported in the journal Cell in 2017 that several compounds relieved pain in mice without causing respiratory depression. That matters more than anything else in this story. Respiratory depression is what usually kills people who use opioids: they stop breathing. The most promising of the compounds carried a laboratory name, SR-17018.
Bohn, now senior associate vice president of research at University of South Florida Health, says her team filed a patent on it. Further work showed that mice taking the chemical did not build up a high tolerance, and that mice already dependent on morphine could use it to reset their tolerance without going through painful withdrawal.
No human has ever taken part in a clinical trial of SR-17018. Bohn has been working toward one. As Manisha Krishnan reported for Wired, in a story republished by Ars Technica, those plans have now been frozen by another arm of the same government.
The order
The Drug Enforcement Administration announced its intention on July 1, in a notice in the Federal Register, to temporarily place four synthetic opioids in Schedule I: cychlorphine, spirochlorphine, SR-14968 and SR-17018. The temporary scheduling order was published on August 27. From that day SR-17018 has shared a legal category with heroin, the category reserved for substances with “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”
For the scientist, the effect is total.
Right now, I would like to have it tested for additional safety studies, and I can’t have it made, I can’t ship it, I can’t touch it. I can’t do anything.
“It’s a real hassle,” she said. That is a mild word for having your life’s work locked in a drawer.
The off-ramp
The compound had already left the laboratory. It was not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, but because it was not federally controlled it could be bought online without much trouble, and on Reddit and Discord people who use drugs began calling it a godsend for getting off opioids. There is no clinical evidence that it works in humans. There are only their accounts.
Jim Bates is 53 and manages a kitchen in Duncan, Oklahoma. He has been hooked on one opioid or another since he was 25: prescription pills, heroin, fentanyl. About two years ago a vape shop introduced him to 7-OH, a concentrated compound found in kratom that acts on the brain’s opioid receptors. “It was a whole lot like heroin,” he said. He moved on to a similar chemical, MGM-15, which felt more like oxycodone, until it was “all I was thinking about.” The DEA placed both in Schedule I over the summer.
Earlier attempts to quit 7-OH had brought restless legs and “anxiety like you wouldn’t believe.” About 11 months ago he went looking for help in the Discord and Telegram groups he belonged to. “I got introduced to SR-17, which was a freaking miracle,” he said. He tapered off MGM-15 in roughly three weeks, he said, with no physical withdrawal and no high.
Michael, another former 7-OH user who asked that his last name be withheld, had tried seriously to quit at least five times. Each attempt meant “three days of hell” and another week of feeling “low.” In January he used SR-17018. Not every symptom vanished, he said, but “the anxiety and the sweating and the restlessness and all that stuff was gone,” and he kept working with “no huge disruption in my life.”
Both men have used buprenorphine and methadone, the standard medicines for leaving opioids behind, and both say they prefer SR-17018 because it is not taken long-term; coming off the standard drugs can bring severe withdrawal of its own. Michael offers his own theory, and it is only a theory: that the authorities saw the compound as a “potential disruptor to a multibillion-dollar industry.”
Two samples
Asked to explain, the DEA pointed to its notice of intent. According to the agency, its National Forensic Laboratory Information System, which analyses drugs seized by police, had found two samples of SR-17018 in two states since 2025. A separate monitoring system, Rapid Drug Analysis and Research, had detected some on the West Coast. The notice argues that “based on positive identifications of these four substances in forensic drug exhibits and toxicology samples,” all four “are likely to be trafficked and abused similarly to other synthetic opioids.” It also warns that because SR-17018 can reset tolerance, a person may be more exposed to overdose the next time they use. The same, as Wired noted, is true of anyone who simply stops.
Here is how a state reasons about a substance it does not know. Two samples are counted as a trend. A drug that lowers tolerance is treated as a danger because people who stop using are in danger too.
Robert Rush, a Denver attorney who runs the drug policy nonprofit Rights and Reason Project and represents Bohn, asked the agency to leave SR-17018 out, arguing it carried less risk than the other opioids being banned. His group and Students for Sensible Drug Policy say they filed an administrative request on July 29 questioning whether the compound posed an “imminent hazard to the public safety.” Rush says the DEA never answered. “It was a very reasonable, well-thought-out, grounded-in-scientific-evidence argument, and they just completely ignored it.” The order itself records that the Department of Health and Human Services, according to the search of the Federal Register record, raised no objection.
Rush calls the use of emergency powers here “draconian,” since SR-17018 has not been linked to emergency room visits or overdose deaths. The listing lasts two years, until August 2028, and can be extended by one more. The DEA may make it permanent in that time, a process that requires public and scientific input. Until then, Rush says, no judge can review the decision.
He sees the agency removing the gas-station opioids while also removing something that might help people escape them, and he calls the combination “a perfect storm for another overdose crisis.”
“I cannot find a compelling reason to shut down a couple of decades’ worth of research into something that could either be or lead to the development of next-generation opioid dependency treatment,” he said.