It was a stressful Tuesday morning in San Francisco, and Christina Lacourte went to her son’s bedroom to wake him up and get him ready for school. The door was locked, so she had to struggle to open it with a hanger.
Upon entering, she saw her son in bed, under the neon sign that read “Open” – like those in shop windows – which he had asked for on his birthday when he was in sixth grade. His face was turning bluish and his veins were prominent. A black liquid was oozing from his nose and mouth, pooling on the sheets, detailed The New York Times in an article published this Monday.
Christina ran to get the two doses of Narcan she kept in the kitchen drawer for this very moment – the one she had feared so much – but they could not revive him. She recalls crying inconsolably and screaming while calling 911. Her apartment suddenly became a blurry gray image of paramedics, police officers, and forensic doctors.
Her son was taken out in a body bag.
She assumed her son had died from fentanyl, but the autopsy report made no mention of it. Instead, it included a word unknown to her: “cyclorphine.” Dante Paul Lacourte was 16 years old.
According to the Times, the teenager’s autopsy marks the arrival of the deadly drug in San Francisco. It remains the only time the word cyclorphine has appeared so far in a city coroner’s report.
Dante Paul’s death occurred on April 7 in his mother’s three-bedroom apartment, located in the affluent Lower Nob Hill neighborhood.
Seventeen days later, San Francisco health authorities held a press conference to warn about the emergence of a synthetic opioid more lethal than fentanyl, which continued to cause the deaths of dozens of people in the city each month.
Earlier in March, the alert had already been issued in Chicago. “It is called cyclorphine and is a synthetic opioid described as 10 times more potent than fentanyl. It is now appearing in the illicit drug market in Illinois,” ABC reported at the time, warning about its distribution on the streets. It has already been linked to at least one death: that of a man from Will County who died in Chicago.
In an interview with the television network, Todd Smith, special agent in charge of the Chicago Field Division of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), stated that this emerging, unpredictable, and lethal drug is so new that it is almost impossible to detect it through street tests.
“It is extremely concerning because we have made progress. There has been a significant reduction in overdose deaths and poisoning cases throughout the Chicago area. And it is worrying to see how this new substance is entering the illicit drug market,” he said.
The potency of cyclorphine makes any contact with it potentially catastrophic. “The real danger is that they could be regular drug users and suddenly this more potent synthetic opioid is introduced into their system, which could cause an overdose or poisoning,” Smith explained.
Until then, cyclorphine had been detected three times in Illinois. However, it is appearing across the country, according to the Center for Forensic Science Research and Education (CFSRE), with multiple cases already recorded in California, Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and the East Coast.
“This substance worries me,” said Laura Fry, executive director of Live4LALI, an organization dedicated to harm reduction associated with substance use. She noted that testing street drugs for the presence of cyclorphine is a challenge, if not impossible.
“We have test strips for fentanyl, xylazine, benzodiazepines, and medetomidine; but a test strip for this substance has not yet been developed,” Fry commented.
At the end of April, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) issued its first official warning about drug-related threats, alerting law enforcement, public health officials, and medical professionals about the spread of cyclorphine, a potent synthetic opioid linked to at least 55 deaths nationwide between 2025 and 2026.
According to the warning, cyclorphine – also known as N-propionitrile-chlorphine – has been detected in the illicit drug market in 10 states covering all four U.S. census regions, with the highest concentrations recorded in Ohio, Texas, and Tennessee. The Knox County Regional Forensic Center in Tennessee linked this substance to at least 41 overdose deaths between July 2025 and February 2026 alone.
The ONDCP warned that cyclorphine could be up to 10 times more potent than fentanyl and that multiple doses of naloxone might be required to reverse an overdose. Authorities also noted that this drug is especially difficult to detect, as it does not appear on common test strips or routine urine tests for opioids in hospitals.
The statement indicated that cyclorphine has been found mixed with fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine, bromazolam, and other illicit substances, although it has also appeared alone in seized drug samples. This opioid belongs to a class of synthetic opioids known as “orphines,” a group that includes brorphine, chlorphine, and spirochlorphine.
The New York Times highlights that cyclorphine is one of the new and deadly drugs revolutionizing the illicit drug market and confounding cities that are just beginning to control the fentanyl crisis. These new substances can be manufactured by amateur chemists anywhere; moreover, they are harder to trace and their effects on the human body are more complicated to reverse.
Experts point out that reversing the effects of this new drug may require multiple doses of Narcan, even though most people only carry one or two doses at a time. In recent years, the substance has appeared in Europe and on the U.S. East Coast, spreading like tentacles.
The drug that ended Dante’s life was created in a Belgian research laboratory in the 1960s – as part of a group of compounds known as “orphines” – in an attempt to find powerful analgesics capable of relieving the suffering of patients with diseases such as bone cancer.
These drugs were not approved for medical use because they were considered excessively potent and dangerous. However, the formula to make them was published in specialized journals and is now available in the darkest corners of the internet, noted Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychiatry professor who served as a senior drug policy advisor during the Barack Obama administration.
That means people can make them in their kitchens, without the costly cultivation lands needed for cocaine, heroin, or marijuana, he explained. “You don’t have to be a big pharmaceutical company,” Humphreys said.
More than 4,000 people have died from drug overdoses in San Francisco since 2020 – mainly due to fentanyl – a number far higher than the sum of deaths from Covid-19, homicides, and car accidents recorded in the same period.
Christina Lacourte knew there was a possibility her son could die from a pill bought on the street and adulterated with fentanyl. “Just one pill,” she said she had told him many times.
The woman regularly visits the Mill Valley Cemetery in California, where Dante’s ashes rest under an oak tree.
She got rid of most of the furniture in the bedroom where her son died but kept the neon sign with the word “Open” that hung over his bed, the Times notes.
Every morning she turns it on, and can see its glowing light from other parts of the apartment; every night, she turns it off. She says that with every flick of the switch, she thinks of Dante.
