In 2012, as the driver of deaths in the opioid crisis began moving from prescription pills to heroin, Laura Bohn was tasked with finding safer drugs to manage pain.
Funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in 2017 she and other scientists revealed in the science journal Cell that several compounds—including a particularly promising one called SR-17018—could relieve pain in mice without causing respiratory depression. That’s a big deal, because respiratory depression is typically what causes people using opioids to stop breathing and die.
Bohn, senior associate vice president of research at University of South Florida Health, says her team filed a patent on SR-17018. They went on to discover that mice using the chemical did not develop a high tolerance for it and that mice already dependent on morphine—a powerful opioid—could consume SR-17018 to reset their tolerance without suffering from painful withdrawal symptoms.
It’s no longer just mice who use SR-17018.
On Reddit and Discord, people who use drugs frequently refer to the compound as a godsend that’s helped them quit using opioids they’re addicted to. Until very recently, the drug, though not regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration, was relatively easy to purchase online, as it was not a federally controlled substance. Bohn, meanwhile, has been in the process of trying to conduct clinical trials on humans, which has never been done.
But all of that came crashing to a halt when the US Drug Enforcement Administration emergency-scheduled SR-17018 as a Schedule I controlled substance in late August, putting it in the same category as heroin with “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”
For Bohn, the move will make it much harder to do the research she’s been planning. “It’s a real hassle,” she tells WIRED. “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.”
For drug users who hope to use it to wean off opioids—despite the lack of clinical evidence that the drug is effective in humans—it’s the removal of a potential off-ramp for their addictions.
Jim Bates has been hooked on various opioids, including prescription pills, heroin, and fentanyl, since he was 25. About two years ago, the 53-year-old Duncan, Oklahoma, kitchen manager got addicted to 7-OH, a concentrated compound found in kratom that activates the brain’s opioid receptors. “That shit blew my head off,” he says, noting he was introduced to it at a vape shop. “It was a whole lot like heroin.”