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.”

He eventually graduated to a similar chemical, called MGM-15, which felt more like oxycodone—the effect he prefers. (The DEA placed both 7-OH and MGM-15 in Schedule I over the summer.)

It got to the point where MGM-15 was “all I was thinking about,” Bates says. About 11 months ago, he started scouring the Discord and Telegram groups he was in for advice on how to quit.

“I got introduced to SR-17, which was a freaking miracle,” he says, using a common shorthand for the chemical. It took him about three weeks to taper off MGM-15, using SR-17018.

Previous attempts to get off 7-OH had caused him “anxiety like you wouldn’t believe” along with restless legs during withdrawal, he says. But with SR-17018, he didn’t experience any physical withdrawal symptoms. “They've never created anything like this,” he says, adding that he didn’t experience a high or “euphoria” from taking it.

Michael, a fellow former 7-OH user, used SR-17018 to kick the habit in January. He also describes it as a “miracle drug.” Michael, who does not want his last name used to protect his privacy, says he’d tried in earnest to quit using 7-OH at least five previous times—each involved “three days of hell” and another week of feeling “low.”

While he says SR-17018 didn’t take away every negative side effect of coming off opioids, “the anxiety and the sweating and the restlessness and all that stuff was gone.” He says he was able to keep working, with “no huge disruption in my life.”

Both men have used gold-standard drugs for getting off opioids—buprenorphine and methadone—but say they prefer SR-17018 because it doesn’t have to be used long-term. Getting off buprenorphine and methadone can also cause intense withdrawal symptoms.

Michael speculates that the feds may have banned SR-17018 because they saw it as a “potential disruptor to a multibillion-dollar industry.” “I think that that's why they're freaked out about SR becoming widely known and available, because it is going to help a lot of people get off of these maintenance drugs that they're stuck on.”

When Denver attorney Robert Rush caught wind that the DEA was planning to emergency schedule SR-17018, he filed a request to stop it, arguing that it has a lower risk profile than the other synthetic opioids being banned at the time. He tells me the DEA never responded.

“It was a very reasonable, well-thought-out, grounded-in-scientific-evidence argument, and they just completely ignored it,” says Rush, who is executive director of the nonprofit Rights and Reason Project—which advocates for drug policy reform—and represents Bohn.

In response to a request for comment, the DEA referred WIRED to its notice of intent to schedule SR-17018 and three other synthetic opioids. The document says the agency had found two samples of the drug in two states since 2025 via the National Forensic Laboratory Information System, which analyzes samples of drugs seized by law enforcement. It also said a separate drug monitoring system, Rapid Drug Analysis and Research, had detected some samples of SR-17018 on the West Coast.

“The four synthetic opioids have no currently approved medical use and, based on positive identifications of these four substances in forensic drug exhibits and toxicology samples, are likely to be trafficked and abused similarly to other synthetic opioids,” the notice of intent says. It also says that because SR-17018 can reset a person’s opioid tolerance, it might leave them more vulnerable to overdose the next time they use—though the same is true for abstinence.

Rush says the DEA’s use of temporary emergency scheduling powers in this case is “draconian” and shouldn’t apply, because SR-17018 hasn’t been implicated in emergency room visits or overdose deaths.

The emergency scheduling will last two years, with a potential one-year extension—but the DEA could also permanently schedule the drug in that time period, a process that requires public and scientific input. During the emergency scheduling period, Rush says, there’s no opportunity for a judge to review the DEA’s decision.

He says that the DEA banning gas station opioids like 7-OH while simultaneously getting rid of potentially helpful substances like SR-17018 “is setting up 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 says.