Opioid overdose emergency calls are surging in Austin, Texas, as cychlorphine—a synthetic drug said to be 10 times stronger than fentanyl—is spreading across the country. In late September, the city's emergency medical services (EMS) told local television station KXAN-TV that it had logged 98 opioid overdose calls over the previous 30 days, up from 73 a year ago. "Of those, nine patients required more than two doses of Narcan to reverse the overdose.
One to two doses is what's common," said Captain Christa Stedman of the Austin-Travis County EMS (ATCEMS). "When we compare that to September of last year, we had 73 opioid overdoses, and only two of them required more than two doses of Narcan," she added. While ATCEMS does not test for different types of opioids during treatment, cychlorphine-related overdoses have often proved to require multiple doses of Narcan.
Texas is not the only state facing increased cychlorphine-related overdoses. Deaths linked to the drug are on the rise across the country, with Tennessee reporting the highest number of fatal overdoses where cychlorphine was confirmed to have played a role. Cychlorphine, or N-propionitrile chlorphine, is a synthetic opioid that has been linked to dozens of deaths in the U.S. since last year.
While it is not technically a new drug, it has become more prevalent in illicit drug trafficking only in recent years. The drug's origins can be traced back to a Belgian lab in the 1960s, when scientists first synthesized and studied a class of synthetic opioids known as "orphines" or benzimidazol-2-ones for potential use as pain relievers. Cychlorphine was never approved for medical use or marketed, but the recipe for making it was published in academic journals decades ago and is now accessible online, allowing people to produce it, Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychiatry professor who served as a senior drug policy adviser in the Obama administration, told The New York Times.
The drug has appeared in Europe, Canada and the U.S. over the past couple of years. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has warned that cychlorphine is increasingly being found mixed into fentanyl and counterfeit pills, making detection hard—especially as standard fentanyl test strips have proved ineffective in identifying the newly popular drug. Man-made orphines are considered to be much more potent than fentanyl.
In the case of cychlorphine, experts have estimated it to be up to 10 times stronger than fentanyl. Cychlorphine was first detected in the U.S. in Florida in April 2024, according to DEA data. Within a couple of years, the drug has spread from the East Coast to the West Coast, with detections quickly multiplying.
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