In April, Christina Lacourte discovered her 16-year-old son, Dante, unconscious inside their San Francisco apartment. She immediately retrieved two doses of Narcan from the kitchen and administered both.
There was no response.
Dante had been overcome by cychlorphine, a synthetic opioid that can be as much as 10 times more powerful than fentanyl—strong enough to defeat the emergency medication many families rely on during an overdose.
The danger is compounded by the fact that fentanyl test strips, commonly used to screen drugs, cannot identify cychlorphine.
For Christina, the most frightening part was discovering that an opioid so deadly and difficult to detect is appearing with increasing frequency across the United States.
The case in San Francisco, which drew attention this week, reflects a growing national threat rather than a one-off tragedy.
In December, 18-year-old Jake Scoufos died in Yukon, Oklahoma, after taking what he believed was a counterfeit prescription pill containing cychlorphine.
His mother, Malisa Hepner, was left with the same devastating conclusion.
‘You can survive a fentanyl overdose in a lot of cases. You can’t survive this,’ Malisa told Our News Outlet.
Jake Scoufos, 18, died in December 2025 after taking a counterfeit pill containing the deadly synthetic opioid cychlorphine
Malisa Hepner remembered her son Jake for having the ‘kind of smile that really made everybody else smile’
Federal drug authorities have associated cychlorphine with at least 55 deaths nationwide. The largest clusters have been identified in Ohio, Texas and Tennessee.
The opioid has been connected to fatal overdoses in at least 18 states.
In Tennessee, officials at the Knox County Regional Forensic Center have attributed at least 41 overdose deaths to cychlorphine during the past year.
Specialists caution that the confirmed figures may be far below the actual death toll. Routine toxicology tests and widely available fentanyl strips can both miss the drug entirely.
Malisa found Jake unresponsive in his bedroom in Yukon. He was positioned so peacefully that it appeared he had simply fallen asleep while looking at his phone.
To her, he looked as though he were sleeping.
Jake thought he was purchasing prescription Percocet from a dealer he had known for years—someone he trusted and believed would not put him in danger.
Malisa said his death illustrates how quickly counterfeit pills can turn fatal, even for teenagers who consider themselves cautious and familiar with the risks of street drugs.
Like many confident teenagers, she said, Jake believed he could avoid becoming another victim.
‘Certainly, the ego of an 18-year-old is unrivaled, and he believed he was so smart, and it would never happen to him because he just knew better,’ said Malisa.
She said her family has been ‘okay, but not fine’ in the months since Jake’s death, leaning on grief counseling while trying to understand a drug that wasn’t even identified as the true cause of his death until March this year.
Malisa, 46, isn’t interested in turning her son’s death into a political crusade against cartels or dealers.
Instead, she wants other parents and their children to understand the danger before it’s too late.
Cychlorphine has claimed dozens of lives in states stretching from Tennessee to California since it first surfaced in America in 2024
The graduate of Mustang High School had a passion for cars and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
She said she wishes she had understood her son’s struggles earlier.
‘I wish I had understood that all of his little impulsive, erratic choices really was him searching for a way to find peace in the chaos of his internal world,’ she said.
‘My own fear and my own shame prevented me from getting him help far before we found him in his bedroom.’
Cychlorphine was first developed decades ago in a European lab as scientists searched for powerful painkillers, but it proved far too potent and dangerous for medical approval.
Decades later, the recipe for producing it has resurfaced in the darkest corners of the internet, giving underground chemists the tools to manufacture it themselves.
As with other opioids, much of the supply is believed to come from cartel-run labs in Mexico, using chemicals sourced from China.
The dealers encountered by Jake, Dante and other users often have no idea what’s inside the pills they’re selling.
Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University professor and former White House drug policy adviser, said such drugs no longer require sophisticated pharmaceutical operations to produce.
‘You don’t need to be a big pharma company,’ he explained, noting that cychlorphine can be cooked up cheaply without the farmland needed to grow other narcotics.
Like fentanyl, its principal danger lies in respiratory depression, as the drug can slow or entirely stop a person’s breathing within minutes.
Dante Lacourte, 16, died from a Cychlorphine overdose in his mother’s apartment in San Francisco’s Lower Nob Hill neighborhood in April
San Francisco cops seized hundreds of pills in raids after the death of a teen from Cychlorphine
Jake Scoufos believed he was buying prescription Percocet pills from a source he had known for years, said mother Malisa
Because of its potency, an overdose is far harder to reverse using naloxone, the emergency antidote better known by its brand name, Narcan.
‘It is ten times more potent than fentanyl… it’s considered Narcan resistant,’ Malisa said.
Jake’s own overdose was initially blamed on fentanyl, and it wasn’t until March 2026 that cychlorphine was confirmed as the true cause of his death.
After Dante died in his mother’s apartment in San Francisco’s Lower Nob Hill neighborhood, police launched an investigation.
They later raided three residences and arrested four men on narcotics and firearms charges linked to the case.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie vowed the city would not repeat the mistakes of the earlier fentanyl crisis that devastated its streets for years.
‘San Francisco was caught flat-footed by the fentanyl crisis. We will not let that happen again,’ he said.
Jake did everything a drug-using teenager reasonably could to avoid becoming an overdose statistic himself, said Malisa
Malisa found her son unresponsive in his bedroom in Yukon, Oklahoma, propped up peacefully
Nationwide, opioid overdose deaths climbed to historic highs during the pandemic before beginning a steep decline from 2023 onward, offering some hope that the worst may finally be passing.
But that trend brings Malisa little comfort. She doubts America will ever fully shake the epidemic, believing new synthetic drugs will keep emerging for as long as supplying them remains a way of life for those involved.
Now working as a therapist and podcast host, she urges other parents to stay alert to their children’s struggles before a crisis takes hold, and to treat any unfamiliar pill as a potential death sentence.
Mostly, though, she chooses to remember her son’s positive energy and charming grin.
‘It was just the kind of smile that really made everybody else smile,’ she said.
