San Francisco Teen's Overdose Autopsy Exposes New Opioid Ten Times Stronger Than Fentanyl

A mother found her 16-year-old son dead in his bed in April. His body had turned blue. Black fluid was coming from his nose and mouth. She assumed fentanyl killed him.

The coroner's report told a different story. Dante Paul Lacourte had cychlorphine in his system, a synthetic opioid San Francisco's medical examiner had never seen before, according to The New York Times reporting cited by both Daily Wire and Newser.

A Drug Nobody Was Looking For

Stanford University psychiatry professor Keith Humphreys put it bluntly: "The worst possible way to find out a new drug is in the city is by an autopsy."

Cychlorphine is estimated to be up to 10 times more potent than fentanyl, according to Daily Wire. It doesn't show up on standard fentanyl test strips or routine opioid urine screens. Reversing an overdose often takes multiple doses of Narcan, and Newser reports that sometimes it can't be reversed at all.

The drug isn't new science. It traces back to a Belgian lab in the 1960s, where researchers were trying to build a painkiller strong enough for severe conditions like bone cancer. Regulators rejected it for medical use because it was "too strong and dangerous," but the research got published in scientific journals anyway. Humphreys said that formula is "now available in the dark corners of the internet."

How Dante Died

Dante's friend Leo Wingate told The New York Times that Dante had struggled with depression and anxiety for years. Wingate was with him the night he died, and the two smoked marijuana before Wingate dropped him off at his apartment. Dante regularly bought drugs in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, knowing the pills could contain fentanyl.

His mother had warned him repeatedly. "It just takes one pill," she told him. Newser reports his parents had tried to get him into treatment during his years-long struggle with addiction.

That tension between a family actively seeking help and a 16-year-old still able to buy counterfeit pills a short walk from home sits at the core of this story. Harm-reduction advocates would argue this shows treatment access and mental health care need to be part of any response, not just arrests. Given how long Dante's family had been fighting his addiction, the question of what might have changed remains open. But he still died from a pill bought on a street corner.

The Investigation

Police used evidence pulled from Dante's phone and pills found in his bedroom to run undercover buys and secure arrest warrants. They arrested four people on multiple felony charges: Leander Pitts, 46; Starr Lamare, 39; Sharonnee Hyson, 44; and Nicholas Wallace, 46. Wallace was picked up in the Tenderloin, about a 10-minute walk from where Dante died, according to Daily Wire.

These are charges, not convictions. No trial dates or plea outcomes have been reported. Police seized roughly 20,000 pills during the investigation, and cychlorphine has since turned up in unrelated arrests around San Francisco, suggesting it's already circulating through the city's illicit drug supply rather than being a one-off batch.

Spreading Beyond San Francisco

Shortly after Dante's death, the Trump administration issued a warning that cychlorphine could spread nationally. Federal officials said it had already been detected in 10 states: California, Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire. At least 55 deaths have been linked to the drug since 2025, according to Daily Wire's account of the federal warning.

The reach may go further than that. Newser cites CBC reporting that cychlorphine overdoses have appeared from Tennessee all the way to Canada's Yukon territory, meaning the federal government's 10-state warning may already understate how far the drug has traveled.

What's Unresolved

No agency has said how many total overdoses or deaths cychlorphine has caused nationwide beyond that 55-death figure, and no timeline exists for developing a field test strip that can actually detect it. Standard toxicology screening missed it in Dante's case entirely. His death only became a data point because a medical examiner ran an unusual panel and got an unexpected result.

Until test strips catch up to what's actually on the street, drug users, including teenagers who believe they're buying fentanyl-laced pills they can somehow manage, have no way of knowing what they're actually taking. The next case, wherever it happens, will likely be identified the same way Dante's was: after the fact, on an autopsy table.