Opioid Users Found a ‘Miracle Drug’ to Help Them Quit. Then the DEA Banned It

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.