His name was Dante Paul Lacourte, and he was sixteen years old.
That is most of what the public record gives us about him. A name. An age. A city, San Francisco. A date, April 7th of this year, when he died at home after taking drugs that contained a synthetic opioid called cychlorphine. Everything else about Dante — what he was like, what he loved, who is sitting at a table tonight with his chair empty — belongs to his family, and they have lost enough without his life becoming content. But hold on to the little we have, because a name and an age are exactly what this story is about. Dante was somebody's whole world. And he is one of the only ones of the dead we can say even that much about.
He was the first person in San Francisco confirmed killed by cychlorphine. He was not the first in America, and he was nowhere near the last. The White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy has counted at least 55 deaths tied to this drug across the United States. Tennessee has taken the worst of it: at least 41 people dead between July of last year and February of this year, spread across 11 counties. Seven people in Cook County, Illinois, gone this year by July. Fatal overdoses in Oklahoma and California. Two people in New Jersey.
Read that paragraph again and notice what is missing from it. Names. Forty-one people died in Tennessee and the public record hands us a number. Two people died in New Jersey — close enough to us that their families shop in stores our readers shop in — and their names were never released at all. Every one of those numbers was a person with a name their people called them by, a phone that still rings in somebody's contacts, a bedroom somebody has to walk past. Cychlorphine is killing people faster than the country can even learn who they were. That is not a figure of speech. It is the mechanics of this drug, and it is why its victims keep disappearing into statistics.
Because here is what the families of the dead are up against. Cychlorphine does not show up on fentanyl test strips. It does not show up on the routine drug screens hospitals run. When it kills, standard toxicology looks at the body of somebody's son or mother or husband and reports back — nothing found. Only a handful of specialized forensic laboratories in the country can detect it at all, which is how Tennessee's dead went unidentified as cychlorphine victims for months, and why the federal count of 55 is understood by the people keeping it to be a floor, not a ceiling. Somewhere there are families who buried their person this year believing it was fentanyl, or a heart problem, or just one of those things — and the real answer is a drug whose name they have never heard. It may still be the answer some of them never get.
The ones who do get answers get them like Dante's family likely did: by investigation, after the fact, when it can no longer help the person it explains. San Francisco police traced the supply that reached Dante and made four arrests. They seized more than twenty thousand counterfeit pills, and firearms. Twenty thousand pills. Every one of them pressed and stamped to look like a real prescription tablet — the kind a teenager buys through a phone screen from somebody who swears it's just Xanax, just Percocet, just the thing everyone at the party is taking. And when pills grabbed in earlier, unrelated San Francisco investigations were sent to the lab, those tested positive for cychlorphine too. The supply that killed Dante was not one bad batch from one bad man. It was already everywhere the police looked. Each of those twenty thousand pills was a Dante that hadn't happened yet.
Why can one pill do it? Because of what cychlorphine is. It's a laboratory-made opioid, patented by a drug company in 1967 and never turned into a medicine — the recipe sat in scientific journals for half a century until somebody went looking for it. It hits the same brain receptors as fentanyl, and the federal government says it may be up to ten times stronger: fentanyl is roughly 50 times morphine, so do the arithmetic and you land somewhere near 500. Los Angeles County's health department warns that "a very small amount can cause someone to stop breathing." Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, who treats addiction in New York, calls it "the new fentanyl on steroids." In Knoxville, Tennessee, where the forensic center has been identifying these dead one by one, an official there put the whole thing in one sentence: "It has never been more dangerous to take street-level drugs than right now."
And if you are the person kneeling next to somebody it is killing — a friend, a girlfriend, a mother who found her kid — understand what has changed about saving them. Narcan still works on cychlorphine. Give it, and call 911. But one or two doses, the amount in the kit most people carry, the amount that brought people back all through the fentanyl years, may not be enough against a drug built like this. Field reports say it can take several doses — by one expert's account, five or six. Some of the 55 surely had somebody try. Some of them may have had somebody give the standard two doses, do everything they were taught, and watch it not work. That is not failure. That is a drug the rescue playbook wasn't written for.
Now the part of the map that touches home, because Dante's city is three thousand miles from Smyrna and this drug is not. Federal officials found cychlorphine in drug samples from ten states in 2025, and Pennsylvania was one of them. Lab data has detected it in Maryland. New Jersey's two dead are already counted. The forensic center tracking this drug for the entire country operates out of Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, in the Philadelphia suburbs. Delaware has no confirmed detection, and this paper will not invent one. But the center's director, Alex Krotulski, explains what that means and every Delaware parent should hear him: the absence of a positive sample from a state doesn't mean the drug isn't there. It means no sample from that state has come back positive — yet. The drug, he says, is in all regions of the country. Every state that touches Delaware has it, and the standard test at a Delaware emergency room tonight could not see it if it arrived.
There is one more number, and it's the one that makes this story hurt the way it does. In 2023, more than 110,000 Americans died of overdoses. In 2024, the count fell to about 80,000 — the biggest improvement in years, tens of thousands of families who got to keep their person. That is what winning looked like. Cychlorphine is what losing again looks like: not the old enemy returning, but a stronger one, wearing the old one's clothes, invisible to the old one's tests, arriving in towns that had just started to exhale.
So this is what we'd ask you to do with Dante's name. If there are pills in your house that didn't come out of a pharmacy — your kid's, your brother's, yours — understand that their stamp means nothing, a test strip's blessing means nothing, and "he's taken these before" means nothing. Carry Narcan if anyone around you uses, carry more than one kit, and it's free through Delaware's state and community programs as well as over the counter. If you find somebody limp and barely breathing: 911 first, Narcan second, again in a few minutes if they don't respond, and stay — Delaware's Good Samaritan law protects the person who makes that call. Somebody in Tennessee needed that paragraph this year and didn't have it. Forty-one somebodies.
His name was Dante Paul Lacourte. He was sixteen years old, and he died at home on an ordinary April day because a pill lied about what it was. The other fifty-four-plus have names too. Say a prayer for the families who know them — and then make sure yours never has to learn a new drug's name the way theirs did.
Brought to you by Team Murphy Media
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