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The next breakthrough can't wait
Every medical treatment starts as a research compound.
Aspirin. Penicillin. Ozempic. Cancer therapy. All medicines we trust today.
SR-17018 has already shown promise in the lab. It deserves the same opportunity other breakthroughs received: the chance to be studied in humans.
Public-health advocacy · Research access
Don't Emergency-Schedule SR-17018 Before It Can Be Studied
DEA has announced intent to place SR-17018 into Schedule I. Many people report that SR-17018 helped them stop opioids with dramatically reduced withdrawal symptoms. These reports are not a substitute for clinical trials, but they are strong enough to justify urgent research, compound-specific review, and a lawful medical pathway rather than emergency prohibition.
What's happening?
- SR-17018 is also known as 5,6-dichloro desmethylchlorphine — this is the DEA's own terminology in its notice.
- DEA has named it in a temporary (emergency) scheduling notice that would place it into Schedule I.
- This advocacy request is NOT about unregulated sales.
- The request is to delay or narrow scheduling of SR-17018 specifically, separate it from other compounds, publish compound-specific evidence, and preserve lawful research and medical-development access.
- SR-17018 is not an untested idea: it has been described in the peer-reviewed literature since 2017. In animal studies — including a 2021 comparison with morphine and oxycodone — it produced pain relief in inflammatory and neuropathic pain models while developing little to no tolerance, meaning the animals did not need escalating doses over time. (See the compiled studies.)
- What is missing is not preclinical evidence but peer-reviewed research in humans. Those animal findings are not proof of safety or efficacy in people — they are exactly the promising signal that clinical trials exist to confirm or refute, and Schedule I placement would make that human research slower and harder to run.
- Federal law sorts controlled substances into five schedules. Schedules II–V cover drugs with accepted uses and progressively lower restrictions, but Schedule I is reserved for substances treated as having no accepted use — and it carries the heaviest research barriers. Placing SR-17018 there does not just restrict it; it makes the very studies needed to understand it unreasonably hard to run, because researchers must secure a special Schedule I DEA registration, site and storage inspections, and separate protocol approvals — a slow, costly permitting gauntlet that stalls or deters the science before it can begin.
The core ask
- Delay or narrow the emergency scheduling of SR-17018 specifically.
- Separate SR-17018 from other listed compounds and review it on its own merits.
- Publish the compound-specific evidence being relied upon.
- Preserve lawful research and medical-development access to SR-17018.
- Involve HHS/FDA scientific and medical review before any placement.
- Avoid blocking potential opioid-withdrawal research before it can be studied.
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This is not a request for unregulated sales, and it is not medical or legal advice. It is a request to preserve lawful research access and require compound-specific review.