SR-17018 Prohibition Prevention
Help us SAVE SR-17018
The DEA is preparing to place SR-17018 into Schedule I as early as July 31, 2026. Unless we act now, a compound with the potential to transform pain treatment and opioid withdrawal research could be effectively locked away before scientists have the opportunity to determine what it can do.
This is not simply a fight over one research compound. It is a fight over whether fear and prohibition will once again be allowed to stop science and whether a potentially lifesaving discovery will be investigated or buried.
We need your voice. We need your support. And we need it now.
A Path Toward Safer Pain Medicines
Traditional opioid medications can provide essential pain relief, but repeated use often produces tolerance. As effectiveness declines, patients may require increasingly larger doses, escalating the risks of dependence, respiratory depression, and fatal overdose.
SR-17018 was developed to interact with the mu-opioid receptor differently from conventional opioids.
In animal studies, researchers found that SR-17018 maintained pain-relieving effects without the same development of tolerance seen with morphine and oxycodone in several experimental models. Other preclinical research found that substituting SR-17018 in morphine-tolerant animals restored morphine sensitivity while suppressing the onset of withdrawal. While these findings are preliminary, they point toward something urgently worth investigating: a new generation of pain medicines that do not lead to escalating addiction.
At a time when the United States desperately needs safer approaches to pain, dependence, and opioid withdrawal, the responsible response is not to shut down inquiry. It is to accelerate rigorous research.
People Are Reporting Something Science Must Investigate
Across online recovery communities, individuals have reported using SR-17018 while attempting to stop fentanyl, prescription opioids, buprenorphine, and other opioid-like substances. Some describe withdrawing with dramatically reduced symptoms. Others report being able to leave years of opioid dependence behind.
While these are not FDA-approved drugs, lived, real-world experience can reveal questions that medicine urgently needs to investigate. When people independently report that an experimental compound may have helped them escape opioid dependence without the severe withdrawal that so often drives relapses, the proper public-health response is not to ignore those voices and ban that substance. It is to study that drug -not shut down research.
Donate Today To Save SR-17018
This campaign supports lawful scientific research and evidence-based public policy. It does not encourage anyone to obtain or use SR-17018 and does not provide medical, legal, sourcing, dosing, vendor, or synthesis information. SR-17018 is not an FDA-approved medication.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine are now conducting an anonymous survey to better understand people’s experiences with SR-17018. Scheduling the compound before this work can be completed could disrupt recruitment, discourage further investigation, and leave critical questions unanswered.
DEA Is Using a Blunt Hammer Where Careful Science Is Required
DEA has grouped SR-17018 with three other synthetic opioids in a single emergency-scheduling action. But the agency’s own evidence shows that these compounds do not have equivalent histories or risk profiles.
DEA reports only two NFLIS laboratory encounters involving SR-17018 in two states since 2025. By comparison, the same notice reports 225 encounters involving cychlorphine and identifies cychlorphine in 49 fatalities. The notice does not identify an SR-17018-specific fatality, yet DEA treats all four compounds collectively as presenting the same “imminent hazard.”
That is not careful, compound-specific regulation. It is guilt by association.
DEA is also using an emergency process that provides no ordinary public-comment period before the order is issued.
If the temporary order takes effect, SR-17018 will be placed in Schedule I for two years, with the possibility of an additional one-year extension. Researchers would face specialized DEA registration, security, storage, procurement, inspection, and protocol requirements—barriers that can delay projects for years or prevent them from beginning at all.
We are asking DEA, HHS, FDA, and Congress to:
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Separate SR-17018 from the other compounds.
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Examine it on its own evidence.
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Publish the compound-specific basis for claiming an imminent hazard.
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Preserve research access - study it before scheduling it.
What Is at Stake
Every medicine begins as an unapproved research compound.
If promising compounds are placed into Schedule I before their therapeutic potential can be investigated, we may never know what treatments were lost. We may lose an opportunity to develop safer pain medicines. We may lose a new approach to opioid withdrawal.
People who might have been helped will never know that another path could have existed.
The opioid crisis will not be solved by criminalizing every molecule.
It will be solved through courage, evidence, research, and a willingness to allow scientific research to proceed.
Take Action Now
We will have a tool ready shortly to email your representatives, senators, DEA, FDA, and HHS. Tell them to delay or narrow the emergency order, require a compound-specific review, and protect legitimate scientific research.
The Rights and Reason Project is organizing legal, scientific, policy, coalition, and public-education efforts to challenge unjustified drug scheduling and preserve research access. Donations support the Project’s broader work to fight DEA overreach, advance rational drug policy, and protect promising scientific research— focusing first on the campaign to save SR-17018.
Research Will Save Lives—But Only If It Is Allowed to Continue!
Save the research. Save science. Save SR-17018.