It was a stressful Tuesday morning in San Francisco, and Christina Lacourte went to her son’s bedroom to roust him for school. The door was locked, so she had to wrangle it open with a coat hanger.
Inside, she saw her son in his bed, under the neon storefront “Open” sign he had wanted for his birthday in sixth grade. His face was turning blue, and his veins were visible. Black fluid oozed out of his nose and mouth and pooled on his sheets.
She raced to retrieve the two doses of Narcan she kept in her kitchen drawer for exactly this moment, the one she had long feared, but they did not revive him. She remembers bawling and screaming as she called 911. Her apartment, normally charming with splashes of pink, suddenly became a gray blur of paramedics, police officers and medical examiners.
Her son left in a body bag.
Surely, she figured, her son had died from fentanyl, but the autopsy report came back with no mention of it. Instead, it included a word new to her — “cychlorphine.” It remains the only time it has appeared on a San Francisco coroner’s report.
Dante Paul Lacourte was 16 years old.
A novel drug reaches San Francisco
The death occurred in Ms. Lacourte’s three-bedroom apartment in the affluent Lower Nob Hill neighborhood on April 7.
Seventeen days later, San Francisco health officials held a news conference to warn that a synthetic opioid had emerged that was deadlier than fentanyl, which was still killing dozens of people in the city each month.
Cychlorphine is one of an array of new, deadly drugs upending the illicit drug market and confounding cities that are only now beginning to get a handle on fentanyl. These novel drugs can be made by amateur chemists anywhere, and they are harder to trace, their effects on the human body harder to reverse.
Experts say cychlorphine is 10 times as potent as fentanyl. Test strips can detect fentanyl but not cychlorphine, and it can take numerous doses of Narcan to reverse the new drug’s effects, though most people carry only one or two doses at a time. It has shown up in Europe and the East Coast over the past couple of years, its presence spreading like tentacles.
Dante had appeared in The New York Times once before, as part of a photo project documenting the first decade of the millennium. Ludovic Lacourte, a tech consultant and winemaker who lives in Sausalito, just north of the city in Marin County, had submitted a snapshot of his newborn twins, Dante and Marco, wearing matching knit hats and tucked under a hospital blanket.
The tremendous joy of that day, Oct. 1, 2009, gradually faded. Ludovic and Christina Lacourte divorced in 2017, and the boys split time between their father in Marin and their mother in San Francisco. Dante struggled with the family rift and with A.D.H.D., anxiety and depression, his mother said.
By 13, he was smoking marijuana. Not long after, he was buying pills, including Xanax and Percocet, from dealers he found on Snapchat. His parents had him see numerous therapists and psychiatrists and placed him in three different rehabilitation programs. Nothing stuck.
Marco Lacourte, the younger twin by one minute, said he has avoided drugs and said in an interview that he had grown increasingly worried about his brother. He said he had talked to him, telling Dante, “You know it could get you killed.”
Ludovic Lacourte said he, too, had felt helpless watching Dante relapse. Sitting at his Sausalito home, where skis leaned against the wall and a boar’s head from a hunting expedition was mounted, he said he felt treatment programs were “a completely broken system.”
In hindsight, he believes there was only one solution. “You’ve got to run out the clock,” he said, explaining that his family was just trying to keep Dante alive until he “figures it out himself.”
Belgian lab origins
The drug that killed Dante was created in a Belgian research lab in the 1960s, part of a group called orphines, in an effort to find powerful painkillers that could ease patients’ misery from diseases like bone cancer.
Such drugs were not approved for medical use because they were deemed too strong and dangerous. The recipe for making them, though, was published in journals and is now available in the dark corners of the internet, said Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychiatry professor who served as a senior drug policy adviser in the Obama administration.
That means individuals can make them in their kitchens, without the expensive farmland needed for cocaine, heroin or marijuana, he said. Now, most illegal drugs are made in unregulated labs, or even in random apartments.
“You don’t need to be a big pharma company,” Mr. Humphreys said.
Some people addicted to fentanyl have developed a tolerance and seek an even stronger opioid to get high, he said. Others unwittingly buy pills that turn out to be laced with cychlorphine.
He recommended that cities test wastewater to detect new substances in the local drug supply. San Francisco was doing so until federal funding ran out in 2024, and then resumed wastewater testing only in July. The city this fall will begin publishing what it finds, including novel drugs, according to a Department of Public Health spokesman.
“The worst possible way to find out a new drug is in the city is by an autopsy,” Mr. Humphreys said.
Dante was the kind of boy who lit up a room. He was a gymnast who could do a standing backflip. He regularly traveled with family and friends to the Alps and could do aerial ski stunts down the steepest sections.
But his adventurous nature slid into recklessness, as his mother described it. He would try to scale San Francisco’s skyscrapers with his friends, she said. He stole from his family. He once brought a loaded gun home while high on drugs. The weekend before he died, he broke into a neighbor’s apartment while high and stole a laptop.
On his last night, he hung out with a close friend, Leo Wingate, 19, smoking weed and talking about a possible fishing trip. Mr. Wingate said in an interview that he dropped off Dante at his apartment late that night and did not hear from him again.
Mr. Wingate said that Dante had used drugs to cope with school pressures, anxiety and depression, and that Dante frequented the Tenderloin neighborhood, where dealers were always changing and their wares could not be trusted. Dante would take pills even if he thought they could be laced with “fetty,” Mr. Wingate said, using the slang term for fentanyl.
“He was just a kid trying to feel better,” Mr. Wingate said.
More than 4,000 people have died of drug overdoses in San Francisco since 2020, mostly from fentanyl, far more than those who died of Covid-19, homicides and car crashes combined during the same time span.
Ms. Lacourte knew there was a chance her son would die from a street pill laced with fentanyl. “It just takes one pill,” she said she had told him repeatedly.
The double-whammy of the pandemic and fentanyl jolted the city six years ago. Drug dealing occurred in plain sight, and people were frequently seen in the Tenderloin bent over at the waist, a common symptom of using fentanyl. Residents were frustrated, recalling the city’s progressive district attorney in 2022 and ousting the mayor in 2024.
The new mayor, Daniel Lurie, has directed the police to arrest users and dealers and prohibited the distribution of city-funded fentanyl smoking supplies without mandatory drug counseling.
Still, pills containing fentanyl remain prevalent on the streets, and Ms. Lacourte fears those deaths will climb as cychlorphine enters the supply.
An investigation yields arrests
An investigator with the San Francisco Police Department assured Ms. Lacourte for months that detectives were still investigating Dante’s death. She finally got some answers on Friday.
Police officers last week arrested Nicholas Wallace, 46, at his home in the Tenderloin neighborhood, about a 10-minute walk from Ms. Lacourte’s apartment. There, the police say, they recovered 34 oxycodone pills and cocaine. At the same location, they arrested Sharonee Hyson, 44, who was on parole and had cocaine base and a loaded firearm.
Police officers later arrested Leander Pitts, 46, and Starr Lamare, 39, in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, about five miles south of the Tenderloin. There, they seized 20,000 pills, including suspected counterfeit Xanax and oxycodone, as well as other drugs including fentanyl. They also seized a semiautomatic assault rifle, a semiautomatic pistol and cash.
The four suspects could not be reached for comment, and requests for jailhouse interviews were not answered Friday.
All four were booked into the county jail on numerous felony charges related to narcotics sales and firearms, though Ms. Lamare appeared to have been released by Friday afternoon.
Evan Sernoffsky, a police spokesman, said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was expediting testing of the pills recovered during the arrests to see whether they included cychlorphine. The White House in April warned the public about cychlorphine, saying that it had killed scores of people around the United States.
Ms. Lacourte received a phone call from the mayor Friday afternoon, and said he had promised her he would “yell from the rooftops” about the dangers counterfeit pills pose to teens.
Ms. Lacourte said she had mixed emotions. She was glad that the police had removed people suspected of drug dealing from the streets. But she was doubtful that she would ever know exactly who sold the fatal pill to her son, who manufactured it or how it ended up in San Francisco.
The police tied the suspects to Dante’s death after investigators worked backward from the April day they found pills and Dante’s cellphone in Ms. Lacourte’s apartment.
Through the phone, they determined whom he had texted in the previous days about buying the pills. Officers then went undercover as drug buyers and purchased substances from the suspects, police said, which allowed them to secure warrants for their arrests.
The police also had disconcerting news for anyone who thought Dante’s cychlorphine case was an isolated incident. Pills recovered in earlier, unrelated arrests have tested positive for the drug, suggesting it was also in circulation from other sellers.
Ms. Lacourte regularly visits the cemetery in Mill Valley, Calif., where Dante’s ashes are buried under an oak tree.
She got rid of much of the furniture in the bedroom where Dante died. But she kept the neon sign reading “Open” that hung above his bed.
Every morning, she turns it on, and she can see the glowing light from other parts of the apartment. Every night, she turns it off.
With each flick of the switch, she said, she thinks of Dante.
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