A 27-year-old woman began an experiment on herself early one morning in December 2024. Her laboratory was her childhood bedroom, tucked into a second-floor corner of a pale yellow house in the Boston suburbs. On a bookshelf behind her sat a small stuffed sloth and some favorite books, including \u201cSiddhartha\u201d by Hermann Hesse. Her parents were asleep in the room next door.<\/p>\n
Her name is Rebecca, but she goes by Becks. Sitting at her desk in a gray T-shirt, she opened a small plastic bag filled with white powder. The bag was stamped \u201cSR-17018,\u201d and \u201cNOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.\u201d<\/p>\n
She extracted some powder with a red microscooper, poured it onto a digital scale and carefully weighed out 25 milligrams. She gathered this into a blue and white pill capsule and sealed it, and then swallowed the capsule with water. It was 4:27 a.m.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s my turn to be a guinea pig,\u201d Becks wrote in the online diary she was keeping of her experience. In sharing her story with The New York Times, she asked that her last name not be used so potential employers don\u2019t discover her drug history.<\/p>\n
Becks had joined the vanguard of a dangerous, highly speculative do-it-yourself approach to getting sober. For a decade, on and off, she had been addicted to various drugs, most recently kratom, an opiate-like substance, which cleared her head and covered up her pain but required constant dosing. She feared the call of fentanyl, which she\u2019d tried a few times.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery morning, I woke drenched in sweat from overnight withdrawals. It was a grim existence,\u201d she wrote of her kratom use. She tried various methods to get sober, including three short inpatient detox stays and one monthlong rehabilitation treatment. She had periods of sobriety but couldn\u2019t sustain it.<\/p>\n
Then she heard about SR-17018, one of many new and unpredictable synthetic drugs<\/a> made largely in China and sold online<\/a> even though it is not approved or shown to be safe, and can pose lethal risks.<\/p>\n Most of these compounds, known as novel psychoactive substances, are designed to get people high. Among those substances, SR-17018 stands virtually alone in that people are using it to try to free themselves of addiction, and some claim it helps.<\/p>\n Excitement about SR-17018 grew after Reddit users discovered a 2019 study suggesting it could free drug-addicted mice of their dependence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 27-year-old woman began an experiment on herself early one morning in December 2024. Her laboratory was her…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":778737,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[11],"tags":[155799,310283,210,318917,318916,11736,24940,67,132,87627,68,318918],"class_list":["post-778736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-content-type-personal-profile","tag-drugs-pharmaceuticals","tag-health","tag-moyers","tag-pain-relieving-drugs","tag-reddit-inc","tag-scripps-research-institute","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-university-of-south-florida","tag-us","tag-william-cope"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=778736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/778737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=778736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=778736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=778736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}