A young woman was found dead in a Columbia apartment in January, and for weeks her death made no sense to investigators: her blood tested negative for any substance, even though the scene looked like a fentanyl overdose. Months later, after expanded lab testing, the Richland County Coroner's Office and the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division zeroed in on an answer nobody in the state had encountered before — a synthetic opioid called cychlorphine.
A Negative Test That Didn't Add Up
According to The State, preliminary testing identified the substance as cychlorphine after it turned up in powder collected from the apartment. The coroner's office said it does not yet know whether the woman had taken any cychlorphine, and samples were sent out for additional testing, with the SLED forensics lab conducting a second round of analysis to verify the initial finding. As NPR reported, Richland County Coroner Nadia Rutherford described the original blood test as coming back clean despite physical signs that pointed toward an opioid overdose — “their blood tested negative for any substance, which was very odd” — which is what pushed her office to expand testing in search of new compounds.
Cychlorphine is difficult to catch with the tools hospitals and first responders normally rely on. Per WMBF News, the drug does not show up on commonly used fentanyl test strips, and Healio reports it is similarly undetectable in standard drug test strips and opioid urine screens. That gap in detection is a central reason officials say cases can go unexplained for so long, as happened in the Richland County investigation before the lab broadened what it was looking for.
How Strong, and How Widespread, Remains Unsettled
Estimates of cychlorphine's potency vary depending on who is doing the estimating. Healio describes it as up to 10 times more potent than fentanyl, while Rutherford told WIS-TV that the drug is about 40 times more potent than fentanyl. Whichever figure proves accurate, officials agree on the danger: WMBF News reports the drug can cause a person to stop breathing or have a heart attack, leading to a fatal overdose, and naloxone — sold as Narcan — can reverse a cychlorphine overdose, though experts say a higher dose might be needed along with repeat doses, according to The State.
Reports also disagree on how far cychlorphine has spread. Covering Los Angeles County's first confirmed fatal overdose tied to the drug, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune noted the drug was first detected in the illicit U.S. drug supply in 2024 and has since been identified in 19 states, with that February death occurring in the county's first confirmed exposure to it. Healio, however, put the number at least 24 states reporting related overdoses or deaths as of March. The same outlet cited the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy identifying 106 cychlorphine reports across 10 states in 2025, up from a single report in 2024, while The State cited toxicologist Alex Krotulski's tally of 72 overdose cases in 14 states, most resulting in death. Those figures use different timeframes and definitions and have not been reconciled.
Tennessee's Outsized Toll and South Carolina's Response
Tennessee has emerged as the hardest-hit state by several measures. Healio reported the state accounted for 41 of 55 cychlorphine-involved overdose deaths nationwide between July 2025 and February 2026, while The State separately reported Tennessee had 34 confirmed cychlorphine cases as of April, followed by Texas with nine and Illinois and California with four each. WMBF News reported that South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said in April that cychlorphine had been found in South Carolina. Even so, not every local agency has turned up the drug: the same report noted Horry County Police said its chemist had not found cychlorphine in tests conducted in recent months, and Myrtle Beach police said their street-crimes detectives had not found it either, though they remain aware of the threat.
South Carolina's broader overdose picture has been trending in a more hopeful direction even as this new threat emerges. Richland County recorded 110 drug overdose deaths in 2025, up from 90 the year before, The State reported, while drug deaths in neighboring Lexington County fell from 125 in 2022 to 75 last year. Nationally, preliminary CDC data cited by NPR showed roughly 71,542 people died of drug overdoses in the United States over the 12 months ending in October 2025, down sharply from the 12-month peak of nearly 113,000 recorded in August 2023.
At colleges in nearby states, authorities have been careful not to overstate the connection between cychlorphine and specific tragedies. WMBF News reported that authorities have not directly linked cychlorphine to the deaths of two Ole Miss students, instead noting that kratom was seized during those investigations.
What the Attorney General and Health Officials Are Telling Families
South Carolina's top prosecutor has framed the drug in blunt terms. In a public safety advisory from the South Carolina Attorney General's office, officials warned that a single exposure to cychlorphine could be fatal and urged parents to talk with their children about the danger. That warning lines up with the earlier case out of Columbia, where a death that initially tested negative for any drug ultimately led investigators to a substance few people in the state had heard of before this year, as the Fort Mill Sun has also reported.
South Carolina's Department of Public Health had reported a decrease in overdose deaths for a second consecutive year in its 2024 report, according to the agency, though that trend predates the cychlorphine cases now surfacing in toxicology labs. For now, the central facts in the Richland County case remain unresolved: the coroner's office has not determined whether the woman had taken cychlorphine or whether the drug caused her death, and the SLED lab's confirmatory testing was still pending as of the most recent reporting.
