Synthetic opioids: can Europe keep up with a drug created every week?

A new psychoactive substance appears on Europe’s drug market about once a week. EU officials say synthetic opioids pose a risk so acute that a single gram can contain several thousand lethal doses.

The warning comes from the European Union Drugs Agency (EUDA), which published its 2026 European Drug Report on 9 June. The report found 50 new drugs detected for the first time across Europe in 2025 alone, many synthetic opioids and cathinones.

The agency now monitors more than 1,000 new psychoactive substances through its Early Warning System, including over 100 synthetic opioids, a category that barely registered a decade ago.

Among the newest threats are so-called “orphine” opioids, a semi-synthetic cluster that has expanded rapidly since 2024. Nine new orphine substances have been identified, linked to more than 30 deaths across the continent. Two of them, cychlorphine and spirochlorphine, have already turned up in a dozen or more countries and have been fast-tracked into EU-level risk assessment.

“It’s hard to distil it down to one factor, because the market responds to multiple issues,” EUDA Executive Director Lorraine Nolan said in an interview, citing organised crime, migration pressures, and geopolitical shifts as forces reshaping supply. Europe, she added, has become a production hub, with hundreds of clandestine labs operating annually, building on the continent’s long history of amphetamine manufacturing and increasingly sophisticated equipment.

“The situation is challenging because of the pace of advancement and the very fast emergence of new substances,” she said, noting that each new compound arrives with health risks not yet fully understood.

But Europe isn’t being outpaced. The EUDA’s mandate was strengthened in July 2024, and the agency has since introduced tools to close the gap between detection and control: a European Drug Alert System for rapid frontline warnings, a threat-assessment unit to anticipate how new substances might behave, and a new network of forensic and toxicology laboratories.

On synthetic opioids, the agency is “actively risk-assessing” several substances likely headed toward EU-wide control, describing a faster pipeline running from rapid detection to rapid characterisation of harms, to control.

The figures from the EUDA report suggest the bloc is holding up better than some other regions. The EU recorded an estimated 7,600 drug-related deaths in 2024, a fraction of the more than 100,000 reported annually in the United States, a country with a smaller population.

Nolan credited the gap partly to Europe’s “balanced approach,” which pairs enforcement with sustained investment in treatment and harm reduction. More than 500,000 of the EU’s roughly 800,000 problem opioid users, over 60 percent, now receive opioid agonist therapy, and take-home naloxone, the overdose-reversal medication, is available in 19 member states.

Gaps remain. Needle and syringe programmes operate across the bloc, but several member states still fall short of international coverage targets. Drug consumption rooms, a more contested harm-reduction tool, are expanding only gradually. Nolan called the overall trend “an aggressively improving situation,” built on national systems she described as committed but unevenly resourced.

That unevenness is central to the EU’s new 2026-2030 Drugs Strategy, approved by the Council in June, one of the most far-reaching frameworks Europe has produced. It is structured around five pillars: public health, security, harm reduction, partnerships, and preparedness.

The goal is to break with what she sees as a flawed legacy of past policy, which treated supply and demand as separate problems. “It actually very carefully considers the complex interplay between these two factors,” Nolan said.

The EUDA’s own role under the strategy is technical, not enforceable. Instead, the agency provides evidence, training and monitoring, helping governments shape their own responses rather than directing them. Last year, it trained thousands of frontline personnel and ran more than 1,200 webinars for national authorities.

Cooperation with Europol and Frontex is also deepening, Nolan said, as trafficking networks grow more sophisticated and increasingly entangled with organised violence. The EUDA currently holds the presidency of the EU’s Justice and Home Affairs agencies network, with this year’s agenda focused on the links between health, security, and emerging technological threats.

Brussels is wagering that faster detection, quicker risk assessment and continued harm-reduction spending can stop Europe’s opioid problem from following the trajectory seen elsewhere, even as the chemistry of the threat keeps shifting.