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.
