IRVINE, Calif. — Nick, who requested his last name not be used for privacy reasons, was a scholarship basketball player for a Division 1 college in the Midwest. After he was injured during his freshman year, the team doctor prescribed him a two-month supply of the powerful opioid OxyContin.

"The first time that I had gotten the high off of the 'Oxy,' it was a feeling of complete serenity," Nick said. "This is how I want to feel every day."

When Nick spoke with Spectrum News, he was shooting baskets at a Santa Monica park. In between lay-ups, he explained how he was hooked on the opioid immediately.

"(The sixty-day supply) was gone in a matter of two or three weeks," he said.

The star athlete fell into a spiraling addiction. He dropped out of school and began smoking the pills to achieve an even greater high. He said he began hanging out with "lesser companions on the street."

"I started getting it off the street any way I could really find it," he said.

In a manner of months, Nick was dependent on the drug. He would get dope-sick if he did not get his fix every few hours.

Eventually, he said, he found fentanyl and nearly overdosed.

Meanwhile, at about the same time, a graduate student at the University of California at Irvine named Lamees Alhassen helped to make a discovery that could very well have kept Nick from opioid addiction.

That discovery was a common plant.

"It's corydalis yanhusuo," Alhassen said, holding up the plant's grounded-up roots in her hand while standing in her white lab coat next to her mentor and Professor Olivier Civelli in a lab at UCI's School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

For the past two years, Civelli and Alhassen have been researching centuries-old Chinese pain remedies. Historically, humans have always turned to plants to fight pain, Civelli.

"You try a plant here… a plant there, until [you] find something that relieves you of the pain," Civelli explained.

One plant that did the trick was the opium poppy. That is the bedrock ingredient used to make opiates like morphine and heroin. Later, scientists synthesized the molecules from the opium plant to make "opioids."

Many drugs today, including OxyContin, are in that class. Both opiates and opioids are good at blocking pain receptors, and both are highly addictive.

To find a substitute painkiller, Civelli and Alhassen did what humans did all along.

They started looking for plants, specifically those that the Chinese have been using for centuries — traditional herbal and plant remedies.

"We tried to find out if we could find something new in those plants which, in China, are used for fighting pain. We tried ten different plants," Civelli explained.

They eventually focused on the corydalis yanhusuo. The plant, which is legal and can be purchased at some stores or on the internet, showed some exemplary analgesic properties.

In fact, Alhassen did some anecdotal research.

"I tried it for headaches," Alhassen said. "And it worked well for me. Probably better than Advil or Tylenol."

Alhassen and her professor decided to do a scientific study on the painkilling attributes of the corydalis yanhusuo using laboratory mice. And they also decided to measure the plant against a powerful and addictive opiate — morphine.

The methodology was simple: Olivier and Lamees measured the pain threshold of a mouse by putting it on a hot plate. They discovered that the mice showed discomfort when the plate was dialed up to 52 degrees Celsius or 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

Civelli demonstrated how the mice were not burned by holding his own hand on the hot plate.

After a morphine injection, the mouse could tolerate a higher temperature; it would feel less and less pain. But over time, as tolerance built up, the mouse needed more and more morphine to get relief. This tolerance is a cornerstone of addiction, Civelli said.

Alhassen's job was to pulverize the corydalis yanhusuo into a fine powder and to make an extract by mixing it with water. Alhassen then injected the extract into the mice. The professor and his student discovered the extract did more than relieve the mice's pain. They made another important discovery when they administered corydalis yanhusuo along with morphine.

"There is no tolerance," Civelli explains. "The effect of morphine stays stable."

Which is to say, when they added a dose of the plant extract, the morphine's potency, or ability to kill pain, stayed the same over time. This, in turn, means the mice did not need more and more morphine to feel comfortable. According to Civelli and Alhassen's initial research, clinically and theoretically speaking, the mice — and perhaps humans — would not develop a drug dependency to begin with if they received corydalis yanhusuo in tandem with an opiate or opioid.

They also think this treatment could benefit people who are already addicted to an opiate or opioid.

"In a clinical setting, you could lower the dose of opiates and over time slowly wean them off opiates and just keep them on this plant extract," Alhassen said. 

Civelli admits there needs to be more research. Their work was already peer-reviewed and published in the "Pharmaceuticals" journal. But, if proven, their discovery could have a great impact on the ongoing opioid addiction pandemic. In early November of 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a report that revealed how deaths due to opioid overdose jumped nearly 35%** from last year.

Civelli said their work calls for more study and could "hopefully" lead to clinical trials.

"For me, if I can help at least just one person who's addicted or in pain, then I have done my job," Alhassen said.

That person could be someone like Nick.

Just a few months before Lamees and her professor submitted their research, Nick, who was back in the Midwest, was asked to come along with friends to score some pills. He declined. His friends, however, overdosed and died.

"I would have been right with them," Nick said somberly, "in the car that Saturday when they picked up the bad batch of fentanyl."

Nick is currently sober and recovering in Southern California.