CENTENNIAL, Colo. — The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) Rocky Mountain Field Division has seized 2.7 million fentanyl pills so far this year, breaking a record with one month left to go in 2024.
Testing reveals five out of every 10 pills contain a fatal dose of fentanyl for a first-time user.
Although the DEA is proud of the work it is doing to tackle the fentanyl crisis, agents say these numbers are nothing to celebrate.
“That’s what we’re laser-focused on — the two cartels most responsible for trafficking this poison, the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco Cartel. Here, we’re seizing more, but it really doesn’t matter if we continue still to lose so many lives each year,” said Assistant Special Agent in Charge David Olesky.
Olesky said most of the pills recovered were pressed to look like blue prescription Oxycodone pills.
A new concerning trend the agency is seeing is carfentanil, an animal tranquilizer one hundred times more potent than fentanyl. The DEA seized 250,000 pills containing carfentanil on the Western Slope in November.
“With carfentanil, it’s a synthetic opiate so it’s highly addictive, it’s potent, but it’s also cheap for the cartels to utilize this drug and manufacture. And so the one thing that the cartels are motivated by is money. It’s greed,” Olesky said.
The DEA said more work needs to be done because while other states are seeing a large decline in drug seizures and overdose deaths, Colorado’s numbers are not following those trends.
