(The Center Square) – The Drug Enforcement Administration’s Rocky Mountain Field Division (RMFD) recently announced that it has seized about 2.7 million fentanyl pills in Colorado in the first 11 months of 2024.
This tops the record 2.61 million pills set last year.
“It is an unfortunate record to set,” DEA RMFD Special Agent in Charge Jonathan Pullen said in a DEA press release. “We continue to work day in, day out fighting the cartels putting this poison on Colorado streets. While we have seen seizure numbers trending lower in other parts of the country, Colorado seems to be consistently at or near record highs for the number of fake pills seized.”
DEA lab tests have found that about half of the pills it has analyzed contain what is likely a fatal fentanyl dose for a first-time user, down from 70% in 2023.
“It’s not a time to celebrate the lethality going down across the country,” Pullen said in the release. “There’s still a 50-50 chance you’ll die after taking just one of these pills. It’s a flip of a coin.”
Most of these pills coming to Colorado are made by Mexican drug cartels. The cartels make the pills look like Oxycodone pills, with an “M” stamped on one side and a “30” on the other.
The DEA considers two milligrams of fentanyl a fatal dose; that amount can fit on the tip of a pencil, the release said.
The recent appearance of carfentanil in Colorado has raised concerns for the DEA. Carfentanil is one hundred times stronger than fentanyl, the release said.
In November 2024, a seizure of over 250,000 pills containing carfentanil happened in Colorado, the release said. Carfentanil is an animal tranquilizer used on elephants and rhinoceroses.
Although it took Colorado eleven months to surpass last year’s record pill seizures, it only took Utah the first six months of this year (774,000) to break its previous record of 668,000. Yet, the other two states in the DEA Rocky Mountain Field Division, Wyoming and Montana, have had fewer pill seizures thus far in 2024.
The four-state division seized about 3.4 million pills in 2023. The Division will likely release its 2024 numbers in late January 2025.