Fentanyl crisis in Colorado: DEA’s warning for parents

(COLORADO) — Wednesday, Aug. 21 is National Fentanyl Prevention and Awareness Day, and in an exclusive, new partnership with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Rocky Mountain Field Division (DEA RMFD), FOX21 News is learning more about Colorado’s drug crisis and the efforts to combat it.

This week, and as the new school year gets underway, FOX21 News spoke with Special Agent in Charge Jonathan Pullen of the DEA’s Rocky Mountain Field Division about the dangers of fentanyl and what parents need to know.

“Fentanyl is in every community,” said Pullen. “It doesn’t matter what race you are, what ethnicity you are, whether you come from a good neighborhood or a bad neighborhood, what kind of car you drive—fentanyl is in your neighborhood.”

In the first six months of 2023 , 38,000 Americans lost their lives to fentanyl, with the DEA calling it, “…the deadliest drug threat the United States has ever faced.”

“We are most focused on high school kids, kids going back to college this year and young people—that’s where we are seeing all of these overdose deaths, is in young people,” explained Pullen.

Pullen said that not only is fentanyl in Colorado, but it’s here in incredibly large numbers and is easily accessible.

“Kids can go and find someone who is selling illegal pills, you no longer have to go into a bad neighborhood and some deep, dark part of Denver or down some dark alley to find these drugs,” he said.

One of the ways teens and others are accessing these illegal drugs is through social media apps, where emoji codes are being used to purchase them.

“If you see a pill, if you obtain a pill and it’s not from your doctor or from a pharmacist, it is most certainly going to contain fentanyl, it is most certainly going to be deadly,” Pullen said.

If you go to DEA’s ‘ One Pill Can Kill ‘ website and scroll about mid-way down, you’ll see a section titled, ‘Can You Spot the Fake?’ From Oxycodone to Xanax to Adderall, spotting the real from the fake is not so easy.

“The vast majority of pills that we seize here in Colorado are these blue M30s . Those are typically, in a pharmaceutical setting, those are OxyContin’s, but that is not what we’re seizing on the streets, they are completely laced with fentanyl,” Pullen said.

According to the DEA’s RMFD, in 2023, 2.61 million fentanyl pills were seized in Colorado, a record that we are on pace to easily break this year.

“We are seeing Adderalls with fentanyl, we are seeing Percocet, we’re seeing Xanax bars, we are seeing the Oxys. And even recently, we’ve seen these Adderall pills that are just chock-full of meth and we are seeing kids overdose on these, we are seeing kids die on these,” said Pullen.

According to Pullen, a deadly dose is just 2 milligrams of fentanyl, the same amount pictured below on the tip of that pencil.

“We’ve done testing at our DEA labs across the country and last year of all the pills we seized in the U.S., seven out of 10 of them had a deadly dose of fentanyl,” he said.

Pullen encouraged parents to talk with their kids and check their phones. “These are hard conversations to have and certainly kids want privacy but you never forgive yourself if your giving them privacy ends up in their death because they bought an illegal fentanyl pill,” he added.

Pullen stressed that fentanyl is easily accessible to kids through social media sites and is cheap, too. “You can buy a fentanyl pill on the streets of Colorado Springs for $3-5, so we are engaged all over the state wanting people to understand that this is a real threat, it is here, and it’s deadly.”

While fentanyl pills have been appearing more frequently in the past few years, according to Pullen there’s a new trend for how fentanyl is being brought into the U.S. and ultimately distributed.

“For the last several years, we saw these pills, actually manufactured within Mexico, coming across the border and being distributed on the streets here in Colorado,” said Pullen. “A newer trend that we are seeing is fentanyl coming across the border in powder form and then people locally are obtaining their own pill presses and making their own versions of these pills.”

Pullen had this to say when we asked how people are obtaining these. “…they obtain the pill presses from usually, places like China, and they buy the specific dyes, so they stamp the pill to have a certain marking on them,” he said.

According to Pullen, people are pressing these pills for their own sale and distribution within their communities. “Sometimes they might stamp them to look like a legitimate pharmaceutical pill, sometimes they might stamp them to look like an MDMA or an Ecstasy pill that has a smiley face emoji on it,” he added.

More resources for teens and parents can be found at the link above, or by searching dea.gov/onepill.

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