The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Rocky Mountain Field Division broke a record for the most fentanyl pills seized in Colorado last year.

This year, the division has already broken the previous record with a month left.

The law enforcement agency has confiscated around 2.7 million fentanyl pills in the state as of the beginning of December, according to a news release from the DEA. 

These counterfeit Oxycodone M30s contain potentially lethal doses of fentanyl.

In 2023, the agency confiscated 2.61 million pills in Colorado.

By comparison, the agency seized 565,200 fentanyl pills in the entirety of the four-state division in 2021, 1.9 million in 2022 and approximately 3.4 million pills in 2023.

“It is an unfortunate record to set,” Special Agent in Charge Jonathan Pullen said. “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.”

“It’s not a record we want to celebrate,” Pullen told The Denver Gazette. “There’s no question that it is the top priority of the DEA everywhere, including Colorado.”

“The Mexican cartels that are producing this stuff are relentless,” he said. “They see a market. They don’t care if people die. All they care about is the money. They are pumping more and more fentanyl into this country and this state.”

According to the agency, two Mexican cartels — the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation — are responsible for the majority of the fentanyl being dispersed throughout the country.

“You might be focusing on a single distributor here, but if it’s elicit fentanyl, it will trace back to one of them,” Field Intelligence Manager Scott Rowan said of the cartels in March. “You may have to go back a few levels. An operation here may stem back to California and Arizona before Mexico, but it will go back there.”

Not all of the fentanyl seized by the division is set to be distributed directly in Colorado, Pullen said, adding the state is a stop on the way to the east coast for some drug networks.

The Rocky Mountain Field Division — which covers Colorado, Utah, Montana and Wyoming — also broke the record in Utah with 774,000 pills seized within the first six months of the year, a significant jump from the previous record of 668,000 in 2023.

Wyoming and Montana have seen pill seizures trend lower over the course of 2024, according to the division.

But while fentanyl is being moved all over the country, it’s getting shipped directly to Colorado, too.

The division seized over 250,000 carfentanil pills in November that were heading directly to Colorado, according to Pullen. That number is not included in the 2.7 million.

Carfentanil is an animal tranquilizer used to sedate or put down animals the size of elephants and rhinoceroses. It has been picked back up by the cartels to replace the precursor chemicals that have been limited to Latin America.

In late 2023, President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to constrict the shipping of chemicals used in synthetic fentanyl production from China to Latin America. Since then, Mexican cartels have attempted to get the precursor chemicals from India and to make them in their own country.

While it’s “incredibly scary” to see those drugs on the streets, Pullen said he has not seen enough information to consider it a concerning trend yet.

“It’s been around for a while. We see it pop up,” Pullen said. “What we are seeing is the Mexican cartels searching for new chemicals to replace the chemicals they’re losing from China.”

“As they’re trying to get ahead of this problem that they’re having by not having the chemicals, they’re going back to old methods like carfentanil,” the agent said. 

While fentanyl only takes a 2-milligram dose to kill someone, carfentanil is around 100 times stronger, according to Pullen.

An increase in stronger drugs, like carfentanil, would only increase the staggering overdose death numbers the state and country have seen over the past few years.

New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that, while overall overdose deaths dropped nationally between December 2022 and December 2023 compared to the year prior, Colorado’s numbers rose.

Colorado, which showed a 3.9% spike in what’s called “predicted” data, was ranked No. 10 among the states with the highest rate of increase. This “predictive” method takes into account and adjusts for incomplete, provisional drug overdose data, which often undercounts the final numbers.

CDC data put the predicted cases through December 2023 in Colorado at 1,928. That number was 1,856 through the same period in 2022.

Nearly a fifth of the 2.7 million pills seized in Colorado came from a bust in Colorado Springs in November.

Last month, a bystander at an Albuquerque bus depot saw two “suspicious men” carrying two suitcases each on a bus bound for Denver and called police, according to a previous release from the division.

One of the men ran and left the luggage behind. Police seized the two suitcases and found about 330,000 pills and two ounces of heroin.

The second man stayed on the bus and was later arrested in Colorado Springs with two suitcases and a backpack, according to authorities. A Colorado Springs K-9 detected narcotics in all three bags. Around 340,000 tablets with fentanyl and several thousand dollars in cash were found within them.

The seizure totaled around 670,000 pills.

In June, the division seized around 570,000 during separate operations across a seven-day period. DEA special agents and members of multiple state and local law enforcement agencies intercepted three shipments of 170,000, 300,000 and 100,000 pills during the week.

The demand for the drugs in America is a main factor driving the illicit trade here, agents said. 

“It’s one of the big arguments that our counterpart nations have,” Pullen said. “When we talk to the Mexicans or the Chinese about the problems and how we want them to fix the part of the problem that resides in their country, one of their responses is always, ‘You need to fix your demand issue.'”

“We’ve got to pour more into demand reduction efforts and these organizations that focus on that,” he said.