“You can get it anywhere,” says 35-year-old Jamie Ethridge, but he typically went to downtown Denver’s Civic Center Park to find fentanyl. Blue tablets, orange pills, pink powder: It was a smorgasbord of fixes, all available from a handful of dealers. Ethridge, a local musician, hasn’t chased the euphoric high of the potent synthetic opioid for more than a year now, though, making him one of the lucky ones who can say they played an often fatal game of chance and lived. In 2020 and 2021, roughly 1,450 Coloradans—and more than 127,500 other Americans—were not so fortunate.
Although experts point to 2013 as the beginning of what is now being called the third wave of the nation’s opioid epidemic, law enforcement and health care professionals in the Centennial State say it wasn’t until about 2018 that they began seeing the effects of the drug on everyday Coloradans. “Patients were coming into our facility in opioid withdrawal,” says Dr. David Mendez, an addiction medicine specialist at UCHealth’s Center for Dependency, Addiction, and Rehabilitation, “but they weren’t responding to treatment. We realized this wasn’t oxycodone. It was something else.”
It was fentanyl. But it wasn’t the pharmaceutical-grade IV drug long used in hospital operating rooms and as a painkiller for cancer patients. This was a bastardized version, one that was cooked up using chemicals (usually imported from China) and pressed into tablets by drug traffickers (often in Mexico) who had realized how much easier and cheaper it was to make and how much more lucrative it was to sell in the States—often passing it off as pilfered prescription meds—compared with heroin.
According to some local law enforcement officials, a 2019 state law may have turned 2018’s trickle of illicit fentanyl into a torrent by 2020. That statute made possession of up to four grams of almost all drugs for personal use a misdemeanor. The problem? Four grams of fentanyl-laced pills equals, conservatively, 40 fatal doses. And while a 2022 law changed possession limits for fentanyl specifically, not everyone believes the legislation went far enough. “Drug dealers are savvy,” says Denver Police Department Commander Paul Jimenez. “When state law allows possession of certain drugs to be misdemeanors, drug dealers know how much to carry so they fly under the radar. Because of its location, population, and drug laws, the metro area is a major trafficking hub for all drugs, including fentanyl.”
The 2022 threat assessment from the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (RMHIDTA) program supports that claim. For the first time, the annual report from RMHIDTA—which facilitates coordination between federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement in Wyoming, Utah, Montana, and Colorado to disrupt drug trafficking—listed fentanyl as the most significant drug threat facing the region.
According to Keith Weis, executive director of RMHIDTA, fentanyl is a menace for several reasons, but mostly because it’s so deadly. “Remember,” he says, “one [pill] can cause a fatal overdose.” Roughly 50 times more potent than heroin, fentanyl is a poor excuse for a street drug because it often kills repeat clients. “Dealers just don’t care,” says Steve Kotecki, a Denver-based public information officer for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). “There’s always another customer.”
There is never, however, another family member or friend. And with Colorado’s associated death toll rising faster than any other state’s save Alaska’s, too many loved ones here are learning that in the most awful way possible—whether that’s because a group of five friends thought they were doing cocaine at a party in
