The Drug Enforcement Administration’s Rocky Mountain Field Division seized around 570,000 fentanyl masked to look like legal prescription pills during a collection of operations in June.

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 in June, according to a press release from the DEA RMFD. 

The “fake” pills are fentanyl pills designed and labeled to look like other prescription drugs, the most common way illegal fentanyl is distributed in the country. 

The 570,000 pills makes up 22% of the 2.61 million fentanyl pills seized by the agency in the entirety of Colorado in the 2023 fiscal year — which, at the time, was a record for the region.

“The total number of pills seized so far this month proves the Mexican drug cartels are not slowing down production and distribution of this poison as we head into the summer months,” DEA RMFD Special Agent in Charge Jonathan Pullen said in the release. “Every day the men and women of DEA and our partner agencies are working hard to get fake fentanyl pills of the streets.”

With the significant seizure, and the nearly 1.8 million pills seized announced by the agency earlier this fiscal year, the agency is on-pace to crush the record set last year.

While new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that national overdose deaths decreased between December 2022 and December 2023 compared to the year prior, but Colorado overdose deaths rose.

Colorado had a 3.9% spike in the “predicted” data of overdose deaths, ranking it 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.

More than 108,000 people died of a drug overdose or poisoning nationally last year, according to the DEA — 70% of those deaths involved fentanyl.

“Keep in mind, DEA lab testing shows seven of every ten pills contain a potentially fatal dose of fentanyl. Seizing another 570,000 pills in Colorado means many lives have likely been saved,” Pullen said.

In March, Acting Special Agent in Charge David Olesky told The Denver Gazette that fighting against the two major Mexican cartels and their fentanyl distribution in the state — and the three other states the division occupies — is “everything we do.”

Two cartel groups, the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels, are heavily involved in the fentanyl and methamphetamine distribution in Colorado, according to the agency.

“You might be focusing on a single distributor here, but if it’s illicit fentanyl, it will trace back to one of them,” Field Intelligence Manager Scott Rowan added said of the cartels. “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.”