Fentanyl Has 'Taken Over Everything': Officials Describe Pipeline Through Colorado

DENVER (CBS4) -  Outside the Denver Recovery Group in the cold, Rosie Macumber told her story.

"So the first time I ever did fentanyl I didn't know that's what it was. I thought it was meth."

It wasn't. She snorted it and then told her husband. In moments he was talking about getting the Narcan. It was obvious something was wrong.

"That's when I knew I had messed up, and I stood there for a second looking at the TV, and I started to get too high and I knew I had to sit down. I sat down and I died, and I woke up in the ambulance, I didn't know where I was. I couldn't open my eyes. I didn't know that they had 'narcaned' me in the neck multiple times, like three or four times."

Her story of getting fentanyl when she didn't expect it is yet another after the deaths of five people found dead in a Commerce City apartment over the weekend. There was evidence they were snorting the drug.

Investigators believe they may have thought they were getting cocaine, but suspect they got a killing dose of fentanyl.

"Now that fentanyl is on the street, it's just taken over everything," said the Denver Recovery Group's lead counselor Melissa McConnell.

The center uses medications like methadone to get people off opioids.

"Very rarely do we have someone coming in testing positive for heroin at this point without having fentanyl in the mix or not having heroin at all."

The Drug Enforcement Administration has seen a change too.

"These are synthetic drugs. They're very cheap. Very potent and it's very cost effective for the cartels to transition to the synthetic drugs namely methamphetamine and fentanyl as opposed to some of the drugs we're used to hearing about. Heroin and cocaine," said acting special agent in charge David Olesky.

The latter are grown and subject to issues of growing. Fentanyl is made from ingredients the cartels get from China. Then it's moved from Mexico north. People are buying it online through social media and delivery people show up at their doors.

"Here in Denver we do typically see parcel packages. We end up seeing our typical where it's the I-25 coming up from the south or I-70 from the west. Those are the pipelines."

DEA seizures of fentanyl are way up. The DEA tabulates those seizures in fiscal years. In 2019, they seized 81,000 pills in the Colorado mountain region that stretches into states to the north; in 2020, 300,000; in 2021, 1.1 million.

This fiscal year, 2022 started five months ago. They've already seized 800,000 pills. The cartels like fentanyl because a pill can be produced for four cents and sold for many, many times that. It is also highly addictive, which keeps customers coming back.

"The same methods they've used to years on end, they basically added another product to their supply. Their product line," said Olesky.

"You don't know what you're really getting unless you test it, and it really is mixed with everything," said recovering addict Paul Wood. He's been clean for a year and is getting methadone at Denver Recovery Group. "I overdosed a bunch of times."

It started with a back surgery and an addiction to oxycodone. Then it moved to another more insidious opioid, fentanyl and he wanted more and more.

"Before you know it you're smoking the entire thing, and you're not even in reality. You're not a person. You're just a zombie," Wood said.

McConnell said it rose in popularity rapidly when people sought to get away from reality in the pandemic.

"Fentanyl hit during the pandemic, and it just grew and grew and grew and grew." It is hitting all classes and races of people she noted. "It's hitting Castle Rock. It's hitting Castle Pines. It's hitting Highlands Ranch. It's hitting those families so hard, and it's starting with their teenagers."

Wood felt badly for the people who died in Commerce City. He is on a path that has him looking at new housing with his wife and children, but it has been hard.

"It's just slowly putting you in the grave. Every single day. It's not a way to live."

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