A Greeley, Colorado man has been sentenced to 40 years in prison after police arrested him while possessing approximately 5,800 pills of lethal fentanyl.
According to a Friday press release from the Weld County, Colorado, district attorney's office, Andrew Durdy, 27, "pled guilty to one count of Conspiracy to Possession with the Intent to Distribute Fentanyl (DF1), and one count of Possession with the Intent to Distribute Fentanyl (DF2)."
The Weld Country Drug Task Force began investigating Durdy in 2021, when he allegedly sold fentanyl to undercover officers. Also, investigators reportedly found three of Durdy's postal packages from California containing additional fentanyl pills.
"Any one of those pills could have killed someone," Chief Deputy District Attorney Michael Pirraglia said at Durdy's sentencing. "Bottom line, [Durdy] made a profit off destroying other people's lives, and we won't tolerate this type of behavior in our community."
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) characterizes fentanyl as a synthetic opioid that is much stronger than morphine.
And, according to Breitbart News, pharmaceutical fentanyl was "developed for pain management treatment of cancer patients, applied in a patch on the skin. Because of its powerful opioid properties, Fentanyl is also diverted for abuse. Fentanyl is added to heroin to increase its potency, or be disguised as highly potent heroin.
"Many users believe that they are purchasing heroin and actually don't know that they are purchasing fentanyl, which often results in overdose deaths," according to Breitbart.
Fentanyl, the leading cause of death for Americans under age 45, has been primarily manufactured in countries like China and Mexico; and this crisis has been exacerbated by the chaos at the United States-Mexico border, with the drug cartels seemingly overwhelming Border Patrol officials with human and drug trafficking.
As Newsmax reported two weeks ago, the DEA seized a record amount of fentanyl in 2022, including twice as many tablets as the previous year, according to the latest data.
At that point of December, the agency had recovered an estimated 379 million fatal doses of fentanyl — or enough "to kill everyone in the United States," according to DEA administrator Anne Milgram, including 10,000 pounds of fentanyl in powdered form and 50.6 million tablets.
"These seizures — enough deadly doses of fentanyl to kill every American — reflect DEA's unwavering commitment to protect Americans and save lives, by tenaciously pursuing those responsible for the trafficking of fentanyl across the United States," Milgram wrote in a statement.
"[The] DEA's top operational priority is to defeat the two Mexican drug cartels — the Sinaloa and Jalisco (CJNG) Cartels — that are primarily responsible for the fentanyl that is killing Americans today."
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.