A Gazette headline Monday served as a chilling – and alarming – reminder that Colorado is still at war: “DEA’s Rocky Mountain region seized enough fentanyl in 2022 to kill almost every Colorado resident.”

That’s right, Coloradans are locked in the same life-and-death struggle against the same deadly opioid that state lawmakers claimed to have clamped down on last year. They passed legislation in the 2022 session that was supposed to undo the damage of their disastrous decriminalization of fentanyl three years earlier. But to no one’s surprise, it fell far short.

Last year’s action still left possession of up to a gram of fentanyl a misdemeanor. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says two milligrams of the hyper-lethal drug can kill someone. When you consider there are 1,000 milligrams in a gram – well, do the math.

A gram not only can kill 500 but also can make a lot of money for a drug dealer. And, rest assured, any streetwise dealer will insist he is merely “possessing” the drug if cornered by police; heck no, he’s not selling the stuff! So, the dealer walks free, and more people die.

In other words, 2022’s purported crackdown leaves a mile-wide loophole for mass murder.

Which is why the fentanyl death spiral that had shamed lawmakers, if only briefly, into last spring’s half-measure – following 912 fentanyl deaths across the state in 2021 – has continued since then.

How fitting, then, that this week’s story on the DEA’s fentanyl seizures ran on the opening day of the 2023 legislative session. Will the legislature at last do the right thing and re-criminalize fentanyl so that possession of any amount is a felony – as the state’s law enforcement agencies had pleaded with them to do? It’s unlikely, but there’s always hope.

Meanwhile, the fentanyl keeps pouring in.

As The Gazette reported Monday, the DEA’s Rocky Mountain division announced it seized more than 5.8 million potentially deadly doses of fentanyl last year in Colorado, Utah, Montana and Wyoming. That included almost 2 million pills and more than 150 pounds of powder.

The most recent U.S. census data shows Colorado has just more than 5.8 million residents as of July 2022. Which means the amount seized last year alone in our region had the potential to annihilate our state’s population.

Not everyone has the same tolerance threshold, and many fentanyl pills are only laced with the drug, which explains why there also are survivors (who, too often, live only to abuse it again). Yet, the skyrocketing number of deaths associated with the drug reflect not only public ignorance of just how little fentanyl can kill, but also the wildly inconsistent doses in the bootleg pills processed by Mexico’s drug cartels and smuggled into the U.S.

Nationwide, the DEA says it seized enough potentially deadly doses of fentanyl in 2022 to kill every person in the country.

DEA Special Agent in Charge Brian Besser issued a statement putting our war on fentanyl in tragic context: “For the first time in my 31-year law enforcement career, we are seeing an oversaturated drug market. Anyone, including our kids, can buy dangerous and deadly drugs at the click of a button. This is like nothing we’ve experienced before and it makes our jobs as narcotics officers far more challenging and critical than ever before.”

Colorado Springs Gazette Editorial Board