A Douglas County man got more than he bargained for when purchasing an abandoned storage unit last week — nearly 2 million fentanyl pills.

The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, along with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Rocky Mountain Field Division (RMFD) and Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI), seized a record-breaking amount of fake fentanyl pills last week, representatives said at a news conference Monday.

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. 

All told, the seizure included around 1.7 million pills, 12 kilograms of powdered fentanyl and 2.5 pounds of methamphetamine, culminating in the sixth-largest fentanyl bust in the country’s history.

“This seizure represents thousands of lives saved,” David Olesky, the assistant special agent in charge at RMFD, said during the news conference. “It’s also indicative that the Mexican cartels continue to traffic significant quantities of fentanyl to Colorado.”

The case began when a man purchased a storage unit at an auction after payments on the unit stopped in April. When the man opened the unit, he found totes full of both fentanyl pills and powder used to press fake pills.

The storage unit aligned with a known drug carrier who had been arrested in April as part of a CBI investigation into the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, according to CBI Director Armando Saldate III.

The bureau had been investigating a drug trafficking operation in Colorado and five surrounding states throughout last year, ultimately leading to “multiple” arrests and seizures.

One known runner, who was not identified due to ongoing legal proceedings, was arrested in April, right when payment on the storage unit stopped.

Last year, Olesky told The Denver Gazette that two Mexican cartels, the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation, are active in the state.

“When folks hear cartel, they’re like, ‘Really? In Colorado?’” Olesky said. “They are here. You can’t think that it’s so far away.”

“You might be focusing on a single distributor here. But if it’s elicit fentanyl, it will trace back to one of them,” field intelligence manager Scott Rowan said of the cartels last year. “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.”

Olesky added Monday that the RMFD was already on pace to break last year’s seizure record of over 2.7 million pills in Colorado.

The 2025 record, which came in November, broke the 2024 record of 2.61 million pills with a month left to go.

“The Sinaloa cartel was designated earlier this year as a foreign terrorist organization,” Olesky said, adding that the group has “tentacles along the southwest border and in to Mexico.”

That includes Douglas County, which has a prime position due to its location along Interstate 25 and near Interstate 70, according to Douglas County Sheriff Darren Weekly.

“Douglas County is no longer a location where the bad guys don’t come to,” he said.

All three agencies said they are fighting hard to clamp down on fentanyl trafficking, including looking into all nearby storage units that may be connected.

Regarding the man who purchased the unit, Weekly said they’re working on it with federal partners because “he did not get the amount he invested.”