A recent Montana Highway Patrol interdiction operation in Butte ended with 39 arrests and a large amount of drugs.
According to a social media post, troopers seized nearly 25 grams of fentanyl powder, 11 lbs of meth, 260 lbs of marijuana and $75,000 of illicit money.
Earlier this year, a special agent with the DEA's Rocky Mountain Field Division said Montana is a fentanyl pipeline.
“Really, if you can imagine it, they have found a way to sneak it across. Once it’s across the border, Interstate 25 (which runs from Arizona to northern Wyoming) is a direct pipeline right up here to Montana,” says Special Agent Jonathan Pullen with the DEA’s Rocky Mountain Field Division.
“A pill in Mexico is produced in Mexico (costs) from two to four cents. That same pill in Denver might sell between two and five dollars per pill — an incredible markup when it only costs two cents to make it. By the time that pill makes it to the Blackfeet Indian reservation, it can be sold for as high as $120 for one pill. An incredible markup, incredible amount of money to be made by these criminal groups that are selling this poison,” Pullen says.
Pullen warns that just one fentanyl pill is capable of killing.
“Half of the pills that the DEA seized last year across the United States had a deadly dose of fentanyl in it, so fentanyl itself is incredibly deadly. Only two milligrams is enough to kill me or you,” he says.
