New York authorities seized 20,000 highly potent fentanyl pills that were disguised as bootleg oxycodone in Manhattan and the Bronx earlier this month.
The blue tablets, with a street value of $600,000, were stamped “M30” to look like prescription oxycodone, according to the city’s Special Narcotics Prosecutor.
But fentanyl is far deadlier and more than half the city’s overdose deaths last year involved the powerful painkiller.
“If you take ‘prescription’ pills that did not come directly from a pharmacy, you are risking your life,” said Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget G. Brennan. “Throughout New York City, we have seen a spate of cases involving tens of thousands of potentially lethal fentanyl pills masquerading as oxycodone.”
She added, “Consuming a counterfeit pill is akin to playing Russian Roulette.”
On Feb. 7, officials executed a search warrant on a cellphone shop in the Fordham Manor neighborhood of the Bronx where suspected narcotics trafficker Andres Reyes-Martinez was meeting with store owner Jesus Garcia.In the shop’s second-floor storage area, agents seized 14 bags of the small blue pills, each containing $1,000 tablets, and two bricks of suspected heroin.
Four days earlier, as part of a separate investigation, authorities pulled over a livery car that they had been surveilling in Manhattan and arrested David Espinal and Victor Almanzar-Cardenas.
Espinal had on him a large clear plastic bag with 6,000 fentanyl pills that looked like oxycodone tablets, officials said.
All four defendants face multiple counts of criminal possession of a controlled substance.