Posted inNews

Knowingly having more than 1 gram of fentanyl would be felony under change to Colorado bill

Knowingly possessing more than 1 gram of fentanyl or a fentanyl compound for personal use would be a felony in Colorado under an amendment passed Wednesday afternoon by the House Judiciary Committee to a bill seeking to stem rising overdose deaths linked to the powerful synthetic opioid. The committee’s 7-4 vote to adopt the amendment […]

Posted inEducation, Health, News

Colorado’s fentanyl crisis is surging, but only three school districts have ordered doses of the opioid antidote

Editor’s note: This story was updated on Jan. 6, 2022, with new information from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to include Cherry Creek School District. As the number of fentanyl overdoses began to climb, Colorado policymakers created a program to put the life-saving opioid antidote naloxone inside police departments, universities, workplaces and […]

Posted inSun Investigation

Parents of young Coloradans killed by fentanyl call it murder. So why aren’t there more convictions?

In a matter of seconds, a tiny blue pill disguised as a prescription painkiller can kill a person with a lethal dose of fentanyl, a drug so powerful that amounts as tiny as a few grains of salt are deadly. Parents of Colorado high school and college students who have died after taking the synthetic […]

Posted inSun Investigation

After teen fentanyl overdoses, moms and community groups step up to hand out testing strips, lifesaving nasal spray

Kate Lacroix was screaming at the top of her lungs on social media. Boulder teens were dying of fentanyl, swallowing pills that looked like real pharmaceuticals but instead were counterfeits laced with lethal doses of the synthetic opioid.  “URGENT COMMUNITY WARNING,” she said in one February Facebook post, begging others to help spread the word. […]

Posted inSun Investigation

How counterfeit drugs made to look like real pills have ravaged one Colorado county

Jack Swanson, 18, died in February while listening to music in his bed. Next to him were little blue pills and rectangular-shaped white ones, the kind sold in his hometown of Boulder and throughout Colorado as “mexis” and “xanny bars.”  Two in five of the counterfeit pills circulating the country, drugs made in Mexico to […]