KVRR Exclusive: Undercover Moorhead Detectives Work To Get Fentanyl Off The Street

MOORHEAD, Minn. (KVRR) — Over the last six months, local law enforcement agencies have seized over $80,000 worth of fentanyl.

“It’s huge they found that in 9/11 over in Afghanistan they started to really over produce their poppy plants and that’s really when the explosion kind of mixed between the expanding shipping out of the opioids along with the we had a lot of these man made prescription medications,” Moorhead Police Detective Brad Stuvland said.

“There’s no consistency to it as there would be for a legitimate prescription pill. The amount of fentanyl in each of these counterfeit pills could be different, 40 percent of them have a potential lethal dose of fentanyl in them,” Moorhead Police Detective Adam Torgerson said.

Stuvland and Torgerson say in 2015 and 2016 they started seeing fentanyl products starting to come in and it’s stayed around since.

“The new latest thing is these new m30 pills that contain fentanyl, they’re counterfeit pills mainly created by drug cartels of Mexico that are distributed here to appear to be legitimate prescribed medication,” Stuvland said.

They say people travel to Minneapolis and St Paul to purchase the pills for $5 to $8 on average and come back to the Fargo Moorhead area and sale them for over three times that price.

Their intel shows the pills can come from China as well as Mexico and are trafficked through the southwest border from Mexico into the United states, and making it’s way to places like the Fargo-Moorhead area.

“What we’re having is people are overdosing and having to be revived by Narcan and obviously a certain percentage of those people are actually dying, they’re not able to be revived additionally a lot of people aren’t able to pay for their addiction and so they’re committing other crimes,” v

Violence is associated with this drug the dealers arm themselves with guns to protect their products and addicts will do anything to fuel their high. Officers say along with buying from those cities people are buying them on the dark web as well.

“So in 2020 we had 21 total overdoses in 2021 we had 63 total overdoses which is nearly three times as many overdoses in 2021,” Torgerson said.

In 2020 and 2021 eight overdoses were fatal.