In the far northwestern corner of New Mexico, San Juan County stretches across high desert mesas and long, lonely roads at the intersection of Arizona, Colorado and Rio Arriba County. The landscape is vast and rural, shaped by oilfield traffic, scattered towns and rough terrain.
To the east lies Rio Arriba County, which has the highest overdose rate in New Mexico, underscoring the region’s vulnerability to trafficking routes.
Across northern New Mexico’s wide-open desert, drug networks can more easily evade law enforcement, exploiting distance and preying on a history of substance use tied to the area’s boom-and-bust economy.
The mix of drugs and violence, Sgt. Nima Babadi said, took hold decades ago with the rise of the oil industry.
“New Mexico has always been bound with narcotics,” Babadi said, alongside stimulants like meth. “People working oilfield jobs, long hours – that’s when they started bringing meth here.”
Fentanyl began appearing more frequently in San Juan County in 2020, and Babadi noticed a shift. Violent crime increased as the synthetic opioid spread, deepening the toll on towns already grappling with addiction.
Even as overdose deaths have declined nationally over the past year, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona have reported increases in synthetic opioid fatalities in the Four Corners. Fentanyl is the primary culprit.
A network of fentanyl distributors continues to operate as regional narcotics task forces seize large quantities year after year and work with federal officials to pursue indictments. But the seizures have not deterred drug syndicates or eased the strain on Four Corners communities caught in the drug’s web.
Rising fentanyl seizures and overdose deaths in northern New Mexico mirror trends in Southwest Colorado, revealing a cross-border drug trade that has entrenched the two states in the same fight.
In San Juan County, the fentanyl supply has surged. The first year the task force tracked fentanyl seizures was 2020, when officers confiscated 0.2 grams. By 2024, they seized about 72,000 fentanyl-laced pills and 96 grams of fentanyl powder.
Since December 2024, New Mexico has recorded a 21% increase in synthetic opioid overdose deaths, the second-highest rise in the nation. Northern New Mexico includes some of the state’s most heavily affected counties.
“The disadvantage experienced by those places – it’s only gotten wider and wider, and there’s not a lot of opportunity or industry, or other things that people can do,” said Phillip Fiuty, a technical adviser for the state’s adulterant-checking program, which monitors the makeup of illicit substances sold on the streets. “That then makes communities everywhere susceptible to things like substance use.”
San Juan County’s location also makes it a natural corridor for cross-state distribution, with easy access to Southwest Colorado and the Navajo Nation in Arizona.
“When they bring drugs here then they can go to Durango, they can go to Cortez, the Navajo reservation,” Babadi said.
Southwest Colorado has become a hotspot for synthetic opioids as well. Detective Sgt. Victor Galarza of the Montezuma County Sheriff’s Office considers Cortez a major hub of fentanyl distribution in the Four Corners.
Galarza is one of two members of the Montezuma-Cortez Narcotics Investigation Team, which has conducted large narcotics seizures over the past eight years.
“People come to Cortez to get their products,” Galarza said. “Our main assignment for the Montezuma-Cortez Narcotics Investigation Team is to do large-scale investigations to prevent these large-scale organizations from taking over with impunity our region to use it as a base to distribute narcotics.”
Organized Mexican drug trafficking operations, some with roots in the community, drive much of the distribution, Galarza said. But the team faces an uphill battle because of limited funding and staffing.
“We are one of the smallest drug task forces in Colorado,” Galarza said, despite the scale of trafficking affecting Southwest Colorado. “We are behind the curve because we have no manpower at all.”
Montezuma County Sheriff Steve Nowlin said he removed a criminal analyst from the team because of funding constraints, and county commissioners have denied his requests for additional support. Those setbacks come as Colorado has seen a 17% increase in synthetic opioid overdose deaths since December 2024.
While the rest of the Four Corners states grapple with rising synthetic opioid deaths, Utah has begun to move in a different direction.
Bill Newell, coordinator for Utah’s fentanyl task force, said a series of changes helped shift the state away from trends seen in Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.
“In 2024, our governor, Gov. (Spencer) Cox, reached out to the commissioner of the Department of Public Safety due to the fact that – at that time – Utah was bucking the trend in a bad way,” Newell said. “We were on the uptick when other states were on the downtick.”
The task force was formed that year, bringing together community organizations, local health departments, law enforcement and Drug Enforcement Administration officials.
In 2024, Utah law enforcement seized 4.7 million dosage units of fentanyl, and nearly 600 people died of drug overdoses. In 2025, officers confiscated nearly twice that amount while overdose deaths dropped by about half.
Using statewide seizure data, the task force helped pass a House bill last year that significantly increased penalties for drug trafficking. Possession of at least 100 grams of any substance containing fentanyl now carries a potential sentence of up to 15 years in prison.
“It has made an impact because word got out among traffickers that we’re not playing around anymore with this,” Newell said.
The bill passed with bipartisan support and was designed to target distributors rather than people addicted to the drug, Newell said. Still, he cautioned against attributing Utah’s progress to any single factor.
“There’s really no magic answer,” Newell said. “Our drug task forces around the state are doing a phenomenal job seizing ever more and more amounts of fentanyl. Because of those efforts we are seeing a decline – about 10% – in fentanyl- or illicit-substance-involved deaths. Now is that the only reason? Of course not.”
Newell also pointed to public education efforts and lower drug potency statewide, which he attributed to increased border enforcement and tighter restrictions on precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl, limiting the reach of Mexican drug cartels.
Despite those gains, Utah continues to struggle with synthetic opioid use in rural areas.
“Sadly, our rural areas – especially our tribal communities – is where we have some pretty serious issues that we’re trying to address because their resources there are more limited than they are in an area like the greater Salt Lake area,” Newell said.
Back in San Juan County, Babadi said the narcotics task force has stepped up its work, moving cases more quickly and coordinating more closely with federal agencies. He declined to share details, citing active investigations.
“As soon as we have a solid case that we can send to the feds, we’re just going to get them indicted federally and get them out of our county,” Babadi said. “That’s one of the major changes. We’ve been making federal cases against all these mid-level and high-level targets, and getting them federally prosecuted.”
The strategy appears to be producing results. San Juan County recorded 47 fatal overdoses in 2023. By 2025, that number had fallen to 16.
“The majority of counties, they saw an increase – the bigger counties,” Babadi said, adding that San Juan County was a rarity among larger counties in seeing a decrease.
Still, overdose prevention remains unpredictable. New Mexico Department of Health officials said overdose-related emergency calls often spike in one area for 24 to 36 hours, fade and then reappear elsewhere.
“It’s always been a changing game. We have to adapt and change our tactics to keep up with the trends and how traffickers do their business,” Babadi said.
Ultimately, Babadi said, law enforcement cannot solve the crisis alone.
“We can do our best to combat trafficking, but it always goes back to the community, and the people to take care of each other,” Babadi said. “Parents need to watch their kids and other family members to make sure they don’t start because – at some point – when they start abusing narcotics, it might be too late.”
avanderveen@the-journal.com
