On February 20, police were called apartments in Commerce City, Colorado.

Inside one unit, they made a gruesome discovery.

"There were three females and two males that were deceased inside the apartment," said Commerce City Police Chief, Clint Nichols.

Authorities later said it appeared the victims, including the parents of a 4-month-old child who was found alive at the scene, had unintentionally overdosed on the opioid fentanyl.

"It broke my heart. Those people went in thinking they were just gonna have a decent party, do a little cocaine, drink some alcohol and be fine. Come to find out the cocaine was laced with fentanyl and they had no idea and now a child will grow up never knowing her parents," said Amber King.

Amber King is director of outreach at the Stout Street Foundation, an addiction treatment center that helped her overcome her  own opioid addiction nearly a decade ago.

"I can honestly say if fentanyl was around, I don't know that I’d be here today."

This highly potent synthetic painkiller is fueling a skyrocketing drug abuse epidemic that now kills 100,000 Americans a year. 

Dr. Vik Bebarta, said "All it takes is half a pill, one pill, to be dead in a few minutes."

Dr. Vik Bebarta is an emergency physician at CU Anschutz Medical Campus. He says the relatively cheap drug kills unsuspecting users and addicts and young and old alike. Two Coloradans a day on average die of fentanyl overdoses.

"Anybody can produce these pills. They can get a gram or two, they get a pill press and they distribute it in local neighborhoods, to communities. It's so easy to get out and for some reason that has accelerated."

"It's in everything. They're finding it in meth, they're finding it in cocaine, they're finding it in marijuana," said King.

And there are no controls over how much fentanyl is contained in each. Cracking down on its illicit use is extremely difficult.

One element of the fentanyl fighting strategy is the potentially life-saving medication Narcan which is designed to help reverse the effect s of an opioid overdose in just minutes.

Experts suspect that stresses and isolation brought on by the pandemic have contributed to the drug surge.

"Hopefully now, as some of this pandemic recedes, we can target this because this requires a national effort," said Dr. Bebarta.

While President Biden touted the issue in his State of the Union speech, King believes opioid abuse may be best fought on the local level by focusing on treatment rather than punishment.

"As a community with all the stigma around addiction and mental health, people feel like they can't reach out for help. We need to educate children. We need to educate teenagers of the dangers that are out there."

It's too late for the victims here, a number of whom were related.

"That whole family had nothing but a bright future ahead of them and now they're gone because of fentanyl," said King.

It's a story that continues to repeat itself, with too often tragic results. 

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