ATCHISON, Kan. — The Atchison County Sheriff’s Office’s Facebook post about a fentanyl bust at the Super 8 Hotel had more than 1,000 shares Friday.

“They were a blueish teal kind of color,” Sheriff Jack Laurie said about the fentanyl pills found at the hotel. “That’s the most common one we’ve seen.”

Laurie said they arrested 19-year-old Matthew Wolfe and 23-year-old Arhianna Franklin on Sept. 1. Both suspects are from the city. Laurie said he doesn’t think the pills were made locally. Regardless he called fentanyl very dangerous. 

“It’s obviously more dangerous now where they’re coming out with more colors,” Laurie said of the makers. “If you look at the latest release from the DEA, they look like a lot like sweet tarts.”

FOX4 also interviewed a Drug Enforcement Administration employee Friday. Assistant Agent in Charge Rogeana Patterson-King touched on drug cartels during her interview.

“Now they’ve decided, ‘OK, we’re just going change the color because we’ve been really hammering to the community about the dangers of the blue pills,’ that they say, ‘Well we’ll just switch it up,’ which is basically what has happened,” Patterson-King said.

Patterson-King said she has not seen the rainbow-colored pills in Kansas yet, but they’ve seen powdered fentanyl in the state.

“It’s only a matter of time,” she said of the rainbow-colored pills. “So it’s about getting the word out that yeah, ‘We were just telling you about the blue ones.’ Now you got to be aware of different colored ones [that are] pink and purple.”

Laurie advises parents to talk to their children about the drug.

“Being that they do look like candy, it’s very possible that it could be presumed at school because somebody brought it from their home, and we’ve experienced in Atchison County where kids have taken drugs to school before not knowing what it is,” Laurie said.

“Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine,” according to a DEA press release on Aug. 30. “Fentanyl remains the deadliest drug threat facing this country. According to the CDC, 107,622 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021, with 66 percent of those deaths related to synthetic opioids like fentanyl.”

The press release said rainbow-colored fentanyl pills have already been found in 18 states in the U.S. A spokeswoman for the DEA said blue pills with fentanyl and powder are already in Missouri. The rainbow-colored pills are not, but it’s only a matter of time before they are as well.