A Puerto Rican man on Tuesday was sentenced to nearly five years in prison for trafficking $40,000 worth of fentanyl into Maine, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maine announced on Wednesday.
Rafael Omar Ojeda Lopez, 44, of Bayamon, Puerto Rico, was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Portland to 57 months in federal prison to be followed by five years of supervised release for possessing with intent to distribute controlled substances.
According to federal prosecutors, in September 2023, agents with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) directed a confidential source to negotiate the purchase of a kilogram of fentanyl from Lopez for $40,000 after a series of smaller buys from him.
When Lopez and the confidential source were finalizing the drug deal in Rockland, Maine, HSI agents arrested Lopez and seized the fentanyl.
Investigators found that the fentanyl was mixed with caffeine, heroin and xylazine, a veterinary tranquilizer commonly referred to as “tranq.”
According to the Department of Justice, the mixture of fentanyl and xylazine is especially dangerous to drug users because xylazine is not a narcotic and its effects cannot be reversed by naloxone, which heightens the risk of overdose death.
