Kofi Anash 
A Surry man was sentenced Tuesday in federal court in Bangor to serve two years in prison for trafficking in counterfeit oxycodone pills that contained carfentanil, an elephant tranquilizer that is 5,000 times more potent than heroin.
Federal agents found 91 pills in Adam Fitzherbert’s bedroom when they executed a search warrant at his home in February 2018, according to the U.S. attorney’s office for Maine. The pills, when tested, were found to contain carfentanil, a drug used as an anesthetic for large animals that is 10,000 times more potent than morphine and 100 times more potent than fentanyl, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
In recent years, Carfentanil has been linked to opioid overdose deaths elsewhere in Maine as well as in Ohio, Illinois, Colorado, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Fitzherbert, 55, admitted to federal officials to purchasing the pills through an online “dark web” site called Dream Market, according to federal court documents.
Judge John Woodcock sentenced Fitzherbert, who pleaded guilty last September, to serve two years in prison and then three years of supervised release.
Prior to searching Fitzherbert’s home, police had the property off Route 176 under surveillance after finding drugs that belonged to Fitzherbert in a storage unit in Blue Hill.
Police were called to a storage rental facility in Blue Hill in November 2017 after an employee found five 5-gallon buckets full of marijuana buds and “a small open safe that contained pharmaceutical drugs and a number of small vials and pill capsules with powder on them,” according to federal court documents. Fitzherbert approached a police officer who was at the storage facility investigating the matter and initially told him he wanted to rent a unit there but later admitted the drugs in the unit were his, police said.
Among the drugs were several 30-milligram pills made to look like oxycodone — Fitzherbert told police there were 480 of them — that turned out not to contain oxycodone but cellulose, an organic compound found in plants, according to police.
Fitzherbert was charged with two counts of trafficking in counterfeit drugs, one for each incident, but one charge was dropped as a result of a plea agreement with prosecutors. He is required to turn himself in to the federal Bureau of Prisons by 2 p.m., April 15, to begin serving his sentence.
Fitzherbert’s prior criminal history includes a 2002 conviction in Aroostook County on a charge of unlawful sexual contact in a case where the victim was less than 14 years old, according to state records. Because of the 2002 conviction, Fitzherbert has to remain registered as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
