CUMBERLAND – Last March, federal drug agents watched secretly as their confidential source met with his supplier of counterfeit Adderall pills, who then arranged for the pickup of 10,000 orange tablets laced with methamphetamine powder. 

Days after the drug buy, court documents say, federal authorities searched the Cumberland home of 27-year-old Dylan Rodas, at 49 Rhode Island Ave., and another location, 2376 Diamond Hill Rd., where in the basement they discovered a pill mill of “staggering” proportions – with possible ties to a Mexican cartel. 

In total, agents seized about 660,500 counterfeit Adderall pills weighing about 660 pounds — as much as a V8 car engine — and with a street value of $4.6 million, Rhode Island U.S. Attorney Zachary A. Cunha said Monday. 

“We believe this to be the single largest seizure of fake Adderall pills in the United States,” he said, “as well as among the largest seizures of methamphetamine” in New England history. 

“The prosecution we announce today, which involves the seizure of what I can only term industrial-scale quantities of meth, is a stark reminder that we cannot be complacent,” said Cunha. “We cannot treat meth as a problem that happens elsewhere.” 

Rodas, who has been held since March 28, has agreed to plead guilty to drug trafficking charges in a case that remains an ongoing investigation, said Cunha. “Suffice it to say, in any investigation we look to go as far as we can. “ 

The charge of possession with intent to distribute 500 grams or more of the highly addictive methamphetamine carries a mandatory minimum penalty of 10 years imprisonment. 

Brian Boyle, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New England field division, said “obviously with this amount of pills,” distribution “was going throughout New England.... This could even be outside New England with this quantity that we’re seeing here.” 

Asked if Rodas was working with a Mexican cartel, Boyle said, “The Mexican cartels are producing meth and fentanyl in record amounts down in these jungles and laboratories ... and they’re flooding the U.S. market, so this meth came out of Mexico.” 

Court records say the pill-making operation was located in the basement home of Rodas’ father and stepmother, who told investigators they knew nothing about what Rodas was doing down there behind the door he always kept locked. 

There, agents found two electronic pill-press machines, each capable of producing 5,000 pills an hour, and the pills in question stored in at least five 27-gallon containers.  

Neither Cunha nor Boyle would say how long the pill mill had been in operation, citing the ongoing investigation. 

Agents also seized a bucket containing 40 pounds of methamphetamine mixture ready to be pressed into pills, packaging materials and binding agents, seven handguns and additional magazines, 250 grams of cocaine and “thousands of blue and pink pills containing a mixture and substance containing fentanyl.” 

They also found $15,000 in cash. 

Cunha said that if the confiscated pills had flowed out onto the street, they promised a “devastating effect in our communities.” 

Cunha said the pills don’t come stamped with the label “fentanyl” or “meth” on them. Quite the opposite. They are “deliberately made to look like something else – whether Adderall or Percocet or some other drug that the buyer may think is safe and what it appears to be.” 

Oftentimes, “customers can wind up purchasing drugs from individuals they know or through connections made over social media…. You see people going to parties or elsewhere and taking a pill that somebody provides them with, and part of the peril is that you don’t know what’s in that pill.” 

Said Cunha: “If you, or a loved one, are buying or taking pills off the street, or from a friend, or from anywhere that is not a pharmacy or a physician, the odds are that it’s not what you think.” 

For a long time, said Cunha, “we here in New England have been spared the full impact of methamphetamine, a drug that has blighted lives in so many other communities across the country. Those days, I regret to say, are over, with meth increasingly making its presence felt in Rhode Island and across the Northeast.”  

Email Tom Mooney at: tmooney@providencejournal.com