(South Bend, IN) - A Rhode Island man has been sentenced to federal prison for shipping fentanyl to Indiana.

Thursday in South Bend’s U.S. District Court, 44-year-old Jesus Martinez-Salas of Providence, Rhode Island was sentenced to 78 months in prison followed by four years of supervised release. He had previously pled guilty to distributing over a pound of fentanyl to a buyer in Indiana back in 2022.

Toxicologists say 2 mg of fentanyl, which is 50-100 times more potent than morphine, is lethal to humans. So the pound that Martinez-Salas was peddling could have killed over 226,000 people.