Lakewood drug kingpin sentenced to 10 years for helming multi-state drug trafficking ring

A Lakewood resident was sentenced to 10 years in prison after law enforcement determined he was leading a South Puget Sound drug trafficking organization that stretched all the way to the East Coast.

The Drug Enforcement Administration, alongside neighboring partner law enforcement agencies, launched a lengthy investigation that uncovered the drug trafficking group, led by Joel Adrian Valencia Rosas, 28, was distributing cocaine, fentanyl and marijuana out of state, including places as far as Georgia and Ohio.

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According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the drug ring used social media to communicate and recruit new members. Most of the members in the drug ring were between the ages of 18 and 28.

“Mr. Valencia Rosas, the ringleader of this trafficking group, actively enticed young people to join his criminal enterprise,” U.S. Attorney Gorman stated. “On social media, he not only posted the drugs available for sale and their prices, he also attempted to portray the drug trafficking lifestyle as glamorous and lucrative, posting pictures of himself with firearms, flashy vehicles and cash. In reality, drug trafficking leaves destruction in its wake.”

Rosas used social media to reveal how much money could be made working as a drug courier for him. He started his recruitment efforts on Snapchat until the social media company closed his account in 2022. He pivoted to Instagram, and posted on there until his arrest in December 2023.

At the sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright said that Rosas used the lower-level members of the drug ring to take on higher risks, sacrificing others to make more money.

During the DEA investigation into the local ring, law enforcement officers seized approximately 52 kilos of cocaine, 23 kilos of fentanyl pills and 131 kilos of marijuana. The investigation also recovered a drug shipment that contained 37 kilos of cocaine and more than a kilo of fentanyl pills. In June 2023, a traffic stop on Interstate 5 (I-5) led to the seizure of 200,000 fentanyl pills hidden within the vehicle.

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“Valencia Rosas was so successful that he could not traffic the drugs without bringing others into his criminal orbit,” Assistant United States Attorney Marci Ellsworth wrote to the court for his sentencing hearing. “He could not move the hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash drug proceeds from Ohio and Georgia without more people, driving cash back to him or flying with it stuffed into their bags … none of those codefendants made money from their involvement in the DTO. Only Valencia Rosas made money off the backs of his codefendants.”

Valencia Rosas has been in custody since his arrest in December 2023.

Frank Sumrall is a content editor at MyNorthwest and producer of the Seattle Seahawks podcast, The Reset with Gee Scott. You can read his stories here and you can email him here.