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TAYLORSVILLE — A three-day enforcement effort by the Utah Highway Patrol and the Department of Public Safety netted hundreds of pounds of marijuana and hundreds of thousands of dollars being seized along I-80 in Summit County.
From Monday afternoon through Thursday morning, 15 troopers with the UHP Interdiction Team worked a special enforcement effort along I-80 looking for drug traffickers.
A total of 185 stops were made resulting in 10 major busts that led to the seizure of 446 pounds of marijuana, 25 pounds of meth and more than $155,000 cash, according to statistics released Thursday by the UHP.
Those drugs busts, according to jail booking affidavits in Summit County included:
- A stop in which 156 pounds of marijuana were found in nine vacuum-sealed bags in a vehicle with Missouri plates.
- A stop in which 25 pounds of methamphetamine was found in a single vehicle.
- A stop in which five empty duffel bags believed to have once contained large amounts of marijuana were found. Instead, approximately $100,000 in cash in bags that were vacuum sealed three times and divided into $10,000 dollar stacks were found.
- A motorhome that was pulled over and 203 pounds of marijuana was found inside.
All of the vehicles stopped committed traffic violations prior to being pulled over ranging from speeding, to driving too slow, to improper lane changes. Once the vehicles were stopped, Lt. Rob Nixon, head of the UHP Interdiction Team, said troopers detected red flags from the behaviors of the drivers and their passengers. In some cases the odor of marijuana could be detected in their cars, according to booking affidavits.
After a trooper suspected drugs might be in a vehicle, a police K9 was used to sniff the exterior of the car.
Nixon said troopers do saturation efforts on different parts of I-15, I-70 and I-80 all year. But knowing that it is currently marijuana harvest season in California, he said this week’s effort purposely targeted I-80 in Summit County for drugs being shipped from the West Coast headed east.
While troopers will sometimes conduct an operation with information already collected on suspects, Nixon said all of the traffic stops and drug busts made this week were done without any prior intelligence collected from sources.
As of Thursday, UHP’s Interdiction team in 2019 had seized 2,077 pounds of marijuana, 519 pounds of meth, 37 pounds of heroin more than $1.7 million in cash statewide.
