The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration considers fentanyl to be the nation’s “greatest and most imminent drug threat.”
According to the Utah News-Dispatch, Utah has already seized a record number of fentanyl pills this year.
In 2023, the DEA and its local partners seized more than 664,000 fentanyl pills, setting a new annual record. By June of this year, that record had already been broken. In just six months, more than 774,000 pills were seized across the state.
Lt. Brent Shelby of the Utah Highway Patrol said neither Summit nor Wasatch counties are major crime hubs, so they don’t typically see large seizures there.
“Salt Lake City is a hub for drugs coming into Utah, where they are packaged up and distributed within the state through local dealers,” he said. “Park City, Summit County and Wasatch County are not really hubs or warehouses, so we don’t see large amounts of seizures going there unless we catch them being transported from this region to another.”
Each law enforcement agency keeps its own count.
The Summit County Sheriff’s Office has seized more than 450 fentanyl pills so far this year, including one case where a Wyoming woman was caught with 400 pills hidden in her underwear. In 2023, deputies found fewer than 90 pills in all of the year.
KPCW is waiting to hear back from the Wasatch County Sheriff’s Office on numbers for the first half of the year.
As for UHP, officers have seized nearly 200 pills in Summit and Wasatch counties through July, and Shelby said officers found 19 pounds of pills in Summit County last year bound for Denver, which amounts to more than 85,000 pills.
Shelby said most of UHP’s seizures occur during traffic stops on Interstates 15 and 70 in southern Utah, but Interstate 80 is also a distribution route.
“In regards to the 19 pounds of fentanyl pills that we seized, the officer conducted a traffic stop for a routine traffic violation that we do every day and made contact with an individual that was there,” Shelby said. “There were suspicious circumstances so he began to investigate and during that investigation, he discovered the narcotics.”
From there, UHP determines the source and ultimate destination of the drugs and submits that information to the court.
The price per pill has fallen in recent years. In 2018, the average price was $25 to $30 per pill, according to the Utah News-Dispatch. In 2023, the street price was about $2.
