Two people were arrested and around 276,000 fentanyl pills seized during an I-5 traffic stop in Jackson County on Monday, Oregon State Police said.
A trooper stopped a commercial tractor unit around 8 a.m. for a traffic violation, officials said. While searching the vehicle’s cab, the trooper found two five-gallon buckets packed with blue pills suspected of containing fentanyl.
Daniel Pena Gragoso, 42, and Josue Itzel Gomez, 28, both of Mexico, were taken into custody and booked into Jackson County Jail, police said.
Gragoso and Gomez were no longer listed in Jackson County jail records on Wednesday.
Gomez — listed under the last name Gomez Parra in court records — was approved Tuesday to travel back to his residence of Sonora, Mexico, with his “co-defendant,” according to Jackson County Circuit Court records.
Gomez’s next court date is Sep. 11. He faces a single charge of unlawfully manufacturing a counterfeit schedule II controlled substance, according to the court travel permit.
No court records were entered for Gragoso on the state’s electronic court record database.
I-5 in Oregon has seen multiple hefty drug seizures in the past few years. Just last week, Portland police seized an estimated $2 million worth of fentanyl, meth and heroin from the highway during a traffic interdiction.
Earlier this year, a traffic stop on I-5 yielded more than 200 pounds of methamphetamine. And in 2022, officers seized 80 pounds of cocaine from a car driving on the freeway.
Fentanyl, a highly-addictive synthetic opioid, has worsened the now three-decades-old opioid crisis. Since 2020, overdose deaths involving illegally manufactured fentanyl have “significantly risen” across the state, according to the Oregon Health Authority.
In 2022, fentanyl was the most common illegal drug involved in overdose deaths, contributing to 65.5% of the state’s overdose fatalities, the authority reported.
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