The Pennsylvania State Police announced Monday that troopers seized more than $5.7 million worth of cocaine, heroin, fentanyl and other illicit drugs in the past three months from across the commonwealth.

The news made an impression on Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger.

“That's a tremendous amount of illegal substances to have that number,” he said. “I'm glad to see that the police are working hard to remove drugs from our streets.”

However, the number is down considerably from the first quarter of the year, when state police reported confiscating more than $11 million of illegal drugs. Of that amount, 70 percent, or nearly $8 million, was from processed marijuana seized between Jan. 1 and March 31.

Ryan Tarkowski, state police spokesman in Harrisburg, noted the amount of drugs intercepted by police fluctuates from quarter to quarter for different reasons, including should a particularly large bust happened to occur in a particular three-month period.

However, the disparity in the amount of drugs seized from the first to second quarters this year, he said, was mostly due to the effects of the coronavirus panademic.

This is an excerpt from a larger article that appears in Wednesday's Butler Eagle. Subscribe online or in print to read the full article.