JASPER COUNTY, SC () – Jasper County has made a series of high-profile drug busts recently, and Sheriff Chris Malphrus said it’s part of the plan to crack down on all crime in the county.

“I believe that a drug dealer or someone who’s committing criminal acts in Jasper County, they don’t have the right to roam around the streets being undetected,” said Malphrus.

Jasper County’s team of deputies is not just detecting those suspects but arresting them.

Multiple cases in the past two weeks stemming from citizen tips, warrants or traffic stops have led to the discovery of drugs, primarily fentanyl, and guns.

“You begin to know who the good guys and the bad guys are. You know who the players are, you know who’s selling drugs. You know who’s up to no good. And, you know, we’ve probably arrested them before,” Malphrus said.

The suspects are some of Jasper county’s “Top 100”, a wanted list of 100 people known to investigators as dangerous criminals.

“We have a priority list, but all of them are a priority to me and I want to get them off our streets,” Malphrus said. “Success would be that they recognize what’s going on and they recognize that there is no good ending to this, that you’re going to go to jail one way or the other because you’re selling drugs or because maybe you sold bad drugs to somebody, and they died because they overdosed because of the product they sold them. And now you’re up for killing someone.”

Malphrus lost both his mother and his sister to drug overdoses. He said the battle against drugs in the county isn’t personal, it’s about taking criminals off the street and making the entire county safer.

Drugs are connected to 85% of the crime in the county. His goal to bring that number down with busts like these as more criminals on the Top 100 end up behind bars.

“We seized enough fentanyl at that house to kill a small army. And you know that success to be that when you’re getting those drugs off of the streets, out of the hands of the dealer or out of the hands of the user, then maybe the user can live another day, another week, another month, another year so enough that at some point there will be some type of intervention.”

The next step, Malphrus said, is prosecution, whether local or federal.

Malphrus said he is working with the government itself to make sure the dealers, and the users spend a long time behind bars and can’t come back to cause more trouble in this community.