Around 4.50pm on 7 December 2021, Toowoomba Tactical Crime Squad officers intercepted a utility on the Warrego Highway near Postsman Ridge Road at Helidon.[1] In the rear seat they found a cardboard box with 20 bags of cannabis, and four more boxes with 78 bags in the rear of the utility, about 44 kilograms with an estimated street value of $264,000.[1] The driver and sole occupant, a 37-year-old New South Wales man, was arrested.[1] A second outlet confirms the 7 December stop and reports the man spent Christmas in a Queensland prison on the trafficking charge.[2]

The arrest led police to a Toowoomba storage facility, where detectives on 8 December found five boxes with about 59 kilograms of cannabis worth an estimated $354,000.[1] On 9 December they searched an acreage property on Willow Springs Road at Clifton and found 3,015 cannabis plants of varying sizes, worth an estimated $10.5 million, in a well-established crop with an extensive glasshouse and a drying shed fitted with lighting, irrigation and ventilation.[1] The plants were destroyed.[1]

The man appeared in Toowoomba Magistrates Court charged with trafficking, producing and supplying dangerous drugs, plus medicine and drug-paraphernalia counts, and was remanded in custody to 14 February.[1]