The nation's opioid epidemic has been attributed to many factors, including the over-prescription of painkillers and the availability of cheap synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
In Congress, lawmakers are trying to make it harder to buy fentanyl, in part by forcing the U.S. Postal Service to make it more difficult to send narcotics through the mail. But the measure has been languishing.
It's not clear how many shipments of fentanyl and other narcotics arrive with the mail carrier. But what is clear, says former Department of Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem is: It's all too easy to get drugs delivered right to your mailbox.
"If you go on the dark Web and you look at these communications, they basically say 'well how can you get the stuff here,'" she said, "and they will just put it through the mail because the chances of it getting caught are just so minimal."
That's because the Postal Service receives some 1.3 million inbound packages a day from overseas, and manages to inspect just a tiny fraction — about 100, according to Kayyem.
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4 comments:
They must be Jonesing in West VA.
Bring it into the Country on military planes OK.
But you low level drug dealers (who buy from CIA) need to stop using USPS as a courrier!
We don't have enough resources (time/money/people) to search every single package through the mail, vehicles coming across the borders (including CAN-A-DUH) or shipping containers that make it to port.
Signed,
we are doing the best we can considering the amount of snowflakes that just won't melt away
My son worked at the USPS in a Boston sorting facility. The line crew was instructed not to slow the line by questioning what was in a package unless it was split at the seams and leaking drugs or weed or whatever. They didn't like it when that happened because they had to shut the line down for hazardous spill cleanup, causing a major mail backup.
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