By Arian Campo-Flores and Jon Kamp | Video and photographs by Jonah Markowitz for The Wall Street Journal
Not long before Don Holman's son Garrett died from an overdose
in February, he learned his 20-year-old had his drugs delivered
directly to their Virginia home in the mail, in packages from
foreign countries.
"Your drug dealer today is your mailman," said Mr. Holman. "If
your kids are getting any packages in the mail whatsoever, you need
to know what that is."
Fentanyl and other synthetic narcotics like U-47700, which was
found Garrett Holman's system, are now streaming into the U.S.
through international parcels delivered by the U.S. Postal Service
and private carriers like United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx
Corp., according to authorities. The deliveries are helping fuel an
opioid crisis that claims tens of thousands of U.S. lives each
year, prodding congressional lawmakers to propose tougher rules and
new resources to try to stop the flow.
Seizures of fentanyl arriving by both international mail and
express carriers reached nearly 37 kilograms in the U.S. overall in
fiscal 2016, compared with 0.09 kilogram five years earlier,
according to Customs and Border Protection data.
While Mexican drug cartels usually transport synthetic opioids
like fentanyl in bulk by land across the southern U.S. border, many
American dealers and users use the mail to receive smaller supplies
of the drugs, officials say. In the past year, authorities have
arrested such alleged dealers in cities including Cincinnati, Salt
Lake City and Kearny, N.J.
Mail and private express services are "attractive options for
smugglers, " said Salvatore Ingrassia, acting assistant director
for trade and cargo at CBP's New York field office. He said there
has been a "significant increase" in synthetic opioids arriving in
packages.
Customs officials rely on X-ray machines and visual scans to
find the contraband at nine international mail facilities around
the country. With 621.4 million international packages and mail
pieces arriving through the U.S. Postal Service alone in fiscal
2016, it is like finding a needle in a haystack.
The chemicals are so lethal, drug-sniffing dogs aren't trained
to identify them for fear of death.
"This manual process...coupled with the tremendous volume of
inbound mail to the United States, creates a daunting task for
CBP," said Robert Perez, the agency's acting executive assistant
commissioner for operations support, at a May Senate hearing on
opioid mail shipments.
A measure sponsored by lawmakers including Sen. Sherrod Brown
(D., Ohio) would provide customs officials with more screening
equipment and lab resources to detect fentanyl arriving by mail or
at ports of entry. Another bill in the Senate, sponsored by Ohio
Republican Rob Portman, would require overseas shippers that use
the U.S. Postal Service to provide certain pieces of information,
transmitted electronically to CBP before parcels arrive in the
country.
Sen. Portman's measure seeks to address a problem that customs
officials and others have complained about for years: Unlike
private carriers like FedEx and UPS, the Postal Service doesn't
always provide CBP with advance data like a shipper's name and
address and a description of contents. Run through software
programs, the data can help flag warning signs such as an address
or neighborhood known to be the origin of previous shipments of
chemicals.
At the recent Senate hearing, a UPS official called advance data
"the cornerstone of effective risk assessment." Mr. Perez from CBP
also highlighted the data's importance.
The Postal Service says it is more limited than private carriers
because it has to work with foreign postal operators. It has been
pushing overseas operators to provide such information and now
receives data for 40% to 50% of inbound packages, said Robert
Cintron, the agency's vice president for network operations, at the
hearing.
The Postal Service is obligated under international agreements
to accept incoming mail from nearly every country, Mr. Cintron
said. He added that the blanket requirements of Sen. Portman's bill
are impractical and would undermine the Postal Service's ability to
compete with private shippers.
Moreover, sellers routinely falsify the sender's name and
address and the description of the contents, authorities say. On
the receiving end, buyers often misrepresent themselves as well,
and may use numerous mailboxes to evade detection.
"Though the express carriers typically require additional data
to ship parcels, it is still rather difficult for these carriers
and law enforcement to detect and intercept opioids," the White
House Office of National Drug Control Policy wrote in a letter to
the House Energy and Commerce Committee in March.
Spokespeople for UPS and FedEx said the companies comply with
law enforcement's legal requirements on imports.
In the March arrest of alleged drug dealer Chukwuemeka
Okparaeke, it was his unusual behavior at post offices in the
Middletown, N.Y., area that helped tip off authorities.
They said the 28-year-old, known to online customers as
"Fentmaster," dropped bags of envelopes in collection bins while
wearing latex gloves. He also bought more than $7,500 worth of
stamps at a time online.
Mr. Okparaeke ordered fentanyl variants online from vendors in
China in one-kilogram quantities and had them shipped to a UPS
store mailbox, according to authorities. He then repackaged the
powder into two-milliliter plastic bags and shipped them through
the post office to scores of customers around the U.S., authorities
said. The envelopes had fictitious return addresses like
"Middletown Sweets" and "North Jersey Plastics Co."
In April, a federal grand jury in New York indicted Mr.
Okparaeke on charges including intent to import and distribute
controlled substances. He pleaded not guilty. An attorney for Mr.
Okparaeke declined to comment.
In March, word circulated in online drug forums that Fentmaster
had been busted. "Do not order from Fentmaster," one participant
wrote.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 26, 2017 05:44 ET (09:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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