Chinese drug traffickers had advice for U.S. buyers of fentanyl: Let us ship it to you by regular mail. It might be slower than FedEx or UPS, but the opioid is much more likely to reach its destination through the U.S. Postal Service. Cyber drug dealers wrote U.S.-based customers that private delivery companies electronically tracked packages, allowing the easy identification of mail from suspect addresses and creating a trail connecting sellers and buyers of illegal fentanyl. The Postal Service did not institute similar safeguards, and that gaping hole has not been closed despite legislation compelling its elimination, the Washington Post reports. Fifteen percent of all packages from China are still not electronically tracked, and the figure rises to 40 percent for all packages from around the world entering the U.S. “What do we not know about these packages that are coming in?” asks Frank Russo, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection port director at John F. Kennedy International Airport. “When you’re talking about a million packages a day,” he said, the volume of international mail arriving at JFK alone, “40 percent is a large number.”
On Wednesday, the Trump administration sanctioned three Chinese nationals accused of trafficking fentanyl, identifying two of them as “significant foreign narcotics traffickers.” Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Sigal Mandelker said the “Chinese kingpins” directly contributed to the nation’s opioid addiction crisis by shipping hundreds of packages of synthetic opioids to the United States. “The most common distribution medium is via the U.S. Postal Service,” the Treasury Department said. The illicit use of the U.S. mail system, widely recognized but unaddressed for years, was just one in a number of persistent vulnerabilities at the nation’s ports of entry and in international mail centers as the fentanyl epidemic spread and tens of thousands of Americans died.