Eric Holder Calls for Crackdown on Drug Smuggling Through ‘the Mails’

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Sen. Lisa Murkowski
(R-Alaska) are warning that “the
mails” are increasingly being used to ship illegal drugs.
Murkowski told the Senate Appropriations Committee Thursday that
this scourge was “wiping out whole families” in rural areas of
Alaska and “we need to get on it yesterday.” 

Holder called it “shocking to see the amount of drugs that get
pumped into communities” through the U.S. Postal Service and “a
major problem we have to deal with.” The warning was part of his
testimony regarding the Justice Department’s Fiscal Year 2015
budget request. 

How big of a problem is USPS drug smuggling, really? The number
of arrests related to narcotics shipments did jump 33 percent in
2012 from the previous year, according to U.S. Postal Inspection
Service figures. Whether this is due to an uptick in drug-o-grams
or increased law enforcement efforts is hard to say. 

But if we use the number of arrests as a proxy for the amount of
drugs being shipped through the USPS, the practice has been pretty
stable for the past two decades. An 1999 article
from The Arizona Republic notes that “typically, the
Postal Service…arrests 1,800 people nationwide for smuggling
drugs and money through the mail each year.” In 2001,
there were only 1,662 such arrests. 

Between 1994 and 1996, 6,170 people—an average of 2,056 per
year—were arrested for attempting to deliver or receive drugs
through the mail, according to
The Christian Science Monitor. In 2012, there
were around 1,760 such arrests. 

According to a report
in Louisiana newspaper The Advocate, most mailed
drug cases involve very small amounts of drugs (and end up being
prosecuted through local, not federal, laws). To catch these
small-scale drug shiptments, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service
already places “prohibited mail narcotics teams” around the
country. Suspicious tape or odors may get package flagged,
officials said—as might having a return address from “suspicious”
location. 

From The Advocate:

Wagner, the local mail sleuth, was profiling parcels at the mail
processing facility on Bluebonnet Boulevard in May when he singled
out an express package sent from San Leandro, Calif., that he
deemed suspicious because it originated in “a known source city for
narcotics.”

Shipping something from San Leandro, California? Apparently
that’s all the probably cause needed!