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in 2017 sending investigators on the committee of Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs wanted to understand how drugs like the powerful opiate fentanyl were entering the United States the synthetic compound and its derivatives have been the source of a sharp rise in overdoses in the u.s. an investigators knew the drug originated from online dealers in China but how is it being smuggled into our country to find out they did what anyone would do they googled it and discovered dozens of online retailers peddling the drug posing as potential us-based buyers investigators emailed questions to fentanyl retailers about products and stop the retailers offered a surprising level of customer service describing the quality of their products providing pricing and discounts and even offering suggestions for fentanyl analogues when a particular product was out of stock almost all of them guaranteed delivery to the United States one even boasted a 99% successful delivery rate but what was most alarming was who the fentanyl dealers overwhelmingly preferred as their parcel delivery service the United States Post Office while the United States Post Office as it has since it was found at 173 years ago still provides the one means of communication which reaches into every corner of the land which has helped to make America great this is how international drug dealers came to favor the US Postal Service if you were going to send something illegal into the United States you might be inclined to first try a private Parcel Service like UPS or FedEx after all neither is run by the United States government however these private companies are required by law to collect information electronically including mailing addresses weight and package contents on all the packages to send to US customers this makes it easier for the US government to monitor who might be trying to smuggle something illegal into the United States but package is sent through USPS often don't arrive with the same information according to the Postal Service to understand why this is you need to understand how mail travels around the globe the United States is one of 192 members of the Universal Postal Union a UN Charter Dejan C that facilitates the flow of global post basically member nations agree to fulfill mail delivery that is sent from other countries if you send a letter from France to Korea for example the French Postal Service will ship the letter to Korea until it reaches the Korean postal service and every nation it passes through is responsible for handling the mail while it's within its borders it's a good faith agreement that has been around for a hundred and forty four years to ensure the flow of Correspondence and goods around the globe but these agreements were made during a time when we didn't have nearly as much international mails we have today with the rise of e-commerce the number of international mail arriving in the US has soared with packages making up around half of all mail delivered to the US from abroad a lot of those packages are coming from China in 2010 the US Postal Service in an effort to increase revenue from international postage introduced the e package service which offered discounted rates proposed from China suddenly it became much easier and cheaper than ever before to send mail from China to the United States the USPS was inundated with packages from China and elsewhere an international drug dealers were presented with a huge opportunity a postage stamp is the best insurance in the world right right according to the Postal Service 275 million packages entered in the United States through their service centers in 2016 but a lot of this mail doesn't arrive with any electronic data meaning there is no clear indication of who sent it or what's in it that's because Universal Postal Union members aren't required to collect and share this data like private companies and only 23 countries send it with her post bound for the US in 2017 only 36 percent of packages sent contained any electronic data this means a lot of packages can fall through the cracks at a postal service center in New York City customs officials were only able to identify 10 suspicious packages from China a day using electronic data according to Senate investigators this leaves us customs to search for many of them the old-fashioned way by hand imagine looking for a needle in a haystack when you're only allowed to examine one straw at a time a customs official was quoted by Senate investigators as saying the current system barely scratches the surface of finding drugs flowing through the u.s. mail stakeholders across the parcel delivery industry have sounded the alarm about how our mail system is being exploited when I board a flight back to the US I don't look around the passengers looking for suspected terrorists I think about the bags and bags of foreign post packages that are loaded in the belly of the aircraft no one has any idea what's in those packages none whatsoever but the US has been unsuccessful in compelling other countries and supplied the shipping data and some legislators have asked if we should refuse to deliver this post from countries unless they also provide this data with their mail why can't we tell them that they can't utilize our post office unless they have an electronic tracking number on it that we can track and share with CBP to cut down on this baloney a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said in a statement that it has made significant investments and improvements in our drug detection and interdiction technology we'll be targeting capabilities but solutions are slow coming and the mail will likely still be an appealing route for international drug smugglers all for the cost of a postage stamp other countries are working on their own timetables we can't afford to have them work on their own timetables because our people are dying and I guess the question I would ask this morning is how many more Americans have to die before our government gets its act together [Music] [Music]