Daily Times

He looked like a regular mail carrier, dropping off an unremarkable package at an upscale New York City apartment tower, but neither the man nor the package were quite what they seemed.

The mail carrier was really a federal agent, conducting a so-called controlled delivery, a tactic the US government employs to help stem the flow of heroin, prescription painkillers and other opioids fueling the nation’s epidemic of fatal overdoses. Drug-filled packages with misleading labels have become a common sight at John F. Kennedy International Airport’s (JFK) sprawling mail-sorting hangars, a front line in the battle against opioids. Many of the parcels originate in China, having been ordered on the web’s darker corners.

“Nobody anticipated the explosion we were going to face,” said Christopher Lau, who oversees the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations office (HSI) at the airport. Fatal opioid overdoses jumped to a record high of nearly 50,000 last year, more than double the 2013 toll, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Customs agents with X-ray machines and sniffer dogs detect and seize what they can. But to track, arrest and prosecute suspected dealers, the New York HSI office organizes several controlled deliveries each month, taking the packages out to see who claims them. For this delivery, a Reuters reporter was allowed to ride along and watch the agents in action.

The package had arrived on a Friday in August, mailed from Shanghai and filled with 250 grams of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 100 times stronger than morphine that can kill with a 2-milligram dose.

Published in Daily Times, September 23^rd 2018.