Postal Inspectors Deliver in War on Drugs

WASHINGTON —  The Postal Inspection Service is trying to help America stamp out drugs by sending gun-toting inspectors to deliver arrest warrants along with drug-filled mail.

“In fiscal 1988, we arrested 425 people for distributing narcotics through the mail,” inspector Tom McClure said. “In the first six months of this fiscal year, we have arrested 440 people.”

Unlike many government agencies that announce their total drug seizures with great fanfare, the postal inspectors are so low key about their work that the spokesman could not come up with the total amount of illicit drugs they seized last year.

Generally, however, because of the nature of the mail system, the Postal Inspection Service does not make large seizures that could compare with those by other agencies.

“In a boat or a container ship or an airliner, they can move tons in those kind of things,” he said. “In the mail you can’t do that, at least not in an individual package.”

McClure declined to give many details on the service’s operations, saying: “The bad guys read newspapers too.”

But he said the service gets help from other agencies such as the Customs Service, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and local police while developing its own cases through informants and other tips.

The service’s recent finds include $8,000 worth of PCP packed in baby food jars and being mailed from Los Angeles to Broken Arrow, Okla., and illicit steroids being distributed by two men in Miami who were arrested in mid-April. Officials said the latter case--which involved a two-year investigation by postal inspectors and the FBI--was the largest illicit steroid ring ever busted.

The Postal Inspection Service has no idea how much drugs are moving through the U.S. mail because it is illegal for the agency to inspect the mail without a federal warrant, he said.

But the service presumes the amount is increasing.

“There’s a direct relationship between the amount of drugs in society and the amount being passed through the Postal Service,” McClure said. When one mode of transporting drugs is shut down, “dealers find new avenues to move the narcotics.”

Of the 1,800 postal inspectors nationwide, about 800 do criminal investigations including mail fraud, child pornography and internal theft, he said.

The number focusing full time on drugs doubled from 50 to 100 in the current fiscal year, McClure said. And when a case comes along, other inspectors are put to work on it. “We’ll even bring them from across the country if the magnitude of the case calls for that,” he said.

The mailings are not limited to any part of the country, he said. “There are mailings from Miami to California, from New York to Miami. It’s crazy.”

Private mail services such as United Parcel Service and Federal Express are not scrutinized as carefully as the U.S. mail. Spokesmen for both companies said they cooperate with authorities on drug investigations, but neither would indicate exactly how often this has occurred or whether the companies instigated any probes.

The Customs Service is cooperating with the Postal Service to clear mail from 29 high-risk drug source countries at the port of arrival, according to Dennis Shimkoski of Customs.

In the first half of fiscal 1989, which began last October, Customs seized 65 pounds of heroin, 216 pounds of opium, 10 pounds of cocaine and 297 pounds of marijuana at the 21 international mail branches, he said.

In fiscal 1988, Customs seized 164 pounds of heroin, 1,600 pounds of opium and 1,310 pounds of marijuana. There were no significant amounts of cocaine intercepted, Shimkoski said.