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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday January 28 2018, @04:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-gray-web dept.

With Google, Bitcoins, and USPS, Feds realize it's stupid easy to buy fentanyl

A congressional report released Wednesday lays out just how easy it is for Americans to buy the deadly opioid fentanyl from Chinese suppliers online and have it shipped to them via the government's own postal service. The report also lays out just how difficult the practice will be to stop.

After Googling phrases such as "fentanyl for sale," Senate investigators followed up with just six of the online sellers they found. This eventually led them to 500 financial transaction records, accounting for about $766 million worth of fentanyl entering the country and at least seven traceable overdose deaths.

[...] "Thanks to our bipartisan investigation, we now know the depth to which drug traffickers exploit our mail system to ship fentanyl and other synthetic drugs into the United States," Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio said in a statement. "The federal government can, and must, act to shore up our defenses against this deadly drug and help save lives."

Related: Opioid Addiction is Big Business
Heroin, Fentanyl? Meh: Carfentanil is the Latest Killer Opioid
Tip for Darknet Drug Lords: Don't Wear Latex Gloves to the Post Office
Cop Brushes Fentanyl Off Uniform, Overdoses
Congress Reacts to Reports that a 2016 Law Hindered DEA's Ability to go after Opioid Distributors
Opioid Crisis Official; Insys Therapeutics Billionaire Founder Charged; Walgreens Stocks Narcan


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by ben_white on Sunday January 28 2018, @05:08PM (1 child)

    by ben_white (5531) on Sunday January 28 2018, @05:08PM (#629505)

    Ban the mail system Now!

    I know you jest, but it is the long term goal of many conservatives in congress to privatize or eliminate the postal service. They have driven them into financial crisis by making them unique among all federal agencies that they have to pre-fund retirement plans 100%. This has put approx $5 billion dollars of expense a year onto the service beyond what is required to keep it solvent. Congress has also limited the postal service's ability to move into other potentially lucrative businesses as revenue from dead tree mail have been falling. The restraints on revenue coupled with ridiculously high expenses to pre-fund the retirement of workers that have not even been hired yet makes the postal service look like it is a failing entity. This is by design.

    Here are some links:

    https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/be-careful-what-you-assume [uspsoig.gov]
    https://mronline.org/2011/09/23/the-manufactured-financial-crisis-of-the-u-s-postal-service/ [mronline.org]

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @08:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @08:46PM (#629568)

    You're kind of half-right about it.

    The small-government types who wanted to privatise the USPS wanted the whole thing out, and run as a business. This would mean renegotiating lots of items, including pensions, to be in line with the rest of the industry.

    They couldn't pass that law as such.

    To get around that, they rolled in a bunch of progressive wishlist items that some people thought were poison pills, and others thought would be a shining beacon that would prove how corporations were all bloodsucking monsters for not fully funding all sorts of benefits - pensions among them.

    Fast forward a couple of decades, and the USPS is caught between an insane burden that arguably was never intended to happen, and insane restrictions on what they can actually do.

    It's a poster child for what happens if you privatise, skip all the benefits of privatisation, and retain the burdens of not having privatised.

    Go figure.