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Senate Investigators Google Their Way to $766 Million of Fentanyl

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

takyon writes:

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."

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday January 28 2018, @07:05PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 28 2018, @07:05PM (#629539) Journal

    Actually, IIRC, requiring cigarette packages to not have blatantly distinctive packaging did reduce the amount of cigarettes sold in Austrailia? New Zealand? Something like that. Granted this is different from requiring a skull and bones on the front of the package, but it is an argument against your argument. (OTOH, I don't know *how* effective it was, or even whether there was any long term effect. And it may have operated by reducing the advantage for manufacturers to advertise.)

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Monday January 29 2018, @01:00AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 29 2018, @01:00AM (#629657) Journal

    Actually, IIRC, requiring cigarette packages to not have blatantly distinctive packaging did reduce the amount of cigarettes sold in Austrailia?

    Yes [health.gov.au] a whooping "0.55 percentage points between December 2012 and September 2015" from the "smokers prevalence". More precisely:

    ... found that after controlling for a range of variables, including excise tax increases since 2010, and socio-demographic factors, tobacco plain packaging in combination with graphic health warnings was associated with a statistically significant estimated decline in smoking prevalence of around 0.55 percentage points between December 2012 and September 2015, or about one quarter of the total drop in prevalence during the period.

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