Opioid war rages in JFK mailroom
At airport dealing with 1M packages a day, Customs workers must defend themselves against contact with super-potent fentanyl
JAMAICA, N.Y. The central battleground in America’s war on super-potent synthetic opioids is a concrete and corrugated steel mail facility at one of the country’s busiest airports.
Inside the cavernous depot on the edge of New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, a team of U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers don masks and latex gloves for this dangerous work: sifting through hundreds of packages for a sliver of fentanyl, the deadly white powder at the center of a new overdose crisis.
There are few hints about which packages, among the 1 million that come through this New York mail center every day, will contain fentanyl or another synthetic opioid. The fentanyl usually comes in a few ounces at a time — hidden inside an innocuous-looking business envelope or a tightly taped box or disguised as a bottle of pills.
Besides their own instincts and training, the CBP officers have three tools: a creaky old Xray machine, a borrowed handheld laser that can peek inside packages and a sleek shepherd named Gini, one of a few canines newly trained to detect fentanyl.
That trifecta is an improvement from a year ago, when officers had only the X-ray machine and seized just a handful of fentanyl shipments coming into the USA.
“We’ve gotten a lot better at
“It’s mainly coming from China and Hong Kong, destined for every part of the United States.”
Frank Russo,
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
figuring out the threat, figuring out where it’s coming from, and identifying those packages that we need to treat as high-risk,” said Frank Russo, the port director for U.S. Customs and Border Protection at John F. Kennedy International Airport. “It’s mainly coming from China and Hong Kong, destined for every part of the United States.”
In fiscal year 2016, Russo’s officers seized seven fentanyl packages; this year, they’ve seized 64, and a half-dozen suspected fentanyl packages are in the pipeline for testing. Sixty percent of U.S.-bound international mail comes through the JFK facility, Russo said, and Customs officers have seized about 40% of the fentanyl pouring into the country.
Customs officers cannot examine every one of the 1 million packages that pass through the JFK facility every day. They use information from law enforcement and other sources to help them narrow their search. Country of origin is a key factor.
China has a robust pharmaceutical industry, and thousands of underground labs manufacture counterfeit and illicit drugs. Shipments from that country are prime targets, and every fentanyl package found