Synthetic opioids kill 20,000 people in USA

yields information about what to look for next.

“The mail is now a central front in the whole fight against drugs,” Richard Baum, the acting drug czar, told USA TODAY during a visit Sept. 8 to the facility.

Police around the country find fentanyl everywhere — along with the drug’s overdose victims.

This month, a woman allegedly dropped more than two dozen bags of fentanyl outside a Pennsylvania elementary school. In Cincinnati, police seized 5 pounds of heroin, fentanyl and other opioids during a drug bust in July. In Maryland, the number of overdose deaths from fentanyl increased 137% in the first three months of 2017, killing 372 people.

Nationally, fentanyl and other synthetic opioids claimed the lives of more than 20,000 Americans in 2016, more than double the fentanyl-related overdose deaths in 2015, according to a preliminary count by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Those numbers — and the human toll behind them — provide strong motivation for Russo’s team at the JFK facility.

They aren’t looking just for fentanyl. During Baum’s visit in early September, the officers examined dozens of suspect packages filled with all kinds of illicit goods.

One contained a bottle of a date-rape drug known as GBL. Another box was stuffed with more than 10 kilos of an erectile dysfunction drug. In a holding room, a table was crowded with other items, from counterfeit money orders to a 6-ounce bag of carfentanil, an opioid that’s about 100 times more potent than fentanyl and meant to be used an elephant tranquilizer.

Amid all the contraband, fentanyl remains a top priority. The search for the drug has become more fruitful since officers got the hand-held laser and the fentanyl-detecting canines.

The laser — on loan from the company that makes it — is a relatively new technology that allows officers to determine what drug is inside a package without opening it. That’s critical with fentanyl because a few granules of the powder can be fatal.

The officers must lab-test the drug before they can seize it, because the laser isn’t foolproof. The machine gives them a pretty solid idea of whether they’re dealing with fentanyl. If so, they need to put on full protective gear and move to an isolated detention room before opening it for testing.

The newly trained dogs have tracked down 11 of the 64 confirmed fentanyl packages seized in 2017. The CBP has had the dogs for a couple of months.

“They’re able to screen 100 packages in … probably 10 minutes,” Russo said. “It would take our officers probably an entire day” to sift through the same number.

Russo and other officials said they could use more of just about everything: a new X-ray machine; more lasers (and not on temporary loan); fresh resources to clear their backlog of suspicious packages waiting to be lab-tested.

And perhaps the most helpful: advanced electronic data that would allow the CBP to target suspect mail packages with a computer program, instead of manually.

“If we get the advanced data, we’d be in a much better place,” Russo said.

Congress is considering legislation that would require foreign shippers to provide that electronic information, but the U.S. Postal Service said that’s not an easy request, given there are 192 postal services across the globe — many in poor countries that don’t have that capacity.

In the meantime, Russo and others said they would keep making inroads using the tools they have.

“We’re doing a lot better than we were a year ago,” said Baum, the acting drug czar.