Senate report details ease of buying fentanyl online

The U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations set out to find just how easy it is to buy fentanyl from China off the internet.

It turns out it’s quite easy. Starting the process takes little more than Googling “fentanyl for sale.”

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid 50 times more powerful than heroin. It is now the leading cause of accidental death in Ohio.

“It’s so powerful that just a few flakes of it can kill you, and those who use it not only put themselves in danger, but they also put law enforcement and children at risk,” subcommittee chairman Sen. Rob Portman, ROhio, said.

Investigators started by Googling “fentanyl for sale” and then emailing sellers from six different websites as they posed as first-time buyers.

The sellers preferred to ship purchases through the international arm of the U.S. Postal Service. They also preferred to get paid through cryptocurrency, Bitcoin in particular, but Western Union, PayPal, bank transfers, credit cards, and prepaid gift cards were also accepted.

The Chinese sellers shipped purchases through other countries to reduce the risk of the drugs being detected and seized by customs officials.

Investigators were able to link the sellers to seven U.S. related opioid-related overdose deaths and 18 arrests for drug related offenses. They were also able to identify suspected

The report was critical of the U.S Postal Service and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection for failing to recognize and prepare for the increase in international shipments.

distribution networks that transship purchases into the U.S. from China. According to the report, the street value of the 500 online transactions discovered by the Subcommittee in its investigation conservatively translates to around $766 million-worth of fentanyl.

Those 500 transactions were made by more than 300 U.S.-based individuals from 43 states, with those in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida making the most purchases.

Investigators tracked several shipments to individuals who sent money to the six online sellers.

One of the people they tracked was a 49-year-old Ohio resident who sent about $2,500 over the course of a 10-month period.

He died in early 2017 from “acute fentanyl intoxication,” just about 30 days after receiving the last of 15 packages through the Postal Service.

The report was critical of the U.S Postal Service and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection for failing to recognize and prepare for the increase in international shipments.

“For more than a dozen years after 9/11, the Postal Service failed to set up a system to secure advanced electronic data (AED) that would help CBP better target illegal opioids, rather than CPB manually inspecting packages, which was inefficient and the equivalent to finding a needle in a haystack,” the report stated. “The Postal Service’s efforts since – starting up a pilot program at JFK Airport in 2015 – have been rife with problems, a lack of coordination between agencies, and other setbacks that have left the agency wholly unprepared to prevent the shipment of illegal synthetic opioids into the U.S.”

The Postal Service receives AED on 36 percent of international packages.

“Given the international volume handled by the Postal Service, that means last year the United States received approximately 318 million international packages with no advanced data. China is capable of providing AED on its packages and currently only does so for about half of the packages it ships to the United States,” the report stated. “The AED that the Postal Service does receive from foreign postal operators is of low quality, sometimes indecipherable, and potentially useless.”

Early last year, Portman reintroduced the Synthetics Trafficking & Overdose Prevention (STOP) Act, which would require shipments from foreign countries through the postal system to provide electronic advance data before it crosses the U.S. border.

“The federal government can, and must, act to shore up our defenses against this deadly drug and help save lives,” Portman said.