Many illegal drugs shipped to Ohio from states in the West
Columbus gateway to almost any city in the Midwest.
It’s a common story for Columbus narcotics officers. A shipping company contacts them about a suspicious package.
They can’t find a record of the listed sender or the intended recipient living at the addresses on the package, and after acquiring a search warrant, they find the package filled with illegal drugs such as cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine.
The vast majority of these packages have something in common: They originate from western states, including Arizona and California.
Why do they come from the West? The answer largely lies in geography, police say.
Illegal drugs tend to come across the southwestern border of the United States because drug cartels operate there.
“They come in from Mexico, Colombia, all those southern countries,” said Capt. Michael Kemer, of the State Highway Patrol.
They bring the drugs into the United States and then ship them throughout the country from there, Kemer said.
“We also get pills coming from Canada, via Detroit” and other northern cities, Kemer said. But “cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine — we’ve had a large increase in meth over the past several years — most of that is coming from clandestine labs in Mexico.”
The trial of suspected drug lord Joaquin Guzman Loera, who goes by the nickname El Chapo and is accused of leading the Sinaloa Cartel, shed light on how drug traffickers ship their contraband into the United States.
Testimony revealed that drugs are stored in passenger cars, cargo trucks and trains, and often hidden in crates of legal products, such as cooking oil, according to coverage of the trial.
Police are regularly alerted to suspicious packages, receiving a report of one every week or so.
But investigators see an uptick every so often. Nine warrants, for example, were filed in Franklin County Municipal Court on Oct. 22 to search packages sent to Columbus.
Columbus has turned into a source city for drugs in recent years, said Eric Brown, deputy director of the Ohio High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program.
“If you look at Ohio, and where we sit in proximity to the East Coast and its multiple interstates, you can pretty much get anywhere in the Midwest from Columbus,” Brown said.
In the past decade, another issue emerged that resulted in a spike in the amount of drugs shipped to Columbus: the legalization of marijuana in several West Coast states, including California and Washington.
Growers will cultivate marijuana legally in those states and then ship it to states such as Ohio, where it remains illegal for recreational purposes.
Senders are hard to catch, police say, because they’re good at covering their tracks and leaving little trace of their identity.
The senders use fictitious names and list addresses where they do not live, and frequently they send the packages to vacant houses and businesses, presumably with the intent that they be collected by associates.
For example, the sender listed on a package intercepted by Columbus police in August was listed as Regina Hudson of Lomita, California, a suburb of Los Angeles.
Police could find no record of anyone by that name living at the package’s return address, according to a search warrant filed in Franklin County Municipal Court.
Neither did police find evidence that the intended recipient, Sarah Hudson, lived at a Columbus address listed on the package.