In January 2023, federal agents raided the home of a Tucson maintenance worker who had a side hustle hauling packages across the border to Mexico. They estimate that over the previous two years, the courier had ferried about 7,000 kilos of fentanyl-making chemicals to an operative of the Sinaloa Cartel. That’s 15,432 pounds, sufficient to produce 5.3 billion pills – enough to kill every living U.S. resident several times over. The chemicals had traveled by air from China to Los Angeles, were flown or ground-shipped to Tucson, then driven the last miles to Mexico by the freelance delivery driver. A 2016 U.S. trade law supported by major parcel carriers and e-commerce platforms makes it easier for imported goods, including fentanyl ingredients, to enter the U.S. The change to trade policy has disrupted international drug trafficking, Reuters reports. The U.S. has become a key point for Chinese-made chemicals used by Mexican cartels to produce fentanyl. The surge in e-commerce and trade provisions facilitates this.
In short, a regulatory tweak fueling the nation's online shopping habit is enabling the country’s crippling addiction to synthetic opioids. U.S. lawmakers inadvertently increased this problem as part of 2016 legislation by loosening a regulation known as de minimis. Individual parcels of clothing, gadgets and other merchandise valued at up to $800 – one of the highest such limits in the world – now enter the country duty-free and with minimal paperwork and inspections. America’s ports of entry are now so jammed with these packages, most of them from China, that just a tiny fraction of the nearly 4 million de minimis parcels arriving on U.S. shores daily are inspected by U.S. Customs. Security officials say that has made it easy for Mexican traffickers to sneak in small boxes of fentanyl ingredients from China disguised as mundane household items. The U.S. received 1 billion de minimis packages in fiscal 2023 with a declared value of $54.5 billion. That’s twice the number of parcels from four years earlier. Mounds of sneakers, tools and toasters crowding customs warehouses are the perfect cover for random boxes of fentanyl ingredients to hide.
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