'Mansfield Police were told by postal inspectors Thursday a package from China containing a controlled substance was beign shipped to an address in Mansfield...'
Shocking? Maybe. A new tactic? Hardly.
In this day and age of 'point-and-click' it is very easy to purchase drugs via the internet...and has been for some time now. Your son or daughter, brother, aunt, even your grandfather can surf the web, find a foreign outlet for percocent, xanax or whatever precription drug of their choice may be and have it shipped to their door with just a few keystrokes on a laptop.
Even marijuana, cocaine and heroin can be delivered by the US Postal Service, FedEx, DHL or UPS, using sophisticated packaging put together by a guy in China, Paraguay or any third-world country to mask its contents. The Drug Enforcement Agency, Customs and Border Protection, postal inspectors and a plethora of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies are scrambling daily to keep up with technology used by overseas traffickers in order to stem the flow of drugs into this country.
Years ago we had such a case in Lexington, that quiet bedroom community here in Richland county. We'd noticed short-duration traffic in and out of a residence in a rather upper middle-class residential area and did a little digging, using intelligence from an informant ( they're called 'cooperating individuals' now...'informant' was deemed to be a rather unflattering designation for persons giving information to police about crime and criminals ) and also utilized a simple, unsophisticated method to collect additional evidence of an active, ongoing crime occurring with some frequency at this particular house. We worked up a search warrant, got it signed by a judge and then rudely interrupted that household's evening when the tactical entry team swarmed through the house and secured the occupants.
Why did we use what's commonly called a 'SWAT' team? Well, you see, this 21 year old, living with his mother, her boyfriend and two younger sisters, had in his possession a fifty-caliber Desert Eagle hand-cannon, a tactical rifle and another handgun, and had been selling dope he'd bought over the internet right under the family's nose. The stuff was coming from a South American country under a phony pharmaceutical name and he was in possession of a large amount of pills and cash when the Boys in Black had knocked, ever so gently, on the front and back doors.
That same senario occurrs daily, multiple times, in these United States, as evidenced by the first paragraph; an entry that confirms the massive obstacles law enforcement faces when combatting the tsunami of overseas traffickers.
If you see something, say something. A house in your neighborhood gets multiple weekly deliveries from commercial carriers, followed by a lot of short-stay visitors? It may be nothing, but then again...
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