CHICAGO — Just a few grains of the synthetic fentanyl being found in packages coming into the United States through this mail sorting facility are enough to slow a person’s heart rate, inhibit breathing, and send him or her into a coma. It’s the most dangerous kind of fentanyl in America.
Francis Byrne, an officer with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, is wearing latex gloves and pulls a couple of two-inch-by-two-inch baggies out of a white envelope that is no more than half an inch wide. He holds the bags at eye level. The see-through zipped-up bags are both full of white powder. He lowers it and hooks it up to a handheld digital machine that will tell him what’s inside.
“In the old days, you’d see in the movies an officer go up to the bag of powder and do like this,” he said, while pretending to put the powder near his mouth. “But we can’t do that anymore with fentanyl when a small amount — those three grains — will knock you out.”
If three grains is enough to do permanent brain damage, the powder packed inside these that just tested positive for methoxyacetyl fentanyl hydrochloride, or synthetic fentanyl, is enough to kill dozens, if not hundreds.
This facility at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago is at the front lines of the opioid epidemic. It’s the kind of unsuspecting building a person could drive by for years and never notice. It sits behind two barbed wire fences, but is on property next to the airport. Tractor-trailers carrying mail from recently arrived international flights pull into the lot every five minutes. A private security guard stands watch at one of the gates.
Before U.S. Postal Service workers can process the 60 million letters and packages that come through the 850,000-square-foot facility annually, CBP officers must inspect them. It’s here, in a tiny section of the massive warehouse that one small component of CBP’s Chicago field office has drawn a line in the sand and declared the beginning of a new war on drugs.
And their efforts are getting results.
The Chicago field office of CBP — overseeing 12 midwestern states — is expected to finish fiscal 2018 with more drug seizures than any of the agency’s 20 regional offices, as well as the highest for any office in the agency’s history.
As of Sept. 6, the Chicago office had documented 23,698 incidents of narcotics discovered by CBP officers since Oct. 1, 2017 — more than double what they did last year. That number is also more than double what the second-highest region saw, according to CBP’s regional spokesman, Steve Bansbach. Officers in New York made 10,874 seizures in the same time period.
The spike in seizures shows two things: The demand for narcotics and availability of substances is growing; and the federal government is surging resources to fight the opioid epidemic.
In mid-2017, O’Hare’s CBP team resolved to do more to find substances that were hidden in mail coming in through their facility.
“We’re specifically focused on narcotics this year,” Chicago Area Port Director Matthew Davies told the Washington Examiner during a tour of the facility. “We have always employed an all-threats approach to anything that might come in through the mail environment … we’re looking for intellectual property rights violations — fake merchandise. We’re looking for consumer product concerns — fake cosmetics and fake contact lenses. We’re looking for things that are a threat from the FDA — pharmaceuticals. We’re looking for things that are agricultural concerns that might come in and cause concerns to our crops here in the United States. And we’re looking at narcotics.
“Over the last year — year and a half, when we announced this fight against the opioid epidemic in the United States, we really said, ‘This is the forefront … for us here in Chicago. This is where we’re going to dedicate the resources that we have to looking for as many of these narcotics as we can and trying to stop them from coming in,’” Davies added.
The sorting facility increased personnel by 20 percent. Davies says the increase in employees is a “big” reason that their results have increased.
In addition to the bump in employees, the O’Hare facility has seen a quadrupling in the amount of mail coming down its belts. The 15 to 16 million letters and packages processed annually a few years ago is now up to 55 to 60 million parcels per year. With four times the mail coming in compared to just a couple years ago, the amount of illicit substances in parcels was expected to increase.
CBP could not specify how many of those seizures took place at O’Hare.
Not all fentanyl is created equally
The most deadly fentanyl in America is not coming into the country over the southwest border, but through international mail arriving at O’Hare. CBP agreed to let the Washington Examiner see how federal law enforcement is thwarting what could be thousands of deaths each year.
The synthetic fentanyl being found here was not manufactured by pharmaceutical companies. Because it’s being made on the black market and is not regulated, it’s being sold almost entirely pure.
Lab tests at CBP’s downtown Chicago facility found the synthetic fentanyl seized from foreign parcels is 90 percent pure. That means for 100 grains, 90 have the strength of fentanyl. Down at the U.S.-Mexico border, only 10 to 12 of those 100 grains are fentanyl and the rest are added chemicals meant to thin it out.
As a result, the synthetic fentanyl seized at O’Hare is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. It’s so strong that accidentally inhaling or consuming just a few grains is enough to kill a person and with daily seizures of this drug, officers and canine officers are at constant risk of being poisoned and killed within minutes.
Lasers to the rescue
In the past few years, ports have begun using a handheld digital tool to test substances and make immediate determinations of what is inside plastic bags. The small, portable device has a long plastic-like string attached to it. Byrne selects a bag of powder that he had found inside a package and shows how officers hold the attachment to the bag, and with the press of a button, can find out what is inside. The device sends a laser light through the tube. The substance then reflects the light back.
The machine will match that color with one of the 20,000 items in its database, giving officers an instant answer as to whether they are looking at a scheduled narcotic, and if so, which one. Not having to open the bag to make that determination keeps officers safer while dealing with such dangerous packages.
“In many cases, we’re seeing things that had not previously been scheduled,” Davies said, referring to the rankings of narcotics by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Food and Drug Administration.
“We’re also seeing now a shift towards the precursors, so we’re not seeing just the actual finished products of the fentanyl, but we’re seeing the precursors, the things that can be used to manufacture those potentially here in the states,” he added. “And those are new substances that we’re coming across and are being identified by our lab [in downtown Chicago].”
Bath salts, ecstasy, GHB
O’Hare has the sixth highest level of fentanyl seizures of U.S. airports as of mid-September, but the facility’s most-often detected drug is ecstasy.
To demonstrate, Byrne lays out six envelopes, even one that is purple and manufactured by Disney. All of them contain ecstasy tablets. He says sellers will use whatever means possible to hide illegal items when shipping them to buyers in the U.S.
Packages filled with bath salts, valium pills, and synthetic marijuana cover the three tables. A handful of other packages out of the nearly 100 parcels on the tables appear to be children’s toys, but inside the Jurassic Park stamp set, children’s comb, Hot Rod toy truck and ecological pen are cannabis seeds that people in the U.S. had purchased to grow marijuana plants.
Another few brown cardboard boxes the size of a shoebox each contain hundreds of benzodiazepine pills that fall under the Xanax and Valium families.
‘Beauty’ products
Byrne is considered the facility’s expert on detecting drugs without even opening a package. He can look at the country of origin, description label of what is inside, even the stamps used, and predict what might be hidden in a box.
“Watch out for the beauty products,” Byrne said as he picked up a box that claimed to have beauty-related items inside.
The box contains two white bottles of what appear to be a serum or cream — something comparable to skincare items sold at make-up counters in department stores.
But Byrne says the bottles have more than just lotion. He picks up a hammer and cracks one open to find a condom-wrapped bag of steroids mixed in with the lotion. Byrne says sellers wrap the steroids in condoms because they don’t want the lotion to get into the drugs. Nearly one-quarter of all drugs found at the site are steroids and many come from England.
He then points to 10 identical white package envelopes laid out in a row.
“This is from the Netherlands,” Byrne said as he picked up three-ounce bottles filled with a clear liquid that he identified as GHB, or the date rape drug. “It only takes like two teaspoons to knock someone out, so to me this is a pretty good quantity. We get these on a daily basis.”
Most of the contraband CBP finds is from mainland China or Hong Kong, but Byrne says South Korea, Lithuania, France, Germany and other countries have their own niches in the online mail-order drug market.
Guess and tell
Byrne walks over to one of the facility’s belts and X-ray machines. He tosses a few unopened packages onto the belt and sends them through. One package’s label description says a “coconut powder hair loss treatment sample” is inside. When sent through, the screen shows more than a dozen vials inside the package. Byrne opens the cardboard box and does not find any coconut powder, but does find steroids packed in vials. Since steroids are regulated by the government, they cannot be purchased online.
He tosses another box onto the belt and watches it go through. The screen shows the box contains something that lacks any sharp edges. It looks like a powder so he decides to open it up when it comes through the other end of the machine. Inside, he finds what appears to be a pound of bath salts. The substance is actually synthetic cathinones, or human-made stimulants comparable to a substance found in the khat plant. Bath salts got their name from being packaged in the underground market to look like Epsom bath salts and come in bright or natural colors depending on what chemicals go into it. Byrne says users will likely dissolve the bath salts in acetone, then inject or smoke it.
Even though the salts and dozens of other drugs remained inside their bag, the room smells like chemicals. The farther he walks down the tables from marijuana and steroids to synthetic drugs, the stronger the smell gets.
As officers inspecting items grow more suspicious about what’s inside, they can put on additional gloves, a Tyvek suit, rubber apron, booties, and other items. They are all trained on how to administer the antidote for drug overdoses in case they are unintentionally poisoned. Canine handlers also have shots on-site that they can inject into a dog if it consumes drugs during its work.
A multi-level approach
Every package shipped from overseas — whether it’s China, England or Venezuela — will enter the United States through one of its air or sea ports then get turned over to CBP for inspection. The person mailing that item can’t control which U.S. city the parcel will enter, making it a coincidence that a package ends up at O’Hare and not CBP’s facility at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City or a different airport.
The CBP facility in Chicago is located on the outskirts of the massive airport grounds in an 850,000-square-foot warehouse where all foreign mail is brought to be inspected before it is allowed into the country. The majority of the rooms in the warehouse are filled with U.S. Postal Service workers, but every piece of mail they handle has first been screened for explosives.
A CBP spokesman would not disclose how many employees the agency has at the sorting facility for security reasons, but says even with the recent personnel bump at the start of fiscal 2018 last October, they do not have the manpower to inspect every package for illegal or regulated items.
The rest of the screening process falls in line with an approach other agencies in the department use for commercial trucks at border checkpoints and passengers at airports.
The agency uses a “force multiplier” method, which includes several processes meant to find drugs, firearms and agricultural items. Although one package may not go through all of those steps, it’s being hit by as many as possible.
“We might run a K-9 on a bin of mail, but it’s not going to tell us if there’s a fake pair of Nike shoes or if there’s a firearm. There’s some limitation,” Davies said. “Our hope is that by employing a number of layers, we’re able to identify as much as we can and stop it, interdict it at the border before it comes into the country.”
Shippers send electronic data to CBP that tells them what the sender claims is inside, where it’s going, and who is sending it. That information is not available for all parcels, but when it is, officers can get an idea for what looks legitimate and what does not.
Not all of the 60 million parcels will get sent through one of the facility’s five X-ray imaging machines, but those that do will have a hard time getting by if the image does not match the package’s description.
“It’s sort of like a factory,” Byrne said. “When somebody thinks they have something that might be bad, they just throw it into one of those orange hampers and at the end of the day, they push it down the hall to me, and then the next day, I sit there and test it.”
The next step in any drug seizure by law enforcement would typically be an investigation and prosecution. But with more than 23,000 drug seizures in just under a year, those steps are not often taken due to the sheer volume of incidents. In addition, for items sent in a comb, lotion or toy, a prosecutor would have to prove the recipient intended to get drugs and not that other item.
“That’s the hard part,” Byrne said.
