CBP making gains on fentanyl trafficking

   Customs and Border Protection has seized the same amount of fentanyl during this fiscal year as the 2,170 pounds it seized during all of last fiscal year, CBP Executive Director of Cargo and Conveyance Security Thomas Overacker told a House subcommittee.
   Overacker was one of several federal officials who testified Tuesday during a House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee hearing on combating the national fentanyl crisis.
   Overacker highlighted investments and activities CBP is undertaking to ensure the agency maintains a robust presence in stopping illicit drug flows.
   Fiscal 2019-enacted appropriations allow CBP to advance acquisition planning for new and drive-through nonintrusive inspection (NII) technology, to incrementally increase scanning rates and to conduct “pre-primary drive-through” NII operational assessments, Overacker said in written testimony to the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.
   “The key operational change involves placing the new drive-through NII systems in pre-primary inspection versus secondary and transmitting the image to an officer remotely located in a command center,” Overacker wrote. “This work builds upon prior automation and transformation initiatives and also leverages advancements made to scanning and imagery analysis capabilities.”
   In addition, the U.S. government is getting more advanced electronic data (AED) on inbound international mail after the October enactment of the Synthetics Trafficking and Overdose Prevention (STOP) Act, which also is helping the government curb illicit drug flows, Gary Barksdale, the U.S. Postal Service’s chief postal inspector, said during the hearing.
   AED typically includes the shipper and recipient names and addresses as well as the package contents.
   The percentage of total inbound packages with AED rose from 26% in October 2017 to about 60% in May, and the percentage of inbound packages from China with AED rose from 32% to 85% in the same time frame, Barksdale said in written testimony.
   A substantial portion of opioids and opioid precursors that illicitly enter the U.S. come from China, and the STOP Act stipulates that AED must be submitted for all international mail shipments from China by the end of December 2020.
   For about the last 15 years, CBP has required private carriers to transmit AED on shipments entering the U.S., but the STOP Act newly imposed similar data requirements on the U.S. Postal Service.
   Carol Cave, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Enforcement and Import Operations, pointed to the Substance-Use Disorder Prevention that Promotes Opioid Recovery and Treatment for Patients and Communities Act (SUPPORT Act), which calls for strengthening coordination and capacity between her agency and CBP on detection and response activities for illegal controlled substances and drug imports, particularly those imported through the nine international mail facilities in the U.S.
   Cave noted in written testimony that the statute gives FDA new authority to treat imported articles as drugs when they meet certain criteria, even in the absence of certain evidence of intended use.
   The authority applies to ingredients that present significant public health concern and that are, or contain, either active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) in a drug or biologic approved or licensed for marketing or for investigational use, or an analog of that API.
   Any imported product entering the U.S. via international mail that meets those requirements is considered a drug under FDA jurisdiction, allowing the agency to apply existing authorities to “appropriately detain, refuse and/or administratively destroy these subject articles,” Cave wrote.
   Implementation of the law has raised FDA’s overall destruction rate of refused drug products from 5% in FY 2018 to 35% in FY 2019, she wrote.
   In written testimony, David Prince, deputy assistant director for transnational organized crime in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit, said cryptocurrency is used for many illicit fentanyl purchases.
   He wrote that HSI so far in FY 2019 has seized almost $1.9 million in fentanyl-related digital currency and has more than 268 open investigations involving the illicit use of cryptocurrency.
   However, Prince added that HSI uses blockchain as one of several investigative methods to track illicit fentanyl transactions.
   “We are moving with the digital transformations of the criminal enterprises,” he said. “We’re keeping up with what’s going on.”
   Asked by Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., about the extent to which the humanitarian crisis on the southern border is affecting the government’s ability to interdict illicit drugs, Overacker said CBP recently has observed more stability at ports of entry and fewer apprehensions between those ports and believes the overall situation is improving.
   Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., suggested that lawmakers in a future hearing consider addressing the federal government’s capabilities and technology for finding fentanyl in containers, noting that the drug is very difficult to detect.