Authorities issued a new report revealing that in several U.S. states where recreational marijuana has been legalized, a significant increase in marijuana-filled packages sent through mail had been observed.
In its report, ABC 7 Chicago said that last year, the U.S. Postal service has seized approximately forty thousand pounds of marijuana from the mail comprising of nearly 8,000 packages out of the 155 billion pieces of mail the postal service caters annually. The report also highlighted that even if marijuana is legal in a certain state, marijuana by mail is a federal crime.
According to the report, marijuana by mail usually goes undetected and that in some cases, marijuana are slid inside cans of corns and bags that are hidden inside a hand-held vacuum.
"I think we've seen it all," said Antonio Gomez of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in Chicago. "Where there's a will there's a way and regrettably the bad guys always try to be one step ahead of us but fortunately we're always two steps ahead of them."
He added, "Federal law trumps state law. So even with these states that have passed the legal recreational use of marijuana, it is still a violation of the federal law to transport [by mail] illegal narcotics through the U.S. mail."
Gomez, on the other hand, would not elaborate as to what their investigative techniques are in detecting marijuana sent by mail. Although according to ABC 7 Chicago, the techniques include drug-sniffing dogs and package profiling.
Drug-related cases continue to become bizarre as the struggle to legalize medical and recreational marijuana continues. One of the most recent ones involved eight-year old children. As reported by Fox 8 Cleveland, an 8-year old girl is recently caught with marijuana in the school's bathroom leading to the girl's suspension. When she was caught, the girl was reportedly trying to light the marijuana.
The girl's family, however, insists that someone else planted the marijuana on the student while she was on the bus. A neighbor of the family said, "Very innocently she lit it up and got in trouble, and the other little girl didn't get in trouble."
