Comment by xzel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xzel | Hacker News Reader

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So we can agree the shipping isn't make it cost prohibitive. Your point about there being less hay making finding needles easier might be possible (although I don't think it matters, as with our southern border, a higher detection rate just means you need more chance to get the desired total smuggled). I would imagine there would just be more product shipped to Central and South America and then imported like everything else south of the border, cars, trucks, boats planes. "The flow of fentanyl to the United States in the near future will probably continue to be diversified" [1] Production in those places might also increase. Moral of my story is this change in shipping prices will have no long term effect on amount of fentanyl brought into the US; though, it might very well increase the involvement of SotB cartels. If there are buyers, these will be sellers.

[1] https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...

Perhaps, but until those supply chains are established and proven to be effective, one should address the way 97% of all fentayl enters the US today - e-packet from China.

Just because opponents will likely evolve their tactics in the future should not prevent one from mitigating their extraordinarily successful tactic that is running in the present.

In FY 2012, USPS handled about 27 million ePackets from China. This increased to nearly 500 million ePackets by 2017. (Thanks to that disastrous subsidy agreement in 2011)

None of our inspection agencies could cope with this volume. Remove the discount-from-China subsidy, this will automatically reduce the volume of all e-packets and thus will ameliorate the load on inspection agencies.

I think even if you reduced volume to 2012 levels its not going to make any practical difference. Like, 1 gram of pure fentanyl is on the order of 1000+ doses... You can profitably smurf it in anything.

The supply chains from Central and South America are already established and proven to be effective. What you seem to be ignoring is the demand part of supply and demand. If there is demand, there will be people importing drugs, increasing USPS pricing won't stop anything that from happening.

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