Senate Passes Opioids Package, Which Now Heads to President for Signature
A bill that would require advance data from all international mail by 2020 -- designed to help CBP interdict small-scale fentanyl and carfentanil shipments, particularly from China -- is headed to the president's desk after the Senate voted 98-1 on Oct. 3 to approve the conference report of a package of bills that attacked the opioid epidemic from many angles.
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Co-sponsor Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, spoke on the floor in favor of the conference report the day before. He said he and co-sponsor Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., took three years to get the bill to this point. "We found out unbelievably that the U.S. Postal Service is the main conduit for this poison. We found out the Postal Service was pushing back against putting additional screening in place. We also found out that the private carriers like FedEx, UPS, DHL were required for every single package to have advance electronic information provided to law enforcement to help stop this poison, to be able to find that needle in the haystack, that package out of the 500 million the Post Office deals with every year that might have this poison in it."