China ‘stands ready to work with US’ to crack down on opioid dealers using postal service to smuggle drugs

China said on Thursday it is ready to work with the United States in fighting illicit opioid shipments after congressional investigators found that Chinese opioid manufacturers exploit weak screening in the US Postal Service to ship large quantities of illegal drugs to American dealers.

“Anti-drug coordination is one of the highlights of China-US law enforcement cooperation,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a regular briefing. “We stand ready to work with the US to enhance our coordination in this field.”

In a year-long probe published on Wednesday, Senate investigators found that Chinese sellers, who openly market opioids such as fentanyl to US buyers, are pushing delivery through the US postal system. The sellers are taking advantage of a failure by the postal service to fully implement an electronic data system that would help authorities identify suspicious shipments.

At a time of massive growth in postal shipments from China due to e-commerce, the investigators found that the postal system received the electronic data on just over a third of all international packages, making more than 300 million packages in 2017 much harder to screen. Data in the Senate report shows no significant improvement during 2017 despite the urgency.

The US Postal Service said it has made dramatic progress in the last year in total packages with opioids seized by US Customs and Border Protection.

“The Postal Service will continue to work tirelessly to address this serious societal issue,” spokesman David Partenheimer said in a statement.

He said implementing the use of electronic data is slowed by the need to negotiate with international partners, but the service is making progress.