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Due to some of the more archaic marijuana laws in the country, the state of Missouri is not necessarily known for producing huge yields of high grade cannabis. As a result, those who want bulk amounts of the good stuff around those parts often tend to get it shipped in from other states, but the consequences can be pretty extreme.
St. Ann lies on the outskirts of St. Louis. Local Police Chief Aaron Jimenez says that since cannabis reform has begun to take root across the country, the cases he sees of weed being imported to his jurisdiction have gone from “5 or 10 a year” to “1 or 2 a week”.
In the greater St. Louis area, local postal inspectors boast of pinching over 1,200 pounds of pot in the past year alone before it could reach its destination. U.S. Postal Inspector Dan Taylor says, “We’ve become very good at identifying those packages.”
Suspect packages get a warrant pulled to reveal the contents. If they find enough weed – or anything else you aren’t supposed to be mailing – local or federal law enforcement are brought in and the intended recipient of the package will get a most unwelcome visitor.
Taylor told KPLR’s Rebecca Roberts, “If you do it, sooner or later it’s going to catch up to you, and you’re going to have a postal inspector knocking on your door.”
That’s pretty much the way the story ended in a recent weed-mailing bust in Memphis, Tennessee, except it wasn’t the postal inspector knocking at the door, but a small army of undercover police officers.
Neighbor Jay Wilkerson describes the midday raid as “10 to 15” undercover cop cars. “I thought they were having a party with all the cars. It was in the middle of the day,” he said.
The house being raided belonged to suspect Sullivan Ly, who had a large parcel of pot intercepted by the post office, which sparked an investigation, which led to Ly being thrown face down and arrested in a Wells Fargo parking lot with thousands of dollars in cash on him.
In his home, besides two kids, investigators found various types of firearms, around a pound of ganja, and everything a guy would need to ship and receive the stuff.
Ly promptly admitted that he was taking in five pounds from California, every two weeks, through the mail, then redistributing it to the local market and sending the cash back to Cali.
For his role, Sullivan Ly was slapped with a fat sack of felonies including drug dealing, firearms possession, and money laundering.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s stance on weed seems to be slowly coming around, yet even he recognizes that it’s not just weed in these illegal shipments. “It is shocking to see the amount of drugs that get pumped into communities all around this country through our mail system, and we have to deal with that,” he said earlier this year.
Nationwide, the U.S Postal Inspection Service reported a 20% hike in pot seizures between 2012 and 2013, resulting in 14% more related arrests over that same time period.
The Postal Service says it took 45,000 pounds of pot out of circulation last year, yet they do not dare venture an estimate as to how much they may have missed, and states like Missouri and Tennessee, clinging to the tattered rags of the failed War on Cannabis, only serve to make their communities targets for this black market activity.