Its a crisis. It doesnt discriminate. Its in every corner of my state. Earlier this month a Police Officer named chris green in east liverpool, ohio, had a near fatal fentanyl overdose following a routine traffic stop. He went up to a car and noticed there was white powder spread around the car. He put on his mask and gloves, arrested some individuals, went back to the police station, and noticed that on his shirt there was some powder. He reached up like this and brushed the powder off his shirt. This guy is 63, 225 pounds, big man. And he fell to the floor unconscious and overdosed. They administered narcan immediately but it wasnt enough. They had to rush him to the hospital, where two more narcan doses were administered. And luckily his life was saved. His police chief said he would have died he had been alone. His police chief said, what if he had gone home with that powder on his shirt and hugged his kid . Thats just an example of what were facing. Its an obvious its obviously devastating our families and communities but also creating quite a danger for our Law Enforcement and other First Responders. Fentanyl is 30 to 50 times more powerful than heroin, 100 times more powerful than morphine. We had some floor speeches this week about it, we were able to show just a tiny amount of fentanyl that can be deadly. We also know about carfentanil and other synthetic drugs coming into our country. This issue is getting worse. As i said, the number of overdoses and deaths have increased dramatically. You may have seen dan coats, our former colleague, actually included opioids in his worldwide threat assessment. He noted deaths have increased 73 just between 2014 and 2015, the last year for which they have records. So sadly, that dead toll continues to climb. Well hear about that this morning. In one county in ohio, for instance, fentanyl was responsible for 394 Overdose Deaths in 2016. One county. Tom gilson, youll hear from him later, the medical examiner, he is projecting 551 fentanyl deaths, in other words fentanyl is by far our biggest killer. A lot of these are deaths from mixing fentanyl with heroin and other drugs, leaving the user with no idea what theyre taking. A new opioid cocktail called gray death includes a mixture of fentanyl, heroin,carfentanil. Fentanyl is the weakest drug in that mix. Think about that. You can get this cocktail on the street for as legal as 10 to 20. Fentanyl has an extremely high profit margin, making it appealing to the drug dealer. The Drug Enforcement agency estimates a kilogram of infinfel can be used to make hundreds of thousands of pills with profits in the millions. We need to stop this flow of illegal, illicit fentanyl. Unbelievab unbelievably, it comes through the u. S. Mail system. This is a shock to many of my constituents and others who are learning about this. While some of this fentanyl is smuggled into the United States from mexico and canada, primarily it comes directly into the United States. And according to Law Enforcement, including some folks who are here this morning who will tell us about this, it primarily comes from one place, which is china. Its produced in laboratories there. And our understanding from Law Enforcement is that most of that fentanyl produced in china is intended for export to one place, and thats the United States of america. There are a number of chinese websites ready to ship. Do a Google Search for fentanyl for sale. It produces a number of websites where the drug and many others appear to be readily available. On one website you can purchase a grahm for 250 bucks, but they offer discounts for larger volumes. To ease any concern about whether the purchaser will receive his order, the website guarantees discreet shipment with, quote, undetectable packages. While shipment is available to a number of companies, the website offers express delivery to the United States. Many of these websites are so sure their seizure will not be stopped by Law Enforcement that theyll guarantee you that if the original somehow gets lost or seized, theyll send you another one for free. Several websites we reviewed made it clear that they exclusively used express mail service or ems as their courier. Ems of course is the International Postal service offered by members of the universal postal union or upu. Packages delivered through ems are passed to the United StatesPostal Service as they enter the United States. So look, our shared goal today is to try to stop these drugs from exploiting our own streams of mail into our country. And every member around this dais this morning has been involved in this issue on prevention and education, on treatment and recovery. Weve actually passed two significant new legislative initiatives in the lasting year in this congress focused on this issue. We understand its much broader than just interdicting. But weve got to do a better job of interdicting. Following 9 11, Congress Identity weaknesses in International Shipping standards as a significant problem and made clear that requiring advanced electronic data would make our country safer. This was 15 years ago. When Congress First legislated, it did so, however, it left a gang loophole. The trade act of 2002 mandated that commercial carriers provide advanced electronic data that could be used to identify certain packages shipped into the United States. In that 2002 legislation, Congress Asked the secretary of Homeland Security and the post master general to decide if the Postal Service should be subject to the same requirements they were putting in place for all private carriers. To date, no determination has been made. And our country is less safe as a result. As such, the difference between the information to private commercial carriers are required to provide is very different than from the Postal Service. Both serve the same function, delivering packages into our communities. At the same time the Postal Service handles a much higher volume than the commercial carriers combined. Prior to any shipment arriving in the United States, commercial carriers are required to electronically provide data to Law Enforcement including custo customs and Border Protection with the basic information including what the shipper name and address is, the name and address of the person receiving the package, a description of the contents, the piece count, the weight, and the value of the contents. This information is then transmitted to customs and border proxy and 47 other agencies at the national targeting center. Based on this information, cpb then targets suspect shipments for additional scrutiny and selects the packages it wants to inspect when they arrive in the United States. Commercial carriers are also charged 1 per package by cpb which most commercial carriers pass on to the shipper. None of this applies to the Postal Service, and the Postal Service handles hundreds of thousands of packages every day. On our national packages shipped through the Postal Service are routed through five International Service centers which jfk airport receiving the overwhelming majority of those packages. How those packages are processed is completely different at each of these centers. Cpb is tasked with identifying packages or shipments it wants to inspect if the Postal Service locates those packages for shipments and presents them to cpb. However it isnt that easy. Due to the hundreds of thousands of packages, the Postal Service is left to manually sort through large shipments trying to identify what cpb is looking for. All internationallily shipped packages are required to have information attached to them, including sender, recipient, weight and volume. The problem is the information is not electronic and its not transmitted in advance, so its not useful to Law Enforcement. Essentially its useless. The upu indicated it will require member countries to place a bar code on every package starting in 2018. Thats fine, however the shipper is not required to load any electronic information on that bar code until 2020. Meanwhile, we have a crisis. Realistically, the target date to implement this requirement is closer to 2022, were told, but theres no guarantee it will even happen by then. For is15 years, the postal serve has been on notice of the need to collect advanced electronic data about its packages. We cant wait any longer. As americans are dying every day from these poisonous drugs flowing into our country, we must act. And weve got to stop this fentanyl, carfentanil, other synthetics from coming in. The Postal Service is trying to use electronic information at jfk to help cpb identify these packages. Its a Pilot Program. Postal service is providing electronic data to cpb for packages that way less than 4. 4 pounds, socalled epackets. Once the postal information shares the information, cpb uses the information to identify the packages it wants to inspect. The Postal Service locates these packages for inspection. This is a step in the right direction in my video view. The results are lacking, however. In 2016, december of 2016, late last year, the Inspector General found that the Postal Service failed to inspect all the packages cpb selected for inspection. I understand the Postal Service is starting to take steps to remedy this issue, presenting packages for inspection. I look forward to headache the details of that death penalty. But without advanced electronic data well continue to miss a significant portion of these packages. Further, the Pilot Program is only happening at one location. At the other four centers, the Postal Service is stuck sifting through millions of packages, like trying to find a needle in a haystack. We cant continue like this, we need the electronic data and we need it now. Weve been working on a bipartisan way to solve this problem. Thats why we introduced legislation, the coauthor is with us today and shell speak in a moment, aimed at providing advanced information the Postal Service should be providing through International Mail. We have 16 cosponsors in the senate, eight democrats, eight republicans. In the house there is companion legislation that has 128 bipartisan cosponsors. Our focus today is getting input from this panel of witnesses so we have a clear understanding from all the Key Stakeholders as we move forward on this. Again, thank you all very much for being here. I thank my colleagues for being here. I would like to turn to Ranking Member senator carper. We talk about special moments, we call them all hands on deck. This is an all hands on deck moment for not just us in this room, not just in the senate, not just in delaware or ohio, or any other states that are represented. This is an all hands on deck moment for our country. We welcome the panel and the second panel. I want to thank our panel. I want to thank Amy Klobuchar for the great work that they have done and other members on this committee have done to get us ready for this day. The focus on todays hearing is more about at least one of the ways these drugs are getting into communities. And what we can do to stop them. I look forward to hearing from our witnesses. We look forward to hearing from our witnesses on first panel, to better understand the processes used by the Postal Service, by private shippers and by cpb to Screen International mail shipments and to identify and stop potentially illicit packages. I also look forward to learning more about where the coordination between shippers and federal agencies is working well, while identifying areas where we need to push for improvements. Joining in todays discussion is the Postal Service which in partnership with cpb is our first line of defense in preventing the flow of Illegal Drugs and contraband into our country. As some of you may recall, protecting and improving the mail system in our country has been one of our biggest priorities, certainly one of my biggest priorities on this committee for an a number of years. The Postal Service is vital to our economy, a linchpin of a trillion dollar mailing industry. Yet the agency is facing insolvency if congress does not act in the coming months to pass comprehensive postal reform. Enacting that legislation will free up billions of dollars that the Postal Service can use not only to invest in the future and improve Customer Service but also shore up mail security. Its worth noting that despite the financial uncertainty facing the Postal Service, its Inbound International package volume has grown significantly in the past three years. In fact, its nearly doubled. Going from 150 million pieces in 2013 to more than 275 million pieces in 2016. There is no question that handling that increased volume, in addition to the increase in domestic packages were seeing, we welcome that, but its putting a strain on our already stretched resource. Unlike private carriers, the Postal Service is required to deliver all mail, all mail it receives from foreign posts in a timely manner. This is due to our membership in the universal postal union which sets International Mailing standards. It also ensures that we can send mail ourselves to friends, to families, to Business Partners overseas. The state department represents the United States, somebody called universal postal union, and theyre going to be with us here today to discuss our involvement, their involvement in this key organization. And we look forward to hearing from our Postal Service and state Department Witnesses about our commitment to promoting the exchange of advanced electronic dot among the unions 192 member countries as a means to combating the shipment of drugs and other illegal goods. While our packages are screened initially by cpb before being presented to the Postal Service, the cpb can and often does target packages for additional screening. Cpb, which is also joining us here today, can target packages based on the country of origin or scans done by the Postal Service. Recently the Postal Service and cpb have been working closely together on a private program that allows cpb to use advanced electronic data on small packages from china arriving at jfk airport. While the Postal Service provides other countries with advanced electronic data about mail originating in the United States, we dont always get the same information from other countries. This makes it harder for cpb to do its job. As packages arrive here, the Pilot Program at jfk is a rare exception. So i hope we can learn today whether there are any recommendations to improve and expand this program. As my colleagues here say many times, find out what works, do more of that. Private carriers like ups, which is also joining us here today, already provide cpb with advanced electronic data on packages destined for our country. And unlike the Postal Service, private carriers have integrated systems in locations around the world and can refuse to accept a package at origin that does not contain any shipping manifest data. Learning how this process is yielding success in interdicting shipments of illicit drugs can hopefully help us cover the gaps exploited by smugglers. I also look forward to identifying ways that congress can ensure that federal agencies as well as our state and local partners have the resources that they need to combat the Opioid Crisis on the ground. Specifically, im eager to hear from our witnesses on the second panel, each of whom serve on the front lines of the nations Opioid Epidemic in various capacities from Law Enforcement to medical doctors to