Free Silk Road by Eileen Ormsby

incredulity by readers. Many believed the whole drugs-in-the-mail thing to be a reporter’s beat-up, a scam or a trap by law enforcement. It was absurd to think people were using something as banal as the postal service to send and receive the sorts of drugs that most of the general public had only a passing knowledge of.
    One of the questions everyone asked was just how drugs could get through the mail. We’ve all seen news footage of dogs racing up conveyer belts of mail – why didn’t they pick up the scent of heroin, cocaine, MDMA? How could a buyer be confident that the mail would get through? And what would happen if a parcel were intercepted – would the goods simply be confiscated, or would a SWAT team arrive at your door?
    It is, of course, classified information as to how many and how often sniffer dogs are used for mail coming through customs. There are many myths around the abilities or lack thereof of sniffer dogs. One such myth seems to have come straight out of the movie Beverly Hills Cop , in which drugs are packed in coffee beans because the smell of the coffee supposedly throws the dogs off the scent of the drugs. This, apparently, is complete bunk.
    There are many technical explanations, but the one that best illustrates the point is that a dog’s scent is similar to a human’s sight. It can distinguish differences, no matter how much you try to mask them. That is, a dog can separate and differentiate scents the same way humans can with visuals. So hiding drugs in coffee is like painting three walls of a room red and one yellow, hoping the red walls will hide the yellow one from us. The dog can smell the drugs and the coffee. One does not mask the other from their sensitive noses.
    In any event, drug dogs apparently are trained to sniff out only one or two types of drug each and can only work in half-hour increments, so the use of them can become prohibitively expensive. Few are trained to smell psychedelics, and that, coupled with the fact that such drugs are supplied on what looks like normal pieces of paper, makes LSD tabs some of the most popular items to import, especially for Australians. Those who prefer the drastically reduced prices of importing rather than buying locally take the risk and, anecdotally at least, it seems very few parcels are detected. The legal risk, however, is magnified: receiving drugs from overseas carries far harsher penalties than receiving the same amount of drugs from an Australian supplier.
    On occasions that drugs have been detected for small-time buyers in Australia, there are reports of customs sending ‘love letters’ to the intended recipient. Stacey Long said she had received two – each for a small quantity of MDMA. The letters stated that customs had intercepted a communication they suspected contained a controlled substance and invited her to collect it if she believed there had been a mistake. She was blasé. ‘I just ignored them,’ she said, despite warnings on the letters that they should not be ignored. ‘Never heard back.’ She continued to have drugs mailed to her home and they continued to arrive. Apparently it is not uncommon for the authorities to let illegal drugs through if they believe they will be able to establish a pattern of deliveries to build a case showing intention, so that there is no defence of a one-off ‘mistake’. Presumably Stacey’s small, infrequent personal quantities were not enough to raise the alarm or effect an arrest.
    Sometimes receiving drugs in the mail comes with unexpected consequences. Sam Tyler ordered a gram of MDMA from the UK and then, a week later, a gram of 2CB, an intense psychedelic. Both drugs come in the form of a white powder. When the first piece of mail turned up the following week, Sam assumed it was the MDMA he had been waiting a fortnight for and duly made up eight capsules of 125 milligrams each for him and his girlfriend.
    ‘Kylie and I popped one each before heading out one night,’ he