Iirc, the USPS can’t unilaterally search your letters or packages because, as a government institution, it would be a major violation of the 4th amendment- even postal inspectors need to get a warrant to open a letter or package that’s not expressly addressed to them if it was in the care of the USPS. I think the only exception is when it’s an ‘Operation Santa’ letter, and there are regulations in place for how those get handled to protect the privacy of the sender.
The private parcel and package companies probably don’t have to abide by the same restrictions because they’re not government owned and operated.
You’re acting like it’s difficult to get a warrant.
It’s not.
Warrants take 10-15 minutes for routine things. All they have to do is explain why they think there’s drugs in there, and convince the judge it meets the threshold- usually that’s pretty easy.
It’s not hard, but it’s still a hurdle. Warrants also can’t be requested from a judge by just anyone in the USPS iirc, so the start of the process often relies on an employee taking time out of their day to report something they deem suspicious in the first place, likely in an understaffed and overworked office that’s not built to handle the package volume of the area they serve.
you might get away with it once or twice or even a lot.
it’s the one time you don’t get away with it that hurts. Are you really sure you want to trust that the- frequently automated- package sniffing doesn’t happen, that the employee (whose monitored out the wazzoo…) doesn’t care about their job enough to not notice, and that they don’t happen to be one of those people who have a chip on their shoulder when it comes to weed?
I'd guess the number of packages that potentially smell like weed is pretty insane these days.
So the USPS, who took 3 weeks to send my priority mail package (containing no weed) about 350 miles, is going to flag all those packages (or even a worthwhile fraction of them), set them aside, get a warrant, open them, and then what?
First, they'll be wrong some of the time because it's jackasses sending delta8 hemp or whatnot.
Meanwhile they've added another complication to their already clearly shit scheduling and routing process, and they've done all this to enforce drug laws, which is not even a component of their purpose as an organization?
Don't ask don't tell makes much more sense, and I'm willing to bet that except in egregious cases where someone tries to send a pallet of weed or something, that's what they every shipping company does, except the occasional try-hard to pulls the alarm on something that smells funny the first time, then gets told to stop wasting everyone's time.
We're on the cusp of becoming post-prohibition with weed nationally. There is literally no upside to USPS or any shipping organization proactively looking for random weed shipments in packages.
Countess425@lemmy.world 1 year ago
There’s also an exception if they can’t read the delivery address; they have the authority to open the package to try to determine delivery address. So make sure your label can get a little wet and still be readable.