DRUG DEALERS TRYING RUSH-DELIVERY SERVICES

Drug dealers who once concealed marijuana and cocaine in cars and trucks
for risky cross-country trips or dropped it in the mail and hoped for the
best may be increasingly trying another avenue to ship drugs: overnight
delivery companies. But authorities are wise to it.

"We're getting more and more all the time now that they are using overnight
delivery," said Col. Ralph Fizer of the Clinton County Sheriff's Office.

Col. Fizer said drug traffickers may believe it is safer to ship drugs that
way -- especially during the busy holiday season -- because they can avoid
postal inspectors and highway troopers, who can seize their drugs, make an
arrest and produce a witness against the dealers.

This month, a specially trained team of Clinton County deputies began
inspecting packages at Airborne Express in Wilmington, the company's main
sorting center for North America. It didn't take them long to find packages
of marijuana.

"The first night they got 49 pounds. The second night they got 333 pounds,"
Col. Fizer said.

Determining the extent to which overnight deliveries are used to ship drugs
is difficult. No statistics were available despite checks with sheriff's
departments, overnight delivery companies, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement
Administration and the White House.

However, authorities say there could be a shift from the U.S. mail to
overnight delivery.

Last year, U.S. postal inspectors seized 12,500 pounds of illegal drugs,
$8.7 million in cash, and arrested more than 1,500 people on trafficking
and money-laundering charges. Those numbers have steadily declined since 1994.

"It's gone down because our efforts have been so successful," said Robert
Bethel, spokesman for the Postal Inspection Service in Washington, D.C.
"We're confident they're looking for other ways to transport the drugs."

Postal Inspector Doug Ervin of the Cincinnati office said his
investigations lead him to believe that many drug dealers have moved from
shipping drugs through the mail to the overnight delivery companies.

"And they alternate from service to service to avoid any kind of
consistency," Mr. Ervin said.

Drug traffickers, however, continue to rely on the streets to ship drugs.
Ohio State Highway Patrol figures show 30 seizures of drugs with a street
value of $10,000 or more by troopers this year compared with 12 last year,
Sgt. Gary Lewis said.

"It could be possible that these individuals are trying to find other
routes," Sgt. Lewis said.

While postal inspectors have no authority to inspect packages sent through
private overnight delivery companies, they are helping coordinate efforts
by law enforcement officials to do that.

Col. Fizer said his deputies look for packages shipped from certain
geographic areas with certain suspect addresses. The telltale reek of
marijuana as well as odors such as coffee, mustard, perfume or clothes
dryer sheets that mask drug smells are also tip-offs.

"They try to squirt them with mustard or something to confuse our dogs,"
Col. Fizer said.

The deputies work at Airborne two nights a week. Col. Fizer hopes to expand
the team to eight or nine deputies and increase the time spent there.

Camille Pitre, spokeswoman for Airborne Express, said the company supports
the deputies' efforts and always has tried to be helpful in spotting drug
packages.

"If an employee notices something that is odoriferous ... they do not play
around," Ms. Pitre said. "They will immediately contact local authorities
for an investigation."

Emery Worldwide uses its own security team at its sorting facility at
Dayton International Airport to check for such things as drugs, said
spokesman Jim Allen. U.S. Customs officials are also on site.

However, Mr. Allen said he doubts that drug traffickers try to ship through
the company much. He said smaller packages would be more conspicuous
because Emery ships mostly heavy freight.

Norman Black, spokesman for the Atlanta-based United Parcel Service, said
no one regularly monitors packages that come through UPS for drugs.
However, he said the company cooperates with authorities when they ask to
check packages.