The Associated Press
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) - U.S. Customs inspectors at Newark International Airport have arrested fewer drug couriers smuggling Ecstasy this year, a drop authorities say is due in part to increased security put in place after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Drug-trafficking organizations are now more likely to use postal and private parcel shipping services because of the increased security at the nation’s airports, authorities said. They also note that more couriers are flying into Canada and trying to smuggle the drugs into the U.S.
Other reasons cited for the decrease include tougher enforcement operations by police in Western Europe and a series of arrests this spring that crippled a major Ecstasy ring operating out of Holland.
Meanwhile, U.S. investigators also have changed their focus.
“We’ve shifted our resources,” Thomas E. Manifase, assistant special agent in charge of the Customs Service’s Newark investigations office, told The Record of Hackensack for Monday’s editions. “It’s the old law-enforcement cat-and-mouse game. We go where they go.”
Newark Airport has ranked as one of the nation’s top destinations for Ecstasy smugglers over the past three years, partly because of its many daily nonstop and connecting flights to the Netherlands, where officials say 80 percent of the Ecstasy entering the United States is produced.
Nearly 1 million tablets of the drug were seized at Newark Airport during the last fiscal year. However, only 736,224 tablets have been confiscated since the new fiscal year began Oct. 1, and the vast majority of those seizures were made during a brief upswing in activity that ran between late October and late December.
Similar declines in ecstasy seizures also have been reported at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and Miami International Airport, which also are among the top destinations for smugglers.