The post office of any well sized country has to deal with millions of letters and packages a day. This is due to the nature of the system and has been done this way ever since the beginning of the postal service. As such it is very near impossible for the service to keep track of every single package, it is very easy for all kinds of packages holding questionable content to pass through the system undetected. Statistic wise more than 90% pass undetected.

What happens in the case of the other 10% ? The good news is that even if your delivery is intercepted you can still plead innocense. When the service employees suspect a package they can open it for inspection and if that package contains illegal goods the person to whom it was addressed to cannot be charged with possession unless he admits to it. Having said that the post office can be a very safe technique for receiving goods, remember that the post office service has no way of proving that a package belongs to you and so as said you cannot be charged with possession. Additionally you can order goods by cash or money order instead of credit card and so have an alternate recipient name on the package, eg john smith. The worst that will happen is that the post office will confiscate the goods and inform the local authorities.

It is highly advised that you obtain a Post Office Box at your local branch. This will mean that you don’t have to ever give your real address to anyone and risk having privacy sensitive mail arrive at your home. There’s nothing more private than a POBox.

You will also have to consider the situation where you will be corresponding with questionable companies. The primary concern is that these companies will be under surveillance in such a case you will risk exposing yourself with the return address on the envelope or the letter. If your envelope is intercepted a probable result would be your post being returned to the address of origin with text such as ‘drugs’ or ‘fake documents’ written on the cover depending on the reason the company is under surveillance. The best way to work past this is to not write your address of origin on the envelope or in the letter, instead write your email address obtained for free from let’s say ‘hotmail’. So to recap you would only write the ‘To’ address on the letter and envelope and if you are sending cash have a prearranged agreement with the company by email, write your email on the letter and you’ll avoid all the hassle.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions from people asking about cannabis by mail so I’ll address this issue here. There are two main techniques the post office use to stop cannabis by mail; they have sniffer dogs to check the mail, they are trained to react when they smell cannabis. The post office also opens suspicious packages randomly. In addition they cooperate with the police on intercepting packages the police suspect to contain drugs. The cannabis suppliers have techniques to deal with the dogs which are the main threat to the delivery. The herb is vaccum packed in heavy plastic material such as butyl polymer which contains the fragrance very well, in addition they usually douse the vaccum packed item in bleach. As for suspicious packages they try to use small innocuous envelopes that look just like the million other envelopes the postal service has to deal with.

There are also restrictions on ordering goods that are made mainly of steel. Heavy steel goods attract a lot of attention especially with the metal detectors in use so large guns are out of the question, swords are accepted but with some trouble from the postal employees who will probably demand to see an import license.

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