SEATTLE — Late last year, a massive years-long federal sting operation revealed that Mexican-based drug cartels had been using checked luggage as a pipeline to ship large amounts of fentanyl into the Seattle area. Five months later, KIRO 7 undertook an investigation where we tested whether airport security would notice large amounts of pills in checked baggage.
The Transportation Security Administration has stopped fentanyl couriers before. In October, a man at LAX was found to have 12,000 fentanyl pills stashed in candy packs. But the January federal bust of couriers packing pills in checked luggage at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport amounted to more than 40 times that amount.
“In this one investigation we estimated they were bringing in a million pills a month into the Seattle region,” said Robert Hammer, Special Agent in Charge of Homeland Security in the Pacific Northwest. “A million pills every month.”
