The amount of marijuana detected in the national mail system surprisingly declined in 2014 as the world's first licensed recreational marijuana stores opened in two Western states, appearing to dash at least some predictions of chaos as other jurisdictions move to legalize the drug.

Data provided to U.S. News by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service show the number of marijuana parcels seized by inspectors fell more than 12 percent in fiscal 2014, with a coinciding decrease in the collective weight of contraband cannabis.

The fiscal year began on Oct. 1, 2013, three months before pot stores opened in Colorado, and ended on Sept. 30, 2014, three months after stores opened in Washington state.

Fiscal Year 2012 Fiscal Year 2013 Fiscal Year 2014 Marijuana parcel intercepts 7,600 9,100

(+19.7 percent) 7,990

(-12.2 percent) Pounds of marijuana seized 42,000 45,000

(+7.1 percent) 39,301

(-12.7 percent) Non-pot drug-related parcel seizures 3,722 4,289

(+15.2 percent) 4,588

(+7 percent)



The Postal Inspection Service is a law enforcement agency that investigates crimes affecting the U.S. Postal Service. Though states can legalize marijuana possession under local law, possession for any reason outside limited research remains a federal crime, as does shipping the drug through the mail.

Postal Inspector Lori McCallister, the service's national spokeswoman, tells U.S. News that's true even if people use USPS to ship pot among themselves in Denver.

McCallister says "we investigate any and all suspicious packages that contain illegal narcotics" and that inspectors vigilantly enforce federal law regardless of state policies.

The inspectors service does not keep records on state-specific drug shipments, she says.

Marijuana legalization supporters see the national decline in intercepted pot shipments as confirmation that regulation works, but opponents dismiss the slump as possibly inconsequential.

"It's a slight drop; I don't think it's particularly meaningful especially since it's an increase since 2012," says Kevin Sabet, president of the anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana. "We don't know what reasons would produce a one-year drop."

Diane Goldstein, an executive board member with the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, however, says the decline is a "very positive" sign for reformers.

"Most of the shipping that's being done is by people in the illicit market, and those are the people we're trying to get out of business," says Goldstein, who retired as a lieutenant from California's Redondo Beach Police Department after a 21-year career in law enforcement.

Even the Drug Enforcement Administration, she says, saw a drop in seized marijuana as pot stores opened. In calendar year 2014, the DEA seized 74,225 kilograms of marijuana, down from 270,823 kilograms in 2013 and a peak of 725,862 kilograms in 2010. It was the DEA's smallest haul in 29 years of data on the agency's website.

Mason Tvert, a Colorado-based spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, says many marijuana users realize shipping the drug isn't worth the risk of harsh federal charges.

"Perhaps people are becoming more reluctant to do it because there is now a sense of order surrounding the product," he says. "Marijuana prohibition is basically marijuana anarchy, and when there’s anarchy, it feels like nobody’s watching and you can get away with anything. Now that marijuana is being regulated, it feels like it is under control and you will likely get caught if you break the law.”

A law enforcement task force called the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area released statistics earlier this year purporting to show a multiyear uptick in pot-packed packages shipped from Colorado, crediting the information to the inspection service. But, McCallister says, "that is not our statistical information"

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Task forces, she says, generally "have to show they are being functional and show they are doing work to continue to receive funding."

Thomas Gorman, director of Rocky Mountain HIDTA, says he stands by the Colorado-specific data. "The citation on there is totally accurate," he retorts, saying the data came from a nonpublic postal inspector database.

More than 2,200 people were arrested by postal inspectors for mailing controlled substances in fiscal 2014, according to the annual nationwide statistics, which were provided in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. In addition to state-level legalization of marijuana, since the 2011 founding of now-defunct Silk Road there have been a wide range of illegal substances a click away from most Americans with Internet access via the "deep Web" markets.

The U.S. Postal Service is the preferred carrier for many drug-shippers because inspectors must acquire a search warrant based on probable cause before inspecting first-class mail and parcels. FedEx and UPS both specify in their terms of service that they reserve the right to open and inspect any package at their own discretion, though California's Supreme Court extended in 2013 warrant protection to a FedEx package that reeked of marijuana.