Wow, nearly everybody in the thread is barking up the wrong tree, no disrespect, just from the numbers point of view alone. The government is really not this powerful, hell, nothing is.The technology available to detect drugs with 100% accuracy *already exists*, and has existed for many years. Yaosh and the other guy can attest to that. You can detect down to a nanogram of drug residue without difficulties with a machine that costs a couple of thousand dollars. Ion spec is a very cool piece of gear.There are at least three basic problems that prevent it being implemented, one of which is intractable short of Orwellian governmental measures.First the obvious:1. The logistics problem. The technology, even completely automated, takes at least 1 second to work, 15 seconds to a few minutes is far more common today. So, there are at least two hundred billion pieces of mail traveling around the States per year. That's just for standard USPS, nothing else.Think about that. If each piece of mail was scanned, 1 second per piece of mail, that would be two hundred billion seconds, which is = 6,337 years.Clearly an efficiency upgrade is required, ahem, about 3 orders of magnitude. And the detection of drugs is just the beginning of the logistics problems for the post office, think of the procedures the post office needs to do next. They need to dust for fingerprints, run lab IDs, file paperwork. Even if drugs represent a vanishing small amount of the mail and there is no false positives, that means a backlog to end all backlogs.Second, the non-trivial:2. Let's say it takes 1 microsecond to scan each piece of mail, one millionth of a second. Now it takes 2 or 3 days to scan everything. LEO goes 'yay us', time to put boots on the desk and take a well earned break?Nope.Drug residue is like DNA, it kinda gets everywhere, which is why the first thing forensic scientists worry about is contaminating crime scenes or samples. Cash money is 80% - 95% of the time having detectable amounts of cocaine on it. Also weed and MDMA, but to a lesser extent. Now, people post cash in the post in Europe, the USA, all the time. So... Hello Mr False Positive times a zillion. Remember, the smart vendors on SR are using HDPP plastic, vaccum packing and heat sealing it several times. The amount of drug particulate leaving the packages per second is measured in the tens or hundreds of nanograms. It gets worse over time and in hot climates, but it's still an extremely small trace amount. The most common way vendor packages get picked up by drug detectors, is their package handling procedures aren't done in the right order or in the correct way, and this is easily fixed by adopting a rigorous packaging procedure. I call these vendors "reverse package profiling engineers", because it's actually more sophisticated than most people imagine. People carelessly slinging dope into ziplock bags will eventually get caught. A proper vendor has a defined cleanroom-like staging area to package and looks a bit like one of those scientists from the Andromeda Strain.Ok, so you, LEO, outlaw cash in the mail. Problem solved? No. There's still dozens of vectors for drug residue to innocently enter the mail system and gum up the works. And even if that was not the case...3. If our economy is threatened by hyper-aggressive LE action, we will begin the biggest and most organized drug bombing campaign in history.By drug bombing, I simply mean trivial amounts of cocaine, MDMA, powered weed, all the popular drugs, are ground down to an incredibly fine power, much finer than normally found. This can be done at a centralized location by dispersing hundreds of 'care packages' across the world to friends or just as easily by simply requesting that our army of fellow travelers, which in fact outnumber LE forces thousands to one, follow a procedure with a fractional amount of their personal DOC cache.1. Grind DOC down to a fine powder or open your care package.2. Deposit contents at every post box, every letter box in your area.3. The fine particulate will spread from mail item to mail item, contaminating the entire bag.4. The sorting machinery becomes contaminated over time, and spreads the residue to previously clean mail from untouched bags.5. The entire mail network becomes covered in an invisible, fine, layer of drug residues.6. The drug detection machines and dogs become almost useless. So much cocaine.Prizes to be awarded for mail stoppages, crazed politicians in your area, and a SR fund for retirement shelter homes for Fido(s) who experience unemployment.tldr; Ha. Haha. Hahahahahahahaha.