Medflies in the Mail--Bills Seek Wider Postal Inspections

When postal workers in Santa Ana began re-wrapping the soggy, first-class parcel with the Hawaiian postmark, they found more than rotting fruit inside.

Hitchhiking in the 20 decaying soursops (which taste like a mix of mangoes and pineapples) were five live Mediterranean fruit fly larvae--infant versions of the crop-killing pest that in the early 1980s cost California $200 million in crop losses and eradication expenses.

The accidental find was the second that day in July, 1986, and occurred only because the sodden package had already begun to fall apart. Under current law, authorities do not have the power to open sealed, first-class mail without a search warrant.

Because of the growing threat of fruit fly infestations to the state’s $14-billion agriculture industry (three fruit-fly quarantines are now in effect in Los Angeles County alone), two California congressmen want to at least partially lift that prohibition.

Debate Rages

Their efforts have touched off an intense debate.

On one side are growers and agricultural officials who want to relax the constitutional ban on unreasonable search and seizure to protect crops and backyard orchards. On the other are the American Civil Liberties Union and the U. S. Postal Service itself, which believe the proposed legislation goes too far.

The U. S. Department of Justice has yet to weigh in with its opinion, but is believed to harbor reservations about aspects of one of the bills.

“It is not coincidence that we’re finding all of these . . . packages at the post offices that contain live larvae and the fact that we have ongoing many, many fruit fly infestations in Southern California,” said Gera Curry, spokeswoman for the California Department of Food and Agriculture, which supports both bills.

The most serious problem for California, Curry said, is fruit and vegetables grown in backyards in Hawaii and sent to friends or relatives on the mainland. Commercial agricultural products are treated before they are sold in the United States.

“We need this protection desperately,” she said.

However, a lawyer in the ACLU’s Washington office, Janlori Goldman, had a different view.

“We would oppose any bill which would authorize inspection of first-class packages without a warrant,” she said. “Our position is, even if the Constitution imposes upon the government (certain) constraints, that is the cost of protecting our constitutional rights, protecting our liberty.”

One bill, authored by Rep. Charles (Chip) Pashayan Jr. (R-Fresno), would grant to officials of the U. S. Department of Agriculture the power to open and inspect any package, including those mailed first class, from Hawaii and Puerto Rico without first applying for a search warrant. Instead, the bill would require the agriculture department to develop specific “reasonable cause” criteria for opening the mail.

Under current law, authorities must persuade a federal magistrate to sign a warrant in order to open mailgrams, letters or packages sent by first-class or express mail. Those classes of mail are sealed against inspection. Postal workers have the power to open and inspect second-, third- and fourth-class mail and, in conjunction with the U. S. Customs Service, all international mail.

Because of concerns over privacy rights, a second bill, by Rep. Tony L. Coelho (D-Merced), takes a different approach. It would require anyone sending plant or animal products through first-class mail to any place within the United States to alert a postal worker to the contents and grant permission for an agricultural inspection, voluntarily giving up the constitutional protection against search and seizure.

Mail Restriction

Under current law, those shipping certain restricted plant products must make similar declarations but are not permitted to use first-class mail because it cannot be opened for inspection.

The Coelho bill establishes a minimum civil penalty of $1,000 for violating the reporting provisions and gives postal workers the right to refuse any undeclared package that they believe contains agricultural products.

In testimony before a congressional subcommittee last Thursday, Donald L. Houston of the Agriculture Department said Coelho’s bill is not strong enough.

“We cannot support it unless it is amended to include the (warrantless) inspection provisions” of the Pashayan legislation, he said.

The department needs the authority to conduct such searches, Houston testified, because “obtaining a warrant in each case where there is a ‘reasonable cause to suspect’ that a package contains any plant- or animal-related article would present an insuperable administrative burden.”

Each day, residents of Hawaii ship about 12,500 first-class packages to the continental United States. Host to the Medfly, Oriental fruit fly, peach fruit fly and Malaysian fruit fly, Hawaii has been under a federal quarantine since 1910.

3 Types of Cattle Tick

In Puerto Rico, home of the Caribbean fruit fly and three types of cattle tick, residents send 11,000 first-class packages to the mainland every day, according to figures provided by the Postal Service.

Houston said a 1983 survey by his department indicated that during a peak holiday season, inspectors in Honolulu would have to examine 580 suspicious packages a day.

“Requiring inspectors to acquire a large number of warrants in addition to carrying out their normal workload would cause serious delays in the transmission of the mail (and) would require additional personnel and resources,” Houston said.

Houston outlined a two-step procedure that agricultural inspectors would use to identify suspicious packages. First, they would visually inspect the package, feel its weight and smell it to determine if it might contain fruit or meat products. To confirm their suspicions, the inspectors would call in trained dogs. If the dogs sniffed contraband, the package would be opened and its illegal contents destroyed.

The Department of Agriculture, however, has not won over the Postal Service.

“There are substantial questions about how far this is going to go,” Charles R. Braun, a Postal Service attorney, said during Thursday’s hearing.

“If Agriculture can do it to inspect for pests, why can’t I do it to inspect for drugs or for national security purposes? When it’s all over, we’re not going to have the American system of mail privacy that we’ve had for years.”

Later, in a telephone interview, Braun said the Postal Service advocates other measures to combat the problem, including public education and perhaps more stringent penalties for violating federal quarantines that ban shipment of produce from infested areas.

“Right now the penalty for failure to declare a plant product that you should declare that’s going in domestic mail is $100,” Braun said.

Cost-Effectiveness

“You’re going to have a lot of trouble getting people in the federal government to spend the thousands of dollars that may be entailed in making a search warrant application, getting the warrant, executing it, and bringing in a federal prosecution when the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is not to exceed a $100 fine.”

While the Justice Department has not formally rendered its opinion, a lawyer in the department’s legislative office said two appellate court decisions that upheld the rights of authorities to inspect luggage for banned agricultural products could be interpreted to “support the administrative, warrantless search as it might be applied in these two bills.”

On the other hand, the attorney, Gregg L. Cunningham, said some have suggested that the Coelho bill faces another, more serious problem.

“There are people who will argue that there are constitutional prohibitions against preconditioning a person’s access to some governmental service (in this case, first-class mail) . . . on their willingness to forfeit some constitutional right. That’s kind of an open question,” he said.

Whatever the outcome, Curry of the California Department of Food and Agriculture said that something must be done to stop the flow of infested fruit into California.

“On the one hand, we are so careful,” she said. “We’ve got those 16 border (inspection) stations on all the major highways, we have the ports covered . . . we have the airports covered, we watch UPS terminals, we watch the nurseries, we watch the railroads, we watch busses and trucks. We have this place covered--except for the mails.”

Times staff writer David Voreacos in Washington contributed to this story.