It was a tip that brought a dog to the main post office in downtown Jackson, Mississippi. An employee there had reported seeing someone in the lobby putting pills into hot pink envelopes.
Hours later, Ed Steed, a police officer from the small city of Richland, just south of Jackson, walked into a back room at the post office where one of the envelopes had been set aside. Steed, a K-9 handler, arrived with Rip, his narcotics sniffer dog. Rip strode around and, when he got to the pink envelope, sat down. According to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Steed said this meant the dog had smelled narcotics. That claim became evidence to get a warrant to open the envelope.
This, though, was no ordinary drug bust. As it turned out, there were pills inside the package, but they were not the kind that Rip or other police K-9s are trained to detect. The envelope contained five pills labeled “AntiPreg Kit.” They were made in India, and their medical purpose is to induce abortion. Dwayne Martin, at the time the head of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in Jackson, told me this was exactly what the initial tipster had suspected.