Danni King
Investigators have linked a number of unexpected deaths at a Chicago prison to a terrifying new drug trend.
A string of inmates passed away at the Cook County Correctional Facility in eerily similar circumstances, leaving officers perplexed and searching for answers.
When Thomas Diskin, 57, was founded dead in his cell in January 2023, investigators struggled to piece together what had happened as there was no evidence of foul play or a fall that could have caused the prisoner's death.
However, there were tiny strips of singed paper littered around Diskin's cell.
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Brad Curry, Cook County Correctional Facility's chief of staff, recalled noticing the paper and insisting on testing it to see 'what's going on'.
After being sent off to a lab in Virginia, it was confirmed that the strips of paper were soaked in Pinaca, a synthetic cannabinoid, which proved fatal when Diskin smoked the paper.
Other inmates began passing away in similar circumstances before authorities could intervene.
Less than a month after the first death, two more inmates were found dead and by the year's end, six prisoners had fatally overdosed after smoking the paper that had been dosed in synthetic drugs.
“We didn’t know what was on [the paper], but we knew it was a drug.
“And it was a race against time. We had a new drug that is very, very toxic and very, very deadly, that Narcan apparently didn’t work on,” Curry explained to The New York Post.
Officers tried to warn prisoners about the dangers of smoking the papers and had plastered the walls of the facility with signs warning against the use of 'drugs smuggled into the jail, like soaked paper'.
Soon, officers at the US prison began inspecting every piece of mail that was received by the jail, searching for any sign of discolouration that could indicate drugs were on it.
Random cell searches began to be conducted more often and surveillance was ramped up in a bid to stop the drugs being passed around.
The only issue was that the strips of paper were often so small that officers wouldn't find them and even trained police K-9s were unable to sniff out the new synthetic drug that was being used.
Curry explained that every measure aside from banning paper, which is 'necessary for everybody's job function', was put in place, but this only encouraged culprits to become more advanced with their smuggling methods.
They began covering legal documents in drugs to make it look as if they'd came straight from the courthouse and doused pages of thick books, which arrived at the prison packaged, to make it seem like they'd been sent from big companies.
Over the years, the number of prison deaths from smoking drug-soaked paper have dropped and new measures, such as an intelligent paper-testing machine, have been introduced to help the issue.
Since 2023, Cook County officers have made 130 felony arrests between smugglers and inmates found possessing the drug-doused paper.
However, with the drug used getting stronger, Curry fears a bigger issue is ahead.
“I think the type of drug that they’re using now, the potency of that drug, will probably be a contributing factor to why we see a [bigger] rise this year [in deaths] than what we’ve seen the last two years,” he explained.