Books have taken on a new and sinister role within the walls of a notorious Chicago jail. An unsettling and deadly trend has emerged, whereby inmates are gaining access to paper laced with lethal drugs, leading to a series of tragic fatalities. This alarming situation has prompted grave comparisons to the devastating crack epidemic of the 1990s, as it poses an escalating threat to the prison population.
The issue came to light with the mysterious death of 57-year-old inmate Thomas Diskin at the Cook County Correctional Facility in January 2023. Found lifeless, slumped near the toilet in his cell, Diskin’s death left investigators puzzled. There were no signs of violence or trauma that could account for his demise.
What stood out, however, were the fragments of burnt paper scattered around the cell, sparking a crucial line of inquiry. “I said, we need to test this and find out what’s going on with it,” recalled Brad Curry, Chief of Staff at the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, referring to the suspicious paper remnants.
As correction officers battle this new menace, the potential for widespread harm looms large, marking a dark chapter in the ongoing struggle against drug infiltration in prisons. The challenge now is to curb this deadly trend before it claims more lives and deepens its grip on the incarcerated community.
The only thing out of the norm? Tiny strips of singed paper littered around his cell.
“I said, we need to test this and find out what’s going on with it,” Cook County Sheriff’s Office Chief of Staff Brad Curry recalled about that moment, referring to the paper shreds.
Eventually, a Virginia lab would confirm that the strips were soaked in a synthetic cannabinoid called Pinaca, which proved lethal when Diskin smoked the paper.
Before authorities could stop it, other inmates were dropping dead under eerily similar circumstances.
Less than two weeks after the first death, a 23-year-old was found dead, and less than a month after that, a 35-year-old inmate died.
By year’s end, six prisoners fatally overdosed after smoking tiny strips of paper that had been soaked in synthetic drugs — often using a “wick,” or slow-burning string of toilet paper or fabric.
“We didn’t know what was on [the paper in Diskin’s cell], but we knew it was a drug,” Curry told The Post.
“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,” he explained.
They tried to warn prisoners about the dangers — throwing up signs in every ward of the approximately 6,000-inmate facility, warning against “drugs smuggled into the jail, like soaked paper.”
The message was stark: “Do not take drugs in the jail if you want to live.”
Guards also began inspecting every single piece of mail that came into the lockup, looking for stains and discoloration that could indicate synthetic drugs on it, and ramped up random cell searches and surveillance.
But the strips of drug-soaked paper were sometimes so tiny, guards wouldn’t find them — and not even drug-trained police K-9s were able to sniff out the new synthetic cannabinoid they contained, Curry explained.
While officials did everything short of banning paper — which “is necessary for everybody’s job function here, and for inmates to communicate with their family and friends,” Curry said — to curtail the trend, smugglers grew more advanced.
‘Doing it for the money’
When the mailroom got too hot with scrutiny, smugglers began dousing legal documents in drugs to make it look like it came straight from the courthouse.
They even put it on pages of thick books that came to the prison packaged as if they’d been sent straight from Amazon or a local bookstore.
Just one, 12×12 piece of paper full of the drugs could run up to $10,000 — a price tag apparently high enough to turn the heads of several money-hungry staffers — who ended up in cuffs for smuggling it to inmates, according to Curry.
“If you’re a dirty officer, [inmates working as dealers] will give them a certain amount of that every time they bring in a sheet of paper … so they’re doing it for the money. It’s so lucrative,” Curry said.
In-person visitors are another avenue to get the goods inside prison walls. Surveillance footage shared with The Post from one May 2024 visit shows a female guest take a tiny, white slip of sullied paper and suddenly launch it across the table, with the inmate catching it across the table and slyly moving it into his uniform pocket.
Between smugglers and inmates found possessing the drug-dunked paper, Cook County law enforcement has made a combined 130 felony arrests since 2023.
A sophisticated, paper-testing machine — which blinks red if paper has anything other than ink on it, and can test hundreds of sheets at one time — has also assisted in their efforts against the epidemic.
Prison deaths from smoking drug-soaked paper fell to just one in 2024. However, one death in 2025 and two already in 2026 are being eyed as drug-doused paper deaths, according to the sheriff’s office, which said it’s awaiting official results from the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office.
And throughout the years, the synthetic cannabinoids used in the recipes have changed — and gotten stronger.
“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,” Curry explained.
Although the epidemic has since hit other prisons throughout the country, Curry said, he and his sheriff’s office cohorts fear for what would happen if the drug-doused paper hit the outside world.
“If you’re a police officer and you pull somebody over … and there’s a stack of paper in an open Office Depot wrapper, you have no idea that that’s $1 million worth of drugs right there, and your dogs are not going to hit on it. Nobody’s going to know that … until we educate all our police officers.
“So the ramifications, if this does go to the street, are huge. This would be the biggest war on drugs you’ve ever seen in your life … you’d have a lot of new drug dealers that are millionaires, because nobody would catch onto it probably for a long time,” he warned.
“And how do you keep it out of schools, because it’s on pieces of paper? It’s terrifying. It would be worse than the fentanyl in the street,” Curry said.
