Inmates in Cook County jail were dying with no signs of trauma. Mystery solved.

In the Cook County jail, inmates are dying from new drugs soaked into the pages of letters, books and legal documents

New York Times, March 21, 2026

How far have we fallen as a country?  Take a look below.  If the article is accurate, it should have been on national newzcasts, but I'll bet you never heard about this before now.

In January of 2023, in Chitcongo's Cook County jail, inmates began turning up dead in their cells, with no signs of trauma.  All investigators found were scraps of singed paper scattered on the floor.

For months, jail inmates had been "falling ill" with no known cause.  Officials said they'd heard rumors that deadly drugs were being smuggled in, but they didn't know how.

Finally officials concluded inmates were heating the scraps of paper and smoking the vapor.

Suppliers would spray a mix of drugs onto the pages of totally legal items like books, letters, legal documents, even photographs.

Inmates would then tear the drug-soaked sheets--worth thousands of dollars a page--into strips and use cigarette lighters to smoke the vapors.  The Times says inmates who smoked the stuff "went into crazed, exorcistic fits, as if possessed."

(Ever seen the word "exorcistic" before?)

To block the drugs the jail added 24-hour surveillance, searched more cells and beefed up the mail room, inspecting every item by hand.

But as always in competitions between drug smuggers and authorities, the smugglers had countermeasures for every move authorities made.  When officials began checking regular mail more closely, smugglers began delivering the drugs on "privileged" legal correspondence.  Officials began finding drug-laced books in sealed packages that appeared to have been shipped directly from Amazon.

Naive investigators claimed to be baffled that anyone would spray so many different--and potentially deadly--drugs onto a single piece of paper.  You have to know druggies: They'd inject goat urine if a friend claimed that would produce a high.  Druggies are not like the rest of us: they'll do literally anything for a high, no matter the risk.  You have to have known one to understand how obsessed they are.

I had a sister who was a druggie.  High IQ, law degree, high position in the courts.  Got into drugs and couldn't let go.  Or perhaps didn't want to.

Addictive drugs have been around as long as humans.  The opium trade goes back thousands of years.  As recently as the 20th century, officials still focused on three substances derived from plants: marijuana, cocaine and heroin.

Today, far more powerful "designer drugs" dominate the market.  And that shows up in the death toll:  In 1971 just under 7,000 Americans died of overdoses. Now, over 70,000 Americans die from overdoses each year.

An arms race for potency is underway.  Stronger drugs mean one kilogram can reap as much profit as 100 kilos of heroin. 

And the consequences aren't just death of the user:  Many drugs cause psychosis and unprovoked violence.

In prison, paper is a lifeline to parents, partners and children outside the walls.  After officials realized drugs were coming in on paper, the sheriff of Cook County (Tom Dart) called other jail officials grappling with the same problem. Some had decided to ban paper outright.

Sheriff Dart--being a good Democrat--refused, bleating that taking paper away from inmates would rob them of what they missed most:  connection to loved ones.  That seemed too harsh to the Democrat, and the Times says the reason is that most inmates in the jail hadn't been convicted yet, but were simply in jail awaiting trial.

As the death toll mounted in 2023, the jail taught inspectors to identify what unadulterated  paper smelled like and felt like, hoping to catch drug-laced paper.  But the drugs were so novel that even dogs couldn't detect them.

One official bleated “Inmates use paper for everything.  The schools inside use paper, the staff uses paper, and the inmates get paper in the mail every day.”  This is an excuse, designed to maintain the "We cain't do nuffin' about dis" status quo.

Almost everything the jail did seemed to spur more innovation by the smugglers.  “Every time we discovered a new trick, they’d make a change.”

The jail put up posters warning of the dangers of smoking drug-soaked paper.  “Don’t die in jail,” the posters warned.

But as anyone who's known a hard-core drug user knows, they're not worried about dying. 

As one former inmate put it, “A lot of us are facing life in prison, so you just want to leave that behind, even for a minute.  “Inmates think, ‘Just ’cause that guy died doesn’t mean I’m going to die. He was probably just weak.’”

Using is not cheap. A piece of drug-laced paper the size of a driver’s license can cost $800.  A whole sheet of such paper can reach $10,000. Inmates tell of begging family and friends for thousands of dollars over the years they spent in jail, to pay for drugs.

On the street, synthetic drugs are often far cheaper than traditional ones.  But inside jail the price reflects the well-known laws of supply and demand.

Oh wait, I forgot:  Democrats don't believe in those laws.  Oh well...

Since 2023 officials have arrested dozens of staffers and visitors for sneaking in drug-soaked paper. One corrections officer was caught with 48 pages in her home.

The team ran back through everything for new leads — and finally caught a break.

An inmate had been caught with drug-soaked paper, so investigators reviewed hours of video recordings of his visits to try to discover how he got it:  When his girlfriend came to see him, she slipped him a packet of papers while someone distracted officers.

She had been searched before visits, but no one realized drugs could be delivered on paper.

When the girlfriend was finally questioned, she told investigators everything.

At last, investigators began to map the outlines of a network. A dealer in the Chicago area seemed to be working with eight inmates and their girlfriends to bring in drug-laced paper.

They also discovered the dealer was in contact with inmates around the country, sending paper to correctional facilities all over the U.S.

In 2024 investigators presented their evidence to federal officials, hoping they would join the fight.  A few weeks later, they did.

By the end of 2024 several dealers were competing to get drug-laced paper into the jail.

“We don’t have dogs that can smell it, we don’t have test strips for it, we don’t have field test kits,” Mr. Murphy said. “So if we find paper on a guy, we have to send it to the lab, wait five to six weeks for it to come back and then say, ‘OK, now we’re going to arrest him.’”

By then the guy would be gone.


On a blustery evening in March 2025, Mr. Wilks was leaving the jail for the day when he spotted a beat-up sedan parked next to his car.

The driver got out, holding three small puffy packages that looked like they came from Amazon. The man did not speak much English, but was on the phone with a woman who did.

“I’m trying to make sure the book I’ve mailed to my husband gets to him,” the woman told Mr. Wilks over the driver’s cellphone.

The woman explained that the driver was supposed to take the packages to a shipping dock at the jail reserved for deliveries by Amazon, UPS and FedEx.

Suspicious, Mr. Wilks said he would take care of the packages himself.

Once inside, he opened the packages and found three books, one with pornography, and two others with the sticky texture he had learned to associate with drug-saturated paper.

It was a brazen scheme. People were sneaking in drug-laced paper by sending official-looking packages to the shipping dock used by UPS, Amazon and FedEx.  By dumb luck Wilks had stumbled on a driver who couldn't find the shipping dock.

Wilks and his team had always assumed that anything in an Amazon box or pouch had come from an Amazon warehouse and was therefore clean.

Now Wilks and his team got a tip that anyone could sign up with Amazon as "third-party booksellers."  Dealers would coat pages of a book in drugs, then offer it for sale on Amazon, complete with official-looking packaging.

Amazon claimed it hadn't found any information confirming that third-party sellers were in fact shipping drugs into Cook County correctional facilities.

The Times propagandist writes that Wilks and other investigators were "astounded" at this display of creativity by the drug sellers, implying that investigators didn't know Amazon and FedEx shipped packages to inmates without any inspection!

Clues were popping up that drug-soaked paper might be catching on outside jail. Tips had circulated that gas stations around the Chitcongo suburbs Illinois were selling gift cards soaked in drugs.

Finally in August of last year, after the tip from the imate's girlfriend, agents raided a house in the Chitcongo suburbs and found ONE of the wholesale operations making the drug-soaked paper.

Law enforcement had been surveilling the owner for months, and had intercepted shipments to jails in North Carolina, Indiana and Illinois. 

When authorities searched the trash for the house they found 14 sheets of printed labels addressed to inmates across the country, some with return addresses of *law offices.*

After the arrest, Wilks said "This is not going to stop.”  And of course he was right. Corrections officers kept finding drug-laced paper in the jail.  In the month after the bust, authorities confiscated 277 suspicious pages.

Of course this could be easily fixed: confiscate all matches and lighters from inmates.  But it's absolutely certain that some dipshit leftist judge would wail that that was "cruel and unusual punishment" and would block it.  See, the Founders believed inmates should have the same rights as non-criminals.  At least Democrat believe that's what the Founders wanted.  And for Democrats, "feelz" overrides all history, every time.    

Source: New York Times