Over the past year, prisons in several states have banned physical mail for incarcerated people, replacing cherished handwritten communications with electronic copies. Corrections departments have often ascribed these policy changes to drug-soaked paper strips arriving in the mail—despite large-scale smuggling of drugs into prisons and jails by staff.
“This is a very popular thing that’s going around the prisons,” Morgan Godvin, a drug and justice policy expert who was formerly incarcerated, told Filter of the strips. “I’ve been hearing about it for perhaps two years now.”
Despite this popularity, researchers—like prisoners themselves, much of the time—have known very little about the substances the strips, which can also be known as “deuce,” contain.
The strips contained a mixture of potent substances, including synthetic cannabinoids and nitazenes.
A study recently published in the journal Substance Use and Addiction tested samples of strips from a county jail near Atlanta, Georgia, and analyzed medical records from 18 detainees who were brought to a nearby emergency department “with suspected strip exposure.”
The researchers found that the strips contained a mixture of potent substances, including synthetic cannabinoids and nitazenes, and that the cases of suspected “strip intoxication” saw “severe and variable clinical manifestations.”
Strips are created by spraying or soaking paper with “liquid formulations of various drugs,” the authors note. These methods, they continue, can result in “uneven application or pooling during the drying process,” creating hotspots and heightening risk: “It is not uncommon for a group of inmates to ingest or smoke strips from the same sheet of paper, with only a subset experiencing adverse health outcomes.”
Among the patients in the study, who were treated at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, the most common health conditions were central nervous system depression and lowered heart rate (bradycardia). Other symptoms included hypothermia, seizures, heightened heart rate (tachycardia) and agitation.
One patient arrived without a pulse and died after a prolonged resuscitation attempt. Two other patients were admitted to the critical care unit but survived.
Laboratory analysis of samples found no evidence that these particular strips were soaked in household cleaners or insecticides, a common conception that has led to nicknames for the strips like “roach spray.”
Instead, they mostly contained synthetic cannabinoids, with minor quantities of nitazene analogs, fentanyl, methamphetamine, xylazine, caffeine and an assortment of other psychoactive substances.
Firsthand accounts of Raid-soaked strips in another Georgia prison, however, suggest that the strips analyzed for the study may not represent the broader supply.
“Jails and prisons are like black holes—we can’t get any scientific information out of them.”
The research adds to scarce scientific knowledge about the contents of strips, but has several limitations. The medical records and strips were sourced from one facility over one time period, August 2022 through November 2023, and the authors don’t know for certain which strips, if any, were related to which symptoms. Additionally, the patients were all men aged 18-45.
Filter reached out to the researchers, but they did not provide comment by publication time.
Despite its limitations, Godvin sees the study’s rare effort to take a scientific lens to people’s experiences with strips as a vital step forward.
“Jails and prisons are like black holes—we can’t get any scientific information out of them,” she explained. “This is one of the only times I’ve seen, like, real science to explain what is happening in jails and prisons and cut through the fear-mongering narrative.”
Though it represents progress in that sense, the study does promote—or at least do nothing to question—a narrative of strips arriving in the mail as the dominant smuggling method.
The authors write that mail from people posing as attorneys is “A prototypical method of smuggling strips into correctional facilities …” But they provide no citations to indicate how common this might be, and make no mention of corrections officers bringing in drugs.
“In so much of the conversation around drugs and prisons, the fact that it’s officers more often than not just gets totally left out.”
“A lot of the increase in drug use in the prisons is being used to exclude people’s access to mail, even though a lot of the drugs are actually coming in from the officers,” Godvin said. “In so much of the conversation around drugs and prisons, the fact that it’s officers more often than not just gets totally left out.”
In line with this omission, states including Texas and Washington have explicitly cited drug-soaked paper strips as the rationale behind their bans on physical mail, an effort that has been ineffective at reducing the supply of drugs in prisons and socially isolating for incarcerated people.
However they enter prisons and jails, strips do pose health concerns, and a big element of that is how unlikely people are to know what’s actually in them.
“Maybe some people know what they’re doing and they want to call it ‘roach spray’ to divert attention,” Godvin said. “But they don’t seem to know.”
Future research investigating the contents of strips in other jails and prisons may help people better understand their local supply, and reclaim a small part of the bodily autonomy that incarceration strips away.
Photograph (cropped) via Monroe County Sheriff’s Office
Morgan Godvin serves on the Board of Directors of The Influence Foundation, which operates Filter.
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