[Part 1 and Part 2 of this story were published earlier in July.]
Back in 2004, right before tobacco was banned in Washington State Department of Corrections facilities, one prisoner at Clallam Bay Corrections Center happened to have had three unopened pouches of Top tobacco among his property when he was sent to the hole. When he came out in June 2005, to a world where tobacco was no longer sold at commissary and the stockpiles were depleted, he got his property back from storage and found the pouches still there. He sold them for $100 each.
People still miss tobacco, but there’s no market for it today. Multiple prisoners who used to move tobacco unanimously told Filter that you’d be stupid to try bringing it in. Once prohibition kicked in, everyone shifted toward things that were more financially worth the risk.
For their first decade or so in Washington State prisons, synthetic cannabinoids—AKA “Spice”—came in the form of dried plant material. Starting around 2008, that’s what took the place of rolling tobacco.
Back then, people would pay $3 to $6 for a “pinner”—a thin pinch of Spice, rolled up and ready to smoke. Not enough to actually get anyone high, but that’s not what pinners were for. It was common for buyers to actually stretch them with dried-out banana peel strings (which have no effect at all) just to add bulk and make them last longer. Pinners provided a little pick-me-up, which was all folks wanted—something to help take the edge off of prison but that still allowed them to go about their day, and that felt familiar to hold in their hand and smoke. The way they used to use cigarettes.
Even today, no one really likes smoking paper. But there were inevitable reasons the Spice market went that way.
The herb form was what everyone wanted, but around 2014 or so Spice started being sold as “strips”—soaked onto little pieces of paper that are smoked directly. Lots of drugs in lots of prisons are sold this way, and it’s become the norm for Spice. Strips got a lot more popular around the country during the COVID-19 pandemic, but here at least they’d completely replaced the herb form of Spice by 2019.
But the fact that Spice didn’t start out as strips is a huge part of how it got so popular. By the time the plant material was phased out, the Spice market included all the people who’d only wanted a stand-in for cigarettes, and strips are nothing like cigarettes. Now, nobody buys Spice with the intention of smoking it and going right back to work. People buy it to get high.
Even with the plant material kind of Spice, money already went about twice as far as it did with marijuana. For the price of a pinner, a quarter-square of Spice in strip form was enough for someone to get high. If they could afford a full square, they could get really high.
A big problem that leads to “epees”—Spice overdoses—is that with strips there’s no way to gauge dosage. People “start low go slow,” but that only does so much; a quarter-inch square is the smallest (ie. the “lowest”) dose sold, and physically you can’t start much smaller than that. And the point of strips is that the whole thing’s gone in an instant, since taking your time is kind of a luxury reserved for those who aren’t constantly surrounded by cops.
Even today, no one seems to really like smoking paper. But there were some inevitable reasons the Spice market went that way.
Spice, the strip kind, is a product of prohibition.
Whatever chemical compounds are in Spice, they just work better to spray on paper compared to other drugs—they don’t seem to make the paper wrinkle or leave an obvious shine like meth would, if you tried to spray it on in the amounts people wanted. So because the delivery method still holds up, Spice has become more and more potent.
For the people smuggling it in, the plant material posed similar problems to tobacco in that it’s bulky; strips are a lot more compact so they’re easier to hide. And the people using strips found them more discreet too—strips are gone in one hit and don’t leave anything behind.
Spice additionally doesn’t have a noticeable smell the way tobacco or marijuana do. Even meth has a smell when it’s smoked, but Spice doesn’t. It’s also hard to identify on drug tests, at least accurately, which is why even outside prison so many people who use Spice are under some form of state supervision where they have to give urine samples. In here, someone can’t be written up for an epee without drug-testing or being caught in the act; on paper it’s only a medical emergency. But as Spice becomes more prevalent and corrections departments across the country come to hate it more, epees that draw attention often prompt some form of punishment.
Prohibition of a drug often does make it more dangerous. Smoking strips is less medically harmful than smoking cigarettes—especially prison cigarettes—but in here the biggest harms are things you might not hear about. How many people end up in predatory debt traps that’ll get them killed or disabled way faster than tobacco. How many people who had a bad epee or a faulty drug test had their earned “good time” revoked, or lost a shot at parole, or got transferred to a more violent facility on the other side of the state from their family.
I’m told that Spice isn’t as big a deal to law enforcement outside prison as it is to the cops in here. But law enforcement is the only reason Spice is as prevalent as it is in prison.
Spice, the strip kind, is a product of prohibition. Nobody likes it, but they all use it because it’s the safest available option.
Photograph (edited) via Monroe County Sheriff’s Office