Chicago authorities are cracking down on inmates’ use of books, and paper in general, after a string of eerie fatalities that began in 2023.
The investigation started when 57-year-old inmate Thomas Diskin was found lifeless in his cell in January 2023. Guards at the Cook County Correctional Facility didn’t find any evidence of foul play or an accident.
Image credits: Cook County Sheriff’s Office
The only unusual elements at the scene were tiny strips of singed paper scattered around his cell.
“I said, ‘We need to test this and find out what’s going on with it,’” said Cook County Sheriff’s Office chief of staff Brad Curry, as per The Post.
Less than two weeks after Diskin’s case, a 23-year-old prisoner was found lifeless, followed by the passing of a 35-year-old inmate.
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After analyzing the paper in a Pennsylvania lab, investigators found that the strips were soaked in a synthetic cannabinoid known as Pinaca, which turned lethal when Diskin smoked the paper.
By the end of 2023, six inmates had lost their lives after sm*king the substance-soaked paper strips.
“It was a race against time … we had a new dr*g that is very, very toxic and very, very d*adly, that Narcan apparently didn’t work on,” Curry explained.
Image credits: Cook County Sheriff’s Office
Authorities at the prison warned inmates by putting up signs that mentioned “dr*gs smuggled into the jail, like soaked paper” and stated, “Do not take dr*gs in the jail if you want to live.”
What followed was a large-scale operation to try to remove all of the cannabinoid-soaked paper inside the 6,000-inmate facility.
Guards began inspecting every single piece of mail that came into the prison and ramped up random cell searches and surveillance.
Image credits: Cook County Sheriff’s Office
Additionally, they used a paper-testing machine that blinks if it detects anything other than ink on the paper.
However, Curry told The Post that the strips of paper were sometimes so tiny that guards were unable to find them. Not even trained police K-9s were able to sniff out the potentially lethal substance.
As efforts to find the chemically infused paper increased, inmates developed more advanced methods to get their hands on the product.
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Prisoners began forging legal documents, infusing them with the substance and making them look like they came from a courthouse. They also applied the product to pages of thick books that arrived at the prison packaged as if they’d been sent from Amazon or a local bookstore.
One 8×11 piece of paper soaked with Pinaca could reportedly be sold for up to $10,000. The lucrative business eventually drew in prison staffers, who were jailed for smuggling the paper to inmates.
Image credits: Cook County Sheriff’s Office
The paper also came from outsiders. Surveillance footage from 2024 caught a visitor tossing a sullied paper slip to an inmate.
Cook County law enforcement has reportedly made a combined 130 felony arrests since 2023, targeting both inmates and smugglers.
This led to a reduction in substance-related fatalities in the prison in 2024. However, concerns grew again when one case was reported in 2025 and two already in 2026, with the incidents suspected to be connected to Pinaca.
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According to Curry, the synthetic cannabinoids used in the product have gotten stronger since 2023.
“I think the type of dr*g that they’re using now, the potency, will probably be a contributing factor to why we see a [bigger] rise this year than what we’ve seen the last two years,” he said.
As this epidemic spreads to other prisons in the country, Curry and his team fear what could happen if Pinaca-laced paper reached people outside jail.
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“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 dr*gs 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.
“You’d have a lot of new dealers that are millionaires, because nobody would catch on to it probably for a long time.”
Image credits: Cook County Sheriff’s Office
Curry warned that the synthetic cannabinoid paper could fuel the “biggest war on dr*gs you’ve ever seen in your life,” surpassing even the fentanyl crisis. According to the DEA, more than 107,000 people lost their lives to a substance OD in 2023, with nearly 70% of cases attributed to opi*ids such as fentanyl.
A paper published in the National Library of Medicine notes that, compared with cannabis, severe and fatal pois*ning appears to be more common under the influence of synthetic cannabinoids, which first appeared as an alternative to cannabis on the black market around the year 2000.
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