No Pills or Needles, Just Paper: How Deadly Drugs Are Changing

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/21/world/deadly-drugs-paper.html

by Physkal • 4 months ago

15 8 4 months ago

rawgabbit• 4 months ago

This reminded me of the film Queen Margot when the king was poisoned by reading and touching a book on falconry with the bad habit of licking his fingers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Reine_Margot_(1994_film)

plmpsu• 4 months ago

As in The Name of the Rose.

Physkal• 4 months ago

Suprised to see the corrections officer smelling the papers during the inspection. Isn't this dangerous?

mindslight• 4 months ago

Externalized locus of control means that when one of them gets harmed, they get to blame it on someone else and take it out on the inmates. So from their perspective it's a feature, really.

JasonADrury• 4 months ago

If something bad happened, it would be the first time. It's of course possible that some future substances might be more dangerous.

duskdozer• 4 months ago

The drugs were so novel that even the dogs could not smell them.

Yes, because drug dogs are largely a sham

The report stated that prohibited drugs were found in only 26% of searches following an indication by a drug sniffer dog. Of these, 84% were for small amounts of cannabis deemed for personal use.

https://www.ombo.nsw.gov.au/reports/report-to-parliament/pol...

robocat• 4 months ago

Caged animal testing: drug chemists testing for lethality/effect on inmates that have few choices.

That explains:

  Mr. Wilks’s team found a single sheet with 10 different concoctions sprayed onto it — a mix of opioids, depressants, cannabinoids and stimulants all jumbled together on the same page, like a Rosetta Stone of synthetic drugs. Scientists were baffled and alarmed: Why would anyone spray so many different, lethal substances onto a single piece of paper?

  The specialized labs needed to run the tests often took months to send back mind-boggling chemical formulas

Everyone is so money focused that they struggle to imagine other motivations than dollars. These are poor inmates with little hope, who are willing to try anything. And it seems that there is little societal response to inmate deaths, plus society's normal harm-reduction features don't function inside a prison.

Follow the "NOT money": is it only the poor inmates that die? Presumably the richer inmates can source safer drugs for themselves.

Lethality might even be the goal: a simple signal that doesn't need covert back-channels. If you regularly send a drug test into prison then you might not even need to know who it was given to (assuming nobody hoards the drugs longer than the period between sending in the samples).

https://archive.ph/xiQzD

No Pills or Needles, Just Paper: How Deadly Drugs Are Changing

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