When Children's Scribbles Hide a Prison Drug (1576 hits)
By ABBY GOODNOUGH and KATIE ZEZIMA
WINDHAM, Me. — A treatment for opiate addiction has become a favorite contraband among prisoners nationwide, and a constant test for prison officials. Mike Barrett, a corrections officer, ripped open an envelope in the mail room at the Maine Correctional Center here and eyed something suspicious: a Father’s Day card, sent a month early. He carefully felt the card and slit it open, looking for a substance that has made mail call here a different experience of late. Mr. Barrett and other prison officials nationwide are searching their facilities, mail and visitors for Suboxone, a drug used as a treatment for opiate addiction that has become coveted as contraband. Innovative smugglers have turned crushed Suboxone pills into a paste and spread it under stamps or over children’s artwork, including pages from a princess coloring book found in a New Jersey jail.
The drug also comes in thin strips, which dissolve under the tongue, that smugglers have tucked behind envelope seams and stamps. “It’s become a crisis in here, to be honest with you,” said Maj. Francine Breton, administrator of the Cumberland County Jail in Portland, Me. “It’s the drug of choice right now.” Law enforcement officials say that Suboxone, which is prescribed to treat addiction to heroin and powerful painkillers like oxycodone, has become a drug of abuse in its own right, resulting in prison smuggling efforts from New Mexico to Maine. Addicts buy it on the street when they cannot find or afford their drug of choice, to stave off the sickness that comes with withdrawal. But some people are also taking it for the high they say it provides.
After Suboxone strips were discovered in two letters, the Cumberland County Jail set a new rule in March that all inmate mail must arrive in white envelopes. That way, Major Breton said, officials can detect the orange tint of the strips when they hold an envelope up to the light. The jail also rips the stamps off every piece of mail before delivery because senders were putting a paste made of crushed Suboxone pills on the back of stamps for inmates to lick off. The Maine Correctional Center tightened its mail policy in 2009 specifically because of Suboxone smuggling. Officials there remove all mail from envelopes before delivering it, then send the envelopes to the “burn barrel.” Any mail containing crayon scribblings, stickers, glitter glue or any “foreign substance” is not delivered.
“We’ve had too many people dry the stuff onto the pages, then get a kid to color over it,” said Capt. Mark James, who supervises the mail room, adding that Suboxone has at times been discovered on a daily basis. In Nesquehoning, Pa., officials at the Carbon County Correctional Facility intercepted three letters with Suboxone strips under the stamps in January and later charged five inmates and six others, including a son of one of the prisoners, with conspiring to smuggle the drug into the prison.
In February, three coloring book pages, including two depicting Snow White and Cinderella, sent to a prisoner in the Cape May County jail, were splotched with the words “To Daddy” and an orange substance that turned out to be Suboxone. In Massachusetts, Suboxone makes up 12 percent of all contraband discovered in state prisons, said Terrel Harris, a spokesman for the state’s Executive Office of Public Safety. And in New Mexico, prison officials foil attempts to smuggle Suboxone to inmates about once a week, said Shannon McReynolds, a spokesman for the New Mexico Corrections Department.
“Typically what inmates will try to do is quarter the pill up and sell it for $25 a hit,” Mr. McReynolds said. The Food and Drug Administration approved Suboxone in 2002 as the first narcotic that doctors could prescribe for addiction to opiates. Seen as a more convenient alternative to methadone, which can be dispensed only at federally licensed clinics, it blocks the effects of opiates while reducing cravings and easing withdrawal symptoms. ...
