Inmates were overdosing in a Chicago jail. At least six had died. It was mysterious. There were no needles, no drug paraphernalia near the victims. Next to one body there were only scraps of burned paper, bits of ash.
That paper, Azam Ahmed and Matt Richtel report, was the culprit. Dealers spray it with toxic new designer drugs that promise ecstatic relief from captivity and often deliver death. “A lot of us are facing life in prison,” one former inmate told them. “To leave that behind, even for a minute, is all you want.” Justin Wilks, the head investigator at the jail, said he soon found the drugs smuggled into the facility on sheets of paper, on the pages of books, on letters and cards and photographs.
The jail increased its surveillance of inmates and their visitors. Guards searched more cells. In the mail room, they inspected every item. It hardly mattered. Smugglers got around them by lacing legal correspondence with the novel drugs. They sent sealed packages that appeared to be from Amazon, containing books soaked in drugs.
Another inmate died. Wilks had been investigating the drugs in his jail for well over a year and had no idea who the supplier was. And the drugs themselves continued to evolve faster than anyone could track them.
It’s not just Chicago. The number of new synthetic drugs has about tripled since 2013, with over 1,440 appearing. The designer drugs are killing at a high rate, too.
Here are Azam and Matt on what’s shaping up as a national crisis:
Fringe chemists are ushering in a total transformation of the illicit drug market. Operating from clandestine labs, they are churning out a dizzying array of synthetic drugs — not only fentanyl, but also hazardous new tranquilizers, stimulants and complex cannabinoids. Sometimes, several unknown drugs appear on the streets in a single month. Many are so new they are not even illegal yet.
Nearly all of them are harder to trace than conventional drugs, less expensive to produce, much more potent and far deadlier.
The unbridled rise of synthetic drugs is as profound for the illicit drug market as the television was for the radio, or the computer for the typewriter, scientists say, and it is confounding law enforcement officials the world over.
“This is the modern drug epidemic: It’s like nothing that’s happened in the world before — anywhere,” said Bob DuPont, a drug czar under President Richard M. Nixon.
An arrest
After a painstaking investigation into the source of the paper at the Chicago jail, federal agents arrested a dealer. He had been shipping drugs to correctional facilities in North Carolina, Indiana and Illinois.
A package recovered from his home contained vacuum-sealed bags packed with drug-soaked cloth. Another contained two books, both of which tested positive for synthetic cannabinoids. In his trash, the authorities said, they discovered more than a dozen sheets of printed labels addressed to inmates across the country. Some had return addresses for law offices.
After the arrest, Wilks told The Times that he felt some relief that the biggest trafficker pushing paper in his jail — “that he knew of, at least” — had been taken down.
“But if the question is whether what happened today is the end,” he said, “I would say this is not going to stop.”
He was right. Read the whole story here.
AIRPORTS ON ICE
Travelers are angry. T.S.A. agents aren’t being paid because their agency has been closed during a partial government shutdown — which means many aren’t coming to work. Which means airport security lines feel endless. To help, President Trump is deploying ICE agents to airports around the country.
Trump cast the operation as an effort to pressure Democratic lawmakers to fund the Department of Homeland Security, most of which has been shuttered for over a month because of a fight over immigration tactics.
What are the ICE agents doing?
It depends whom you ask. Over the weekend, Trump said it would be a wide-ranging, aggressive operation. He said on social media that agents would “do security like no one has ever seen before,” including “the immediate arrest of all illegal immigrants who have come into our Country.”
But Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said agents mostly would support T.S.A. employees in areas of their jobs that don’t require specialized expertise. That would allow them to focus on moving passengers through long security lines.
Will the agents be at my airport?
ICE personnel, including agents from Homeland Security Investigations, are planning to be at 14 airports, according to a document obtained by The Times. The airports include Newark, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston and Phoenix, as well as Kennedy and LaGuardia in New York.
LaGuardia, for its part, was shut down this morning after a plane collided with a fire truck late last night. Two pilots died and dozens of people were injured.
Women’s college basketball: Amaya Battle hit a game-winning shot with 0.8 seconds remaining, lifting Minnesota to the Sweet 16 with a 65-63 win over Ole Miss.
RECIPE OF THE DAY
Eric Kim had the idea to add a few dollops of creamy ricotta to his recipe for pasta alla vodka — and it’s a great one. The cool creaminess of that cheese is a wonderful foil for the spicy sauce. He uses bacon in there, too, for a smoky saltiness that you don’t often see in the dish. That’s smart, too, but you could always omit.
HERE COMES THE SUN
Recent surveys of Americans’ seasonal preferences place spring a distant second or even third to autumn, the runaway winner. (Really, there are people who track such things.) But there are signs the season could be on the brink of a cultural comeback. “I don’t think spring needs a total rebranding,” a marketing executive told The Times. “I just think it needs a wake-up call.”
