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

The body lay slumped on the jail floor, curled around a metal toilet.

Investigators found no evidence of homicide, just a few scraps of rolled-up paper, singed and scattered on the floor like scorched confetti.

For months, inmates had been falling ill at the Cook County jail in Chicago. Officials said they had heard rumors that extremely toxic drugs were infiltrating the facility, delivered on something so ordinary that it seemed impossible to stop.

Then the body appeared, and “something clicked,” said Justin Wilks, the head investigator at the jail.

The paper itself must be the culprit.

More overdoses soon followed. The next month, in February 2023, another inmate died from smoking paper laced with mysterious new drugs. In April, one more.

“People were dying so fast,” Wilks said.

By year’s end, at least six people had died of overdoses, putting the jail at the vanguard of a new kind of drug war, one in which extraordinarily powerful drugs can be invented faster than authorities can identify them.

And where something as ubiquitous as paper can become lethal.

Today, 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, according to scientists and law enforcement officials across the globe.

After that first death in the Cook County jail in January 2023, it took months for Wilks’ team to realize that these mysterious new drugs were being sprayed onto the pages of the most innocuous-seeming items: books, letters, documents, even photographs.

The sheets of drugs, worth thousands of dollars a page, were being torn into strips and smoked by inmates who went into crazed, exorcistic fits, as if possessed by a phantom narcotic the authorities could not see, much less stop.

Just figuring out what the paper had on it was maddening. The specialized labs needed to run the tests often took months to send back mind-boggling chemical formulas that left officers scratching their heads.

Desperate, the jail added 24-hour surveillance, searched more cells and beefed up the mail room, inspecting every item by hand.

But the traffickers were cunning. When regular mail got checked more closely, smugglers began lacing legal correspondence. Soon, officers discovered sealed packages that looked as if they had been shipped directly from Amazon, with drug-soaked books inside.

In the summer of 2024, Wilks’ 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? It was a distillation of the dark future these drugs threatened.

Soon, another inmate died, with many of the same novel drugs in his system. For Wilks, it was a crushing realization. Eighteen months into his investigation, he was no closer to finding the supplier — and the array of deadly new drugs was evolving faster than he could track it.

“We have to do something,” Wilks told his staff. “Another person can’t die on my watch.”

For most of human history, illicit drugs came from the land.

The trade in opium from poppies stretches back thousands of years. Even during the 20th century, when the United States declared its war on drugs, officials were still largely focused on three substances derived from plants: marijuana, cocaine and heroin.

Today, the dynamic is almost unrecognizable.

Supercharged drugs are increasingly synthesized in labs by illicit chemists who whip up new varieties like chefs testing recipes. More than 1,440 new psychoactive substances have been recorded since 2013, tripling in a little over a decade, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Some of the newer substances dwarf the potency of drugs that were introduced only a few years ago.

“Today is the most dangerous time in the history of the world to be using drugs,” said Dr. Andrew Monte, the head of the Rocky Mountain Poison Center.

An arms race for potency is underway, scientists and officials say. The stronger the drug, the bigger the high. Dealers can also provide drugs in smaller quantities, making them easier to smuggle, with greater profit potential.

The consequences are severe: higher risks of respiratory suppression, psychosis, violence, overdose and death.

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Nitazenes, a class of synthetic opioid that killed one of the inmates at the Cook County jail, can be 20 times more potent than fentanyl, a grim reflection of how the battle against illicit drugs often ends up spawning newer, even deadlier ones.

As quickly as authorities ban one substance, narco-chemists drum up novel, more potent variations that have not been outlawed yet.

Few places illustrate the struggle more clearly than the Cook County Correctional Facility, but it is not an isolated case. At least 15 other states have arrested or prosecuted individuals for smuggling drug-soaked paper into jails or prisons, according to a New York Times analysis of case data from New York to Texas to Hawaii.

Paper is a lifeline in jail, a tether to parents, partners and children in the outside world.

After the first person died from smoking a drug-laced piece of it in 2023, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart called around to other jails and prisons grappling with the same phenomenon. Some had decided to ban paper outright.

Dart refused.

The jail has been criticized at times for not keeping a close enough eye on inmates. But getting rid of paper altogether would rob them of what they missed most in lockup: human connection. That seemed particularly harsh to Dart, considering that most inmates in the jail were still awaiting trial and had not been convicted.

“The physical card a child sends their dad — in the correctional setting, it’s a big deal,” he said. “To dismissively say were going to ban everything from coming in, it was just something that I didn’t want to do.”

As the death toll mounted in 2023, the jail stepped up random searches and taught inspectors to master the natural touch and smell of paper, hoping to catch when it had been adulterated, however slightly. The drugs were so novel that even the dogs could not smell them.

Because the labs took months to identify these new compounds, authorities were always several steps behind, trying to break up a fast-changing drug ring with dated intelligence.

But even death did not dissuade users.

In fact, it seemed to have the opposite effect.

“A lot of us are facing life in prison, and to leave that behind, even for a minute, is all you want,” said Rashad Rowry, 33, a former inmate in Division 9, the maximum-security wing of the jail, explaining why he used to smoke paper. “People using in here will say, ‘Just ’cause he died doesn’t mean I’m going to die. He was probably just weak.’”

More inmates have died of overdose in Division 9 than in any other wing of the jail, and from the moment you enter, the smell of scorched paper fills the air. Officers can spot users by their fingertips, which are often stained with a brownish resin.

Using is not cheap. A small rectangle of paper the size of a driver’s license can cost up to $800. A whole sheet of paper can reach $10,000.

In the summer of 2024, jail officers found the Rosetta Stone — the sheet of paper with 10 different synthetic drugs on it.

The kaleidoscope of drugs horrified scientists, who viewed it as a manifestation of how drastically chemistry had run off the rails.

“That is a brutal amount of material,” said Christopher Pudney, a scientist who studies novel drugs. “It epitomizes the dangers of these new drugs.”

And then, not long after discovering the drug-laden sheet, authorities found Daniel Aranda-Delgado, 27, dead of an overdose from the same kind of illicit onslaught.

The toxicology showed five different drugs in his system: an opioid more potent than fentanyl, a cannabinoid, a hallucinogen and two central nervous system depressants. They closely matched the chemicals discovered on the terrifying page officials had found.

Shaken, Wilks ordered his team to start over. Trying to stop the paper from entering the jail was not enough. They needed to get into the streets and find who was making it.

Wilks, 53, relied heavily on a sheriff’s investigator, Adam Murphy, a former narcotics officer who had spent years on the streets.

The team ran back through everything for new leads — and finally caught a break.

Months earlier, an inmate had been caught with drug-soaked paper stuffed in his anus.

Investigators reviewed hours of video recordings of his visits and discovered where he got it: When his girlfriend came to see him, she slipped him a packet of papers while someone distracted officers.

Ecstatic at the discovery, Murphy, 45, went to the girlfriend’s house.

“She told us everything,” he said.

The scale and novelty of an investigation into traffickers making drug-soaked paper — across state lines, prison systems and a staggering array of novel chemicals — was significant enough that Murphy and his colleagues presented it to federal officials in late 2024, hoping they would join the fight.

A few weeks later, they did.

Nearly a year had passed since Murphy persuaded the inmate’s girlfriend to cooperate. Now, in the baked air of late July 2025, a swarm of federal agents encircled a nondescript home in a suburb of Chicago.

A white van pulled in front, blocking cell signals to the house. Agents broke down the door with a battering ram. A drone was sent in to search the premises.

Inside, Murphy saw paper everywhere. Upstairs was an industrial mixer. Downstairs, a shipping station setup, with U.S. Postal Service labels and envelopes. Fans were all over, presumably to dry the soaked paper.

Agents from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and Cook County hauled boxes from the house, some holding paper, as well as amber bottles filled with liquid.

The DEA took liquid, paper and a tan powder to test.

Of all the investigations that Cook County was now undertaking, the federal case was the most ambitious. Five hours later, the target of the raid, Denis Joiner, 33, was in custody. He was charged with distribution of a controlled substance — in this case, paper soaked in two different types of synthetic cannabinoids.

Law enforcement had been surveilling him for months and intercepted shipments to correctional facilities in North Carolina, Indiana and Illinois, according to a criminal complaint filed in the Northern District of Illinois.

After the arrest, Wilks felt some relief that the single biggest trafficker pushing paper in his jail — that he knew of, at least — had been taken down.

But corrections officers kept finding paper in the jail. In the month after Joiner’s arrest, authorities confiscated 277 suspicious pages. Officials are still awaiting autopsy results but say that two deaths in the jail in 2025 and one this year may have been caused by paper soaked in drugs that are even more powerful than before.

Wilks knew that he and his team were trapped in a cycle of this new drug war, where getting to the bottom of the mystery did not stop the mystery, it just changed it. But what else could they do?