Jayson Murphy lit the speck of paper and inhaled, holding the smoke in his lungs as long as he could.

His cellmate, John Jenkins, purchased the drug-soaked paper from another incarcerated man at Lebanon Correctional Institution, a state prison notorious for substance abuse and violence.

The drug was their escape from the cockroaches, the bad food, the brutality of their life in prison. The friends laughed themselves to sleep in their bunks that October evening in 2024.

The next morning, Jenkins set his dirty laundry outside the cell and tapped Murphy’s leg. But Murphy, 50, didn’t move.

“Oh man, my cellie is dead,” Jenkins recalled telling a corrections officer.

A crime lab detected potent synthetic drugs that incarcerated users call K2 in the partially burnt paper found near Murphy’s body. Authorities closed their criminal investigation the moment the coroner ruled the death an overdose, abandoning any effort to determine how the drug entered the prison.

“I feel like they think, ‘OK, he made a choice to get high. So that’s that,’ you know, instead of looking deeper into the root of the issues,” said Amber Hall, Murphy’s sister. “How are these things happening? Why are they happening more often? Why is this normal?”

Drug-soaked paper, sold in confetti-sized hits, is now the most commonly found drug in Ohio prisons, fueling violence and accounting for more deaths than any other substance, according to a yearlong investigation by The Marshall Project - Cleveland, Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and Canton Repository.

The highly addictive drug is smuggled in by staff and visitors, tossed over fences and dropped in by drones. Wide-ranging and unpredictable side effects include vomiting, twitching, convulsing, aggression and psychosis.

Jenkins said nearly all 150 men in his cellblock smoke paper. He described a scene from “The Walking Dead” — men passing out or shuffling around, grunting with burn holes in their clothes.

Reporters reviewed hundreds of autopsy, police and court records, hours of prison surveillance footage and data on more than 56,000 drug seizures inside Ohio prisons since 2020. They interviewed prison employees, incarcerated people, families, prosecutors, coroners, forensic scientists, lawmakers, inspectors and smugglers.

The investigation found tens of millions of tax dollars spent on tighter security, including taller perimeter fences, anti-drone technology and the electronic delivery of mail. Yet an unknown number of employees and contractors continue to sneak significant amounts of drugs through the front entrance with little consequence. Workers suspected of smuggling often resigned without facing charges, records showed.

Murphy was among at least 13 people incarcerated in Ohio who fatally overdosed on K2 in 2024, up from just three the year before, according to available autopsy and toxicology reports.

Coroners say they are struggling to identify K2 and other chemicals that evade detection in standard toxicology tests, causing state prison officials to undercount fatal overdoses, the news outlets found after reviewing dozens of death investigations.

“At the end of the day, they’re still someone’s dad, brother, son,” said Hall. “And they have people that care about them.”

Corrections officers are doling out an unprecedented level of discipline. From 2020 to 2024, records show that rule violations for drug use and possession doubled from 10,308 to 20,799, despite only a 6% uptick in the state prison population.

Prison officials attribute the spike to new drug detection methods.

Nearly half of all drugs found in Ohio prisons are suspected to be K2 paper or other synthetic drugs, state records show.

“There is an infestation of narcotics in prisons all over Ohio,” said Chris Mabe, president of the union that represents state prison workers.

The suspected drugs officers find are rarely tested due to cost and potential exposure. It’s impractical to investigate every case, a state official said. Nonetheless, the contraband found is used to discipline incarcerated people.

Drug-soaked paper is the most troubling development within state prisons in 30 years, said Annette Chambers-Smith, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, who is stepping down to take a job in the governor’s office. When it’s not available, desperation and untreated addiction drive incarcerated people to wipe up floor wax and bug spray with toilet paper, and then smoke it.

People will even smoke dead cockroaches soaked in insecticide, Chambers-Smith said. In some prisons, the floors aren’t waxed anymore.

“It’s crazy,” Chambers-Smith said. “Who else is going to smoke wax? I don’t notice that happening out in the community.”

Smoking paper is a uniquely prison thing. The common chemicals and synthetic compounds are hard to detect. The paper is easy to smuggle and hide.

Smugglers can make up to $5,000 for each delivery, which can vary in size and often includes other types of drugs. People who unbundle and sell the packages inside prison walls make even more.

One man incarcerated at Ross Correctional Institution bragged on a text-messaging system used to communicate with people on the outside that he could make $12,000 in two or three days, according to messages obtained by the highway patrol. His collaborators could make a half-million dollars in two or three years.

“It’s a gold mine here,” he texted.

“FUCK THE LAW,” the man wrote in another message, declaring open season for drug dealing in Ohio prisons. “I GOT 28 TO LIFE. IM NEVEGONE STOP HUSTLIN TILL I GET HOME OR THEY KILL ME.”

Synthetic cannabinoids flood Ohio prisons

Even before drug-soaked paper began to overrun facilities in 2018, addiction and drug use were devastating Ohio prisons. Chambers-Smith said more than 80% of incarcerated people have a history of substance abuse.

Corrections officers significantly increased the use of Narcan in 2024 to counter suspected opioid overdoses. But there is no antidote for widely circulating synthetic cannabinoids, which killed more people in Ohio prisons than fentanyl that year, autopsy records show.

These mind-altering substances appeared on the shelves of U.S. head shops about 20 years ago. The drug was sold as incense or potpourri — often in colorful packaging with names like Spice or K2 and with often-ignored warning labels that said, “not for human consumption.”

Public health departments and poison control centers fielded emergency calls and sounded alarms. By 2011, federal regulators and lawmakers in states including Ohio started banning the drug.

These drugs are primarily manufactured overseas. In 2019, the Chinese government outlawed synthetic cannabinoids. But clandestine labs continued to produce the ingredients as manufacturing shifted to the U.S., said Derek Maltz, who led the DEA in 2025.

Synthetic cannabinoids are seemingly tailored for prisons. The drug is soaked into paper, sometimes disguised as court documents, magazines and books. It enters prisons in full sheets or tiny pieces, often packaged in balloons that can be swallowed.

The product is ultimately sold in hits that users smoke or ingest.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Tim Wade, who has served time in six prisons in the past decade. “It’s different. People are getting rich off it. You can’t stop it because you can’t detect it. There’s no test for it.”

When Wade first smoked K2, also called tune, he was told he threw his commissary box at his cellmate while barking like a dog.

“You mess with someone on tune,” Wade said, “you’re liable to get attacked.”

He said he eventually quit, but it wasn’t easy.

Inside Ohio prisons, multiple eyewitnesses described people smearing feces on walls, constantly talking to themselves, and refusing to shower or eat after prolonged use.

Some are “like that permanently now,” Wade said. “They ain’t coming out of it.”

Jenkins, 36, remains incarcerated at Lebanon Correctional Institution. He continued to smoke paper after reporting the death of his cellmate, Murphy.

“That tune is the devil. It turns you into something that you really ain’t,” he said.

The last time he used the drug, he said it felt like his heart was going to explode — a scare that finally got him to kick the habit.

One morning in February 2023, Steven Grant found his cellmate, Willis Crutcher, still slumped over in a chair from the night before. He was dead, his skin cold and tight.

A toxicology test found methamphetamine, fentanyl and K2 in Crutcher’s system. Packing up his belongings fell on Grant, who called Crutcher’s mother to share details of her son’s death.

“That was probably the worst part,” Grant, 48, said, “talking to her on the phone because she didn’t know that he even smoked the tune, you know what I mean? And I hated to be the one to tell her that.”

Incarcerated people, workers and independent inspectors said some K2 users will visit the prison infirmary in the morning until the effects wear off and be back at it that evening.

“We got inmates that go to prison who were straight arrows and clean. And when they leave prison, they’re addicts,” said Ohio Rep. Mark Johnson, a Chillicothe Republican, who has two state prisons in his district. “There is something wrong with this puzzle.”

A game of Whac-A-Mole

Prisons are struggling to stem the flow of drugs across the country and in Ohio, where officials in recent years have spent tens of millions of tax dollars on tighter security and new strategies.

“It’s like Whac-A-Mole,” state prison director Chambers-Smith said of the multi-front war on prison drugs. “[W]hen you shut down one lane, another one tries to open up.”

Along with higher fencing and drone detection systems, Chambers-Smith wants more than 14 drug-sniffing dogs, which take time to train, to cover 28 prisons. In the meantime, prison investigators have deployed mobile units that detect unauthorized cellphone signals and airport-style body scanners that check incarcerated people as they return from visits or outside work.

The scanners use low-dose X-ray imaging.

“A person can be scanned 1,000 times and be under the amount of radiation someone can be exposed to in a year,” state prison officials said in a September press release.

But they’re not used on staff despite more than 180 state prison employees and private vendors suspected of smuggling drugs or contraband since 2020. Some of them admitted to smuggling for weeks or months before getting caught at the main entrance with drugs tucked into their underwear, according to investigative files.

The most significant change is how Ohio prisoners receive their mail.

Mailrooms had become a primary entry point for drug-soaked paper. In 2021, staff at each prison began scanning and photocopying thousands of letters each month. By 2023, the department opened a center in Youngstown to streamline the process.

Now, the 158,000 letters sent to Ohio prisons each year are scanned. Incarcerated people receive them digitally on state-issued tablets, which are also used for emails, phone calls and video visits.

Monitoring all that communication, including 60 million annual phone calls lasting 833 million minutes, is a monumental job. In 2025, the department began piloting artificial intelligence at 10 prisons to help investigators search for keywords and follow up on tips. Lawmakers allocated $1 million to expand the program in 2026.

But incarcerated dealers and their collaborators often speak in code to keep a step ahead of investigators. And last year, prison investigators said they found at least 1,000 illegal cellphones. Mobile units can detect illegal phones, allowing officials to see phone numbers but not hear the conversations.

State prisons are under constant watch by thousands of cameras and employees. Yet drone operators continue to drop drugs into prison yards, even where netting has been installed. People chuck packets over fences or shoot them out of potato cannons — homemade launchers. Visitors conceal drugs in their bags, bodies or clothing, even under press-on fingernails.

Sometimes they’re caught, but often the smugglers get away with it.

“You can get a whole lot of Suboxone strips in the palm of your hand, worth thousands upon thousands of dollars. Same with the K2 — it’s so small and easily carried. It’s really pretty simple math,” said one man, who has been incarcerated for nearly two decades and asked not to be named because of safety concerns. Suboxone, which is abused by some incarcerated users, is prescribed for opioid addiction.

Drug testing is difficult, costly

Of the 176 deaths recorded in Ohio prisons in 2024, officials only linked 10 to fatal overdoses.

But toxicology and autopsy reports show that drug use likely caused or contributed to at least 20 deaths: 13 from K2, five from amphetamines like meth, and one each from fentanyl or alcohol.

And that’s probably an undercount since standard testing isn’t designed to detect many chemicals in drug-soaked paper, and additional testing can be costly. Unable to confirm suspected overdoses, coroners often list an undetermined cause of death or point to a chronic disease in a person’s medical history.

Some coroners go further than others to get answers.

In November 2024, Eric Thompson, 33, died while sitting on the bunk in his single cell at Lorain Correctional Institution. Jaleel McCray, 36, died a month later in the middle of a phone call.

Lorain County Coroner Frank P. Miller III found nothing of note in their medical histories. He sent each man’s blood and urine to a forensic toxicology lab in Indianapolis for the standard $300 screening, plus $200 for synthetic cannabinoid testing. No hits.

Undeterred, Miller applied for free testing at the nonprofit Center for Forensic Science Research & Education near Philadelphia, a cutting-edge operation with the latest instruments and a library of known substances.

Both men had, in fact, died of the same synthetic cannabinoid, the center found.

“It really was invaluable to us that they were able to screen our material and find that,” said Miller.

Warren County Coroner Russell Uptegrove, who examines bodies from two state prisons, increasingly has had to send samples to specialty labs.

“I’ve heard about people trying to spray things with ant killer or some sort of pesticide or some sort of chemicals,” said Uptegrove. “But, again, unless you know specifically what kind of chemical, that’s not going to show up on routine toxicology testing.”

Jessica Toms manages the drug chemistry section at the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, which has grown from six chemists to three dozen in her 20-year career.

Originally, lab testing revealed more common drugs like cocaine and meth, she said. “And now just the volume of designer drugs has exploded.”

Toms and her team are often telling crime labs in other states when they find something new.

“Unfortunately, Ohio is at the forefront of some of these new substances. So, we’re seeing some of these things first, and then telling the DEA, ‘This is what we’ve seen. You should be aware of this,’” she said.

The smuggling economy: ‘A hell of a temptation’

A concentration of users and dealers drives demand behind bars, making prisons fertile ground for the lucrative drug market.

“Who would want to stop that?” said Grant, who has been incarcerated for more than three decades. “I mean, you’re already in prison. You got less risk. What are they gonna do, ride you to another prison where you’re going to do the same thing?”

Workers can make a month’s salary for smuggling just once.

“That’s a hell of a temptation, don’t you think?” Grant said. “It takes a lot of morals and self decency to say, ‘yeah, I’m cool on that.’”

Grant’s solution? Punish everyone who smuggles, sells and uses drugs in prison. “That’s the only way things are really going to change. You have to have consequences. There are none.”

For many, the reward outweighed the risk.

Travis Fletcher worked for Aramark at Mansfield Correctional Institution in early 2021 when an incarcerated kitchen worker serving time for drug trafficking offered him $2,500 to smuggle in “some little things.”

Struggling to pay his bills, Fletcher drove to Akron to pick up pre-packaged Suboxone strips and a box of court papers soaked in K2.

“I can promise u 100,000 cash by christmas,” the incarcerated kitchen worker texted, three days before Fletcher got busted.

Generally, smugglers are paid by dealers via online money apps, such as Cash App, Venmo or Apple Pay. Instead of getting paid, Fletcher pleaded guilty and was given four years of probation.

In some instances, employees conspire with each other to bring in contraband.

At the start of their shifts, corrections officers walk through metal detectors. Another officer working the front desk checks their bags and might run a hand wand over their coworker’s body. It’s like going through airport security, but you might be on a first-name basis with the agent checking you.

Corrections Officer Brenda Dixson worked the front entry desk at Northeast Ohio Correctional Center and would allow registered nurse Jodi Johnson to pass through with drugs and other contraband, according to federal court records. The two women pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial on drug trafficking charges.

Acting on an internal tip, prison investigator Scott Nagy worked with a federal drug task force to catch the two on Oct. 18, 2025.

The prison is owned and operated by CoreCivic, a publicly traded, for-profit company. It declined a request for records that would shed light on the case.

In a 2025 hearing on a prison security bill, lawmakers asked William R. Cokonougher, a sergeant at Ross Correctional Institution, what prison reform is needed most.

“It’s going to be drug interdiction, 100%,” Cokonougher said, without hesitation. “We need to put more measures in place to combat these drugs. Like I said, it’s killing inmates. It’s causing staff to OD.”

Mark Johnson, the state representative, said he believes that the government — not private contractors — should handle all functions inside high-security prisons, including food service. Ohio started contracting with Aramark for food service in 2013 under Gov. John Kasich to save money.

“We have people who are from behind the walls of prison getting their friends to apply for work here,” Johnson said.

“They know all the signs and everything when they get there. They’re not really going to work to serve food. They’re going in there to serve drugs up.”

An Aramark spokesperson did not respond to detailed questions.

State prison officials have banned more than 200 Aramark employees from prison property since 2020 for suspected smuggling or inappropriate relationships, which often go hand in hand. Like former staff put on a do-not-rehire list, they rarely face criminal charges.

And as soon as one of them gets removed from the job, incarcerated people are busy finding replacements.

“I need somebody to come out here and work in this prison for Aramark,” an incarcerated dealer wrote on a monitored messaging system in May 2024, just two days after his Aramark contact got busted. “Can you knock a white girl for us in Chillicothe Ohio, a smart one. To bring me drugs in the kitchen where I work.”

Few answers for families

Katherine Dixon, 24, holds a heart-shaped pendant etched with “always in my heart.” Inside is a portion of her father’s cremated remains.

When she gets married in October, Dixon plans to wear the pendant and leave a front-row seat open for her dad, Aaron Dixon.

“I always imagined my dad walking me down the aisle,” she said.

In August 2024, Aaron called Katherine, the oldest of his seven children, from inside Chillicothe Correctional Institution. They made plans to attend her little sister’s high school graduation together — if he managed to get out in time.

“He said, ‘I love you,’ and that he’d call me the next day,” Katherine Dixon said.

That night, an officer asked Aaron Dixon’s cellmate if his bunkie was OK. He hopped off the top bunk to find Dixon slumped forward, blue and cold.

The autopsy said Aaron Dixon suffered from heart disease and died of a synthetic cannabinoid overdose. Patrol investigators found a wire and a burnt electrical outlet in the cell — a telltale sign of smoking drugs.

As the listed next of kin, Katherine Dixon got the call from the prison about his death. In the weeks that followed, she said she placed multiple calls to the coroner, which yielded little information about exactly what happened.

Prison officials told her that he suffered a heart attack. She learned the true cause months later when a reporter called and shared the autopsy and toxicology reports with her.

“Wait, did you say that he overdosed?” Katherine Dixon said on the phone.

She and her sister Hannah sobbed when they finally reviewed the medical reports. A heart attack seemed easier to accept.

“It feels different because passing away due to a drug overdose, it’s something you don’t want to hear about a family member. It just breaks you inside,” Katherine Dixon said.

Aaron Dixon, who was serving seven years for drug possession and burglary, started using drugs as a teenager. With a family history of addiction, he had little success controlling his cravings. He landed in jails, bar fights, homeless shelters, prisons and trouble. When her father got locked up, Katherine Dixon was hopeful that he would finally get clean.

“I thought he was going to be safe in prison.”

How we did this: A database showed more than 56,000 drug seizures inside Ohio prisons since 2020 — a jaw-dropping number for places that are under constant watch and control.

That information prompted journalists at The Marshall Project - Cleveland, Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and Canton Repository to start asking questions in the spring of 2025.

Who is smuggling, and how are they doing it? How much money is being made? How does the flood of drugs affect safety for workers and incarcerated people? And what is the state doing to stop drug smuggling?

Reporters Doug Livingston of The Marshall Project - Cleveland and Laura A. Bischoff of the USA Today Network Ohio bureau filed more than 50 public records requests, often waiting months for responses while tracking down 121 autopsy reports and interviewing more than 65 people.

The journalists reviewed police reports, court documents, prison records, surveillance footage and witness statements of nearly 100 smuggling cases. They interviewed prison employees, incarcerated people and their families, prosecutors, coroners, crime lab experts, prison inspectors and drug smugglers.

State officials do not track employees and contractors suspected of smuggling. The reporters pieced that together by matching what was available from the state with criminal case files, patrol investigations and prison disciplinary reports.

Reporters and photographers traveled to multiple prisons for interviews, witnessed how drug sniffing dogs are trained, and toured a processing center that reviews and scans about 158,000 pieces of mail each year.