Michigan's Prison Overdoses Rose Nearly Tenfold in a Decade. Drug-Soaked Paper Is the Main Route In.

Michigan's prison system recorded 396 drug overdoses in 2025 — nearly ten times the 41 reported a decade earlier, and a 74 percent increase over the prior year, according to the Department of Corrections' own critical incident reports. Twelve of those overdoses were fatal.

The delivery method behind much of that surge is unusually low-tech: ordinary sheets of paper, sprayed or soaked with synthetic cannabinoids, smuggled behind the walls and smoked. In a report to lawmakers earlier this year, the department said that tighter mail rules had reduced contraband overall, but that "adulterated paper remains a primary form" of drugs entering its 26 prisons — and that "nearly any piece of paper within a facility could include contraband."

That second sentence is the whole problem in miniature. Michigan has already gone further than most states to control what comes in by mail. It stopped handing inmates original letters six years ago and began providing photocopies instead. This year the policy was tightened again, to cover confidential and legal mail as well; the originals are shredded. Thirty-six states now photocopy prison mail, a practice advocates criticize because black-and-white scans can be illegible and cut incarcerated people off from a physical connection with family.

The drugs still arrive. A quarter-inch square of treated paper — a "dot" — is enough for a single high and sells for one to three dollars inside, according to two incarcerated writers who have described the market. A full sheet can fetch up to a thousand dollars.

What the department's own numbers show

The overdose counts come from critical incident reports, the internal documents filed when staff respond to a medical emergency. They show a system in which drug-related emergencies roughly tripled in two years: 227 overdoses in 2024, 396 in 2025, 12 deaths in 2025.

The mortality picture for this year is not fully closed. Michigan's prisoner mortality report covering February through August 2026 lists at least four deaths attributed to synthetic cannabinoid overdose, with another 42 deaths still pending medical examiner review. The previous report listed no synthetic cannabinoid deaths at all.

That gap between confirmed and pending cases matters more than it might appear. Synthetic cannabinoids are not part of a standard toxicology panel, so a death can be recorded without ever being tested for the compounds that caused it. Researchers who track the drug class describe prison and jail fatalities as systematically undercounted, and the pending reviews are the closest thing to a correction.

Meanwhile the prison population has been falling. The overdose curve has not.

A case series of "wasping"

Alongside the cannabinoid cases sits a stranger phenomenon that Michigan researchers have now documented in the peer-adjacent literature of occupational health: "wasping," in which paper is dosed not only with drugs but with insecticide.

Occupational-health researchers at Michigan State University assembled cases from hospital records, poison control calls, workers' compensation claims and ambulance runs covering 2023 through 2026. They identified 20 incarcerated people, nine corrections officers and one other staff member sickened by exposure to wasping fumes. Twelve of the cases were logged this year. At least one inmate has died: in March 2025 a man was found not breathing in his cell after smoking fentanyl with a pyrethroid insecticide — the active class in ordinary wasp spray — and died six days later in a hospital.

The September 2025 case in the series reads like a toxicology exam question. An inmate was found walking around confused, heart rate 170 beats per minute, pupils dilated. He said he had smoked paper laced with synthetic drugs, methamphetamine and wasp spray. In the emergency room his eyes darted; standard drug testing came back negative; clinicians called the poison center. He was eventually discharged.

The authors are careful about the limits of their own data. The series captures only cases reported to the state's pesticide surveillance system, it does not identify which prisons or which dates, and no laboratory testing confirmed that a pesticide was actually present. Ken Rosenman, one of the researchers, told MLive the count is rising — while noting that awareness itself improves detection.

Forensic analysts suspect most "wasping" cases are, at bottom, synthetic cannabinoid cases. "Usually it is synthetic cannabinoids," said Alex Krotulski, director of the Center for Forensic Science Research and Education. "It's the thing that's going to get them high. It's unfortunately also the thing that is quite toxic, has pretty bad side effects and can result in death."

Why K2 behaves differently from anything else in the facility

Synthetic cannabinoids are lab-made compounds designed to hit the same receptors as cannabis, but they are not close cousins of it in potency. In 45 death cases tested by CFSRE between August 2023 and March 2025, the metabolite of 5F-ADB appeared in 80 percent, the metabolite of MDMB-4en-PINACA in 31 percent, and both in 17 percent. Measured by activity at the receptor, 5F-ADB is roughly 450 times more potent than delta-9 THC; MDMB-4en-PINACA roughly 100 times.

The pharmacology explains the case histories. Most of the deaths CFSRE reviewed were described simply as "individuals found down in cell." The National Institute on Drug Abuse notes that illicit synthetic cannabinoids are associated with severe and sometimes life-threatening health problems, that they are typically applied to dried plant material or vape liquid for smoking, and that they are largely invisible to routine urine drug screens — which is part of their appeal in a setting where testing is routine.

Facility staff are exposed too. In August 2025 four officers at Gus Harrison Correctional Facility in Adrian became ill after smoke filled an inmate's cell; two went to the emergency room. A state narcotics team in respirators and hazmat suits later collected the cell's contents. The Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the prison $6,000 for failing to provide adequate personal protective equipment, a citation the department has appealed on the grounds that a cell search with nothing burning and no contraband found the day before fell "significantly outside the norm." MIOSHA's own follow-up said it was unclear what the officers inhaled, but that it could involve inmates making drugs "from materials such as bug spray."

What this means outside the walls

Prisons are closed systems, and what happens inside them tends to be treated as a corrections problem rather than a health one. Two consequences reach past the fence.

The first is that incarcerated people with substance use disorder are, overwhelmingly, released back into the community — often with no tolerance, no naloxone and no appointment. That transition is the single highest-risk window for overdose in the whole arc of the disease, which is why discharge planning and medication continuity matter more than anything that happens in the last month of a sentence. Families preparing for a release can read our guide to reentry from jail or prison and our explainer on medication for opioid use disorder.

The second is that paper is not a fixable vector in the way a visitor or a package is. Legal mail has to arrive. Books have to arrive. Courts have held that it does. Every additional restriction trades a documented risk against a documented harm, and Michigan has now made that trade twice.

What happens next

Three things are in motion. The 42 deaths awaiting medical examiner review will determine how large this year's synthetic cannabinoid toll actually was — and whether the department's mortality reporting catches up with its overdose counts. The appeal of the MIOSHA citation will decide whether staff exposure at Gus Harrison is treated as an outlier or as a foreseeable hazard of the job. And the mail policy will keep being tightened unless the department finds something other than paper to police.

For families, the practical question is less abstract. Someone leaving a Michigan prison this month should leave with naloxone in hand, a first appointment already scheduled, and — if they were receiving treatment inside — no gap in medication. If that is not in place, it can be requested before release through the facility's health care provider and the community provider handling the transition.

The Michigan Department of Corrections said in a statement that it "continues to take significant strides to reduce drug contraband, which has become increasingly difficult in recent years due to the increase of synthetic drugs that may be sprayed or soaked on paper and easily concealed."

For anyone who needs help now, the SAMHSA National Helpline is 1-800-662-4357, free and confidential, 24 hours a day. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline handles overdose-adjacent crises as well.