I have put about nine years of time into low-security federal prisons where mail rules are the least strict, and thus where you’d think the most abuses should be occurring regularly. It has been my experience that there are only two kinds of drugs that are sent through the mail: suboxone and K-2 paper. Neither will hurt a person if they touch it or smell it. Harder drugs such as powders, wax, meth and marijuana are either brought in through the visiting room or by drone delivery, or, on rare occasions, by guards themselves.
I personally witnessed, in my building 5751 on the east side of Fort Dix, a guard claim that he walked through a cloud of fentanyl smoke and shortly after passed out. Strangely, however, the guard was able to finish his rounds on the second and third floor before he passed out in his office on the first floor. He was relieved from duty that night and taken away, and our building was locked down and searched. Everyone was collectively punished via a building-wide commissary restriction for a month and a massive surprise shakedown a week later.
The day after the incident happened, I listened to the chatter from other inmates, and the consensus was universal: The guard’s story was complete bullshit. First of all, they said they didn’t know anyone who had fentanyl at the time. Second, nobody smokes fentanyl, and even if they did, they wouldn’t do it when a guard is nearby or making a round. Third, a fentanyl cloud would never be that big, lingering long enough in a hallway for a guard to be able to walk into it. Only people who do not use drugs or sell them would believe something as ridiculous as this story. Had there been a puff of smoke thick enough to take down a guard, the smoker himself would have been dead or taken out to a hospital.
What the inmates suspected was that the guard may have used drugs himself during his shift, while sitting alone in his office all day, and he may have done a little too much and put himself down. And the easy scapegoat, his get-out-of-jail-free card, was to blame it on the inmates.
If an inmate snuck pure, uncut fentanyl into a prison, inmates would drop left and right. And if you’ve ever used fentanyl, or know anything about it, you would understand why. Sure, pure powder fentanyl could come through the mail room in an envelope, but this is not normal behavior for inmates. Most prisoners are not as stupid as people think they are. Smart inmates are not going to kamikaze themselves or anyone else for a tiny bit of powder anything. They will find an easier and safer way. The object for a smuggler is to stay in business, not to make the whole building hot and ruin everyone’s peace. And, if someone did something truly stupid like the smoke-cloud incident I mentioned above, he would have gotten beaten out of the building for costing everyone so much in both shakedowns and a 30-day commissary restriction.
Always remember that cops are human; they are just as fallible and corrupt as the people they are guarding. They get caught and prove it all the time.