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More at OHEA.org The trial of two former First Energy executives ends with no verdict.

And a new and deadly drug is getting into prisons in creative ways and making those lockups more dangerous.

That's this weekend.

The state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

The bribery and corruption trial of two former First Energy executives ended with a mistrial after the jury told the judge they were unable to reach a verdict.

On Tuesday, the jury told Summit County Judge Susan Baker Ross they were deadlocked a day after they told her they were at an impasse and she ordered them back into deliberations.

Ross dismissed the jury and the next day declared a mistrial.

After six weeks of testimony, including dozens of witnesses and hundreds of exhibits.

Former First Energy CEO Chuck Jones and former vice president Michael Dowling are accused of paying a $4.3 million bribe to the late Sam Randazzo as he became Public Utilities Commission chair in 2019.

Before the passage of House Bill six, the billion dollar nuclear power plant bailout.

Their lawyers have said Randazzo was not a public official when they paid him money that was intended for clients he was representing and that he stole it.

Randazzo died by suicide in 2024 after pleading not guilty alongside Jones and Dowling.

Attorney General Dave Yost, who filed these charges, says the state will retry Jones and Dowling in 2021.

FirstEnergy admitted to bribing Randazzo and Republican former House Speaker Larry Householder, who was serving a 20 year sentence in federal prison.

Former Ohio Republican Party Chair Matt Burgess was also convicted in the scandal and released early from a five year prison term in October.

A group of rural Ohioans who want to ban huge data centers for the constitutional amendment got the green light to start gathering signatures this week.

The Ohio Ballot Board met on Thursday for a very brief session, chaired by Assistant Secretary of State Kimberly Burns.

As Secretary of State Frank Laroche has been activated.

The board approved language for petitions on the issue banning construction of data centers using more than 25MW a month.

we've been prepping the whole time and we're ready to roll it out.

Are you guys, Amy, to try and get on this?

That would be 100%.

Yep.

Do you think you can get the 413,000 signatures by July?

You bet, baby.

How are you going to do that?

That's ambitious.

We already started a hollow residence for responsible development.

We started the statewide initiative.

We have county leaders in at least 46 of the counties.

Last time I checked, Jessica Adams paper, she really wanted to be here today.

If you're watching, too.

What's up?

Yeah.

And, we've we've got a good statewide starting festivals.

We have a River life festival celebrating the wild.

And really start eating the events and get rolling.

You never done nothing like this before, so we're going to give it everything we got.

Well, you can say, let's go on I don't think the signatures is.

And is this really spreading like wildfire?

Not just Ohio.

It's spreading to key, West Virginia.

And so like in Sylvania, West Virginia, Tennessee.

Everybody's talking about this now.

The group has to gather at least 413,487 valid signatures from half of Ohio's counties by July 1st.

That's a little under three months away.

More than 8 million people are estimated to have turned out for the anti-Trump No Kings protest last weekend, and perhaps the largest single day demonstration in U.S.

history.

There were no Kings events in Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati, as well as Toledo, Akron, Dayton and Springfield, and smaller communities including Sidney, Mount Vernon, Vermillion, Worcester and Newark, sometimes in areas that were Republican strongholds in 2024 And the three fallen.

Ohio Air National Guard men who died in western Iraq on March 12th are back home.

Captain Seth Koval of stouts ville, Captain Curtis Angst and Technical Sergeant Tyler Simmons, both of Columbus, died when their KC 135 refueling plane crashed.

All three serve with the 121st Air Refueling Wing at Rickenbacker Air National Guard Base.

They will return to the air base last Sunday, and were met by Columbus police and a parade of more than 200 veterans on motorcycles to escort them from the base.

A drug called K2 is the most common drug in Ohio's prisons now, and it's the deadliest.

Somebody is making these things.

They're manmade substances.

They're not grown out in the prison yard.

I mean, these are something that is made and somehow is finding their way into prison.

These chemicals interact with the same receptors in the body that, cannabinoids would interact with.

And they can cause an individual to have a heart attack.

Hypertension can cause kidney issues, can cause psychosis.

So they're certainly, dangerous and have been, proven to cause death.

What I thought I knew was that he wasn't doing drugs anymore.

And that he was clean, and that he was going to try and get his life together for his kids.

You know, passing away due to a drug overdose is something that you don't want to hear about a family member, and it just it breaks you inside.

The highly addictive drug, also called tune, gets into the states lock ups and imaginative and terrible ways, according to a yearlong investigation by two reporters.

Drugs are flown in by drones.

They're thrown over fences and brought in secretly by visitors, sometimes even by corrections officers.

The drug has horrible and scary effects, both for the user and those nearby, and it can kill journalist Laura Bischoff from the USA Today Network in Ohio and Doug Livingston from The Marshall Project Cleveland reported this story this week.

To get it, they talk to inmates, people convicted of bringing the drug into prisons, survivors of incarcerated people who died of overdoses, prosecutors and other state and county officials.

They file dozens of public records requests, got access to surveillance footage and looked at hundreds of documents, including police records and autopsy reports.

Their final product is a multi-media presentation on the websites of the USA today, Ohio newspapers, The Columbus Dispatch, The Cincinnati Enquirer, the Akron Beacon Journal, and the Canton Repository, and the Marshall Project.

Cleveland.

I talk with Laura Bischoff and Doug Livingston about what they uncovered and what it took to find it all out.

let's just start with what prompted this series I think, and I imagine a lot of people think that there are drugs in the prison system.

But what specifically sparked some of what you found.

Because what you found was probably more than most people imagine.

Sure.

So some of the early reporting with the Marshall Project was looking at the conditions in prisons, some of the restrictions and why those restrictions were put in place.

And I looked at, some criminal sentencing, adjustments to the state law and also what they were doing with mail in terms of opening mail and scanning it.

And I started digging into why they're doing this and, learned through a deposition, in a, in a case filed against, basically, incarcerate persons saying that it's unconstitutional for them to be opening their mail outside of their presence.

There was a state, DRC official from the Department of Rehabilitation correction, saying on record that there's data on how many times they find drugs inside prisons.

So we requested that data, and I reached out to law and I said, hey, there's something here.

Yeah, we dug out the data.

It was 56,000 instances since 2020, in which, officers on their daily shifts had, seized suspected drugs.

And immediately, right when they seized it, they could only pinpoint where the drugs came from in less than 5% of the time.

It's unclear whether or not, you know, what percentage of the time do they eventually find out, the sources of it.

And in a lot of cases, it's a scrap of paper, soaked in drugs that's found in a common area, like a dayroom or something like that.

And they don't have a real good path to finding out.

Yeah.

I want to ask you, we're talking about meth, heroin, fentanyl.

But also there's these manmade drugs.

There's one called tune that, we heard about, and there's some really creative ways that drugs were being brought in.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah.

So, as you mentioned, some of the typical forms of drugs, you have powder forms, you have marijuana, tobacco coming in.

But increasingly these synthetic compounds.

And if you think of, you know, how heroin became fentanyl, well, marijuana has become synthetic cannabinoids, and it's just a potent form of a drug, that that reacts with the same part of the brain that marijuana would.

But the reactions and what happens next is, is far from, you know, a marijuana experience.

People are vomiting, having seizures, lashing out, attacking other people.

It's causing hurt, heart, heart attacks, kidney failure.

We've really considered they're screaming like demons.

They're hallucinating.

They're like, literally climbing the walls.

And it's it's it is of an array of chemicals that are sprayed on to paper, and then the paper is smuggled in.

That's why they stopped the mail.

They now they scan all of the mail and, electronically deliver it to people inside on their tablets.

Yeah.

During the pandemic, they notice that the the number of drugs they were finding and the number of intoxication incidents were continuing despite shutting down visitations.

So the first thing that they looked at was the visit.

Those are the the mail.

And so they started scanning the mail at the facilities.

That was kind of burdensome.

So they opened the center at a at a former camp and Youngstown, right next to Ohio State Penitentiary.

And now 158,000 pieces of mail are opened and read by a team of about a dozen people there who, make sure there's no drugs in there.

Everything is scanned and allegedly, delivered digitally to their electronic tablets that each incarcerated person has.

That's 158,000 pieces of mail a year on average.

And also, DRC, you know, they're trying to catch it's like a cat and mouse game or, as the director said, a whack a mole.

You know, you get one, you close off one lane and then another one opens up.

They, they, also use artificial intelligence to there's starting a pilot program to monitor the calls, that, that, incarcerated people make to their loved ones off and on on the tablets and, and we'll see how that pans out.

But, you know, there, there there are recorded lines, in this application called, ironically, getting out, in which people can email and make calls.

But most of the I think the drug dealing work is, is done on illegal cell phones that are smuggled in along with packets of drugs.

People are dropping them in by drone.

They're chucking them over fences.

You know, you build a higher fence, they build a bigger, potato launcher.

And it's cheap for the inmates that there was, a quote about getting high for about a dollar a day.

But it's big money for those who are supplying those drugs.

Yeah, it's really, it's it's a marketplace.

So you have supply and demand and each individual prison, some prisons may have more of one substance than another.

So the, if you have a, there's, there's an abundance of, a K2 or two in which is the drug soaked paper, then the costs are going to be really low.

You could get high for a dollar a day.

Some, people have told us at other prisons where the supplies is much tighter.

It could cost you 20 to $25, for that hit that you can then chop up and really smoke over the course of a day.

But a single, you know, a single piece of paper sprayed with this stuff is cut up into like 1500 different hits.

And so each piece of paper is worth, you know, like $6,000 inside.

And so if you were able to smuggle in, on the regular, you know, ten pieces of paper, that's huge money.

And you mention that it's impossible for prison officials in a way, to keep up, because you close off one avenue and another one drops off.

And this is happening not in one prison, but lots of prisons and is I mean, there's 28 prisons.

Is it happening in all of them or most of them?

Are.

So the data points we have, or what's collected by officials who are enforcing rules against drug use and possession.

So a lot of it is a function of like, where are you looking?

What are you finding?

And then what are you investigating once you find something?

So, what we found is the biggest increase in the number of confiscations of drugs in prison are not happening in the higher or even the medium security prisons.

It's the lower security men's prisons and also women's prisons, which are a significantly smaller portion of the overall population.

But the increases are just astounding.

In terms of the percent increase of of drugs found in, in Dayton and, the Ohio Reformatory for women.

And also, I was gonna say, this is not just a uniquely Ohio problem.

This is happening in in jails and prisons across the country.

And these lower level prisons, these are the ones that are housing people who are likely to have shorter sentences, who are likely to get out, and they're potentially going to leave prison with addicted, essentially.

Yeah.

There's significant concerns about whether you can rehabilitate people.

When, when drugs are so readily available to them.

And it's not just, you know, keeping people clean so that they can get their lives back together and, you know, for the 18,000 people who come back and join us in our communities every year after being released from prison, it's a significant concern for, for for whether or not they can not end up back in prison, or not pick up new charges because a lot of them have, strict conditions on their parole or their conditional release once they leave the, the desperation for for drugs inside is so intense that if if somebody can't get their hands on some K2 paper, they will follow the Orkin bug spray man and wipe up the bug, the bug spray and roll it up and smoke it.

Even if it even if there's a dead cockroach in it.

Yeah, I mean, it's it's astounding.

The violence that follows behind this is, is really concerning.

Like a lot of incarcerated people we talked to said that, you know, when you get locked into your cell at night with your cellmate who is using K2 or tune, in, you're not sure how they're going to react here.

Obviously, you know, you're sleeping with one eye open.

And, people's commissary items are stolen, their possessions are stolen.

There are people who will basically force dealers to give them and supply them with drugs.

And if they don't, they'll short circuit fuzes.

They'll they'll knock out the Wi-Fi.

They'll do whatever they can to maintain that.

I, and that's been confirmed by staff members and incarcerated people.

So this is a danger not only to the inmates who are using, but other inmates, and also to corrections officers and prison workers.

I mean, even outside vendors who come in can get caught in some of this violence.

Sure, absolutely.

It's very unpredictable what's going to happen when somebody uses this stuff.

Now, there have been some.

There's at least one that you talked to, corrections officer who was brought into this and kind of lured into it and or forced, if you want to say it.

Yeah.

Doug interviewed, Barbara Devine, who was a corrections officer, and she was pressured by an incarcerated man to, to, smuggle.

And she did, and she got caught.

Yeah.

And, it's kind of it's a common case in which, incarcerated dealers will seek out a staff member who's vulnerable.

Either they have financial problems or, you know, have problems at home.

They're not happy with their job.

It's not hard to find somebody who is doing this grueling prison work who's not happy with it.

That's common.

And so they'll, they'll seek out people who, who could possibly be tempted by, you know, giving them hope and talking to them and kind of grooming them to smuggle and then enticing them with money to bring them to bring the drugs in.

And Barbara was having a rough year.

There was a there was an incident with, a family member, and somebody had had assaulted a family member and got a light sentence and somebody said, hey, I'll take care of that guy when they get to prison.

She never agreed to it.

It happened.

She thinks it may have happened.

She doesn't know for sure.

But at that point, he basically said, you're in my back pocket now.

You owe me.

You're going to do what I do next.

You know, somebody else steps in, takes care of that guy, and it just snowballs in.

Her first and biggest mistake was that she never notified her, her superiors that, hey, they're trying to get one over me, and they're trying to they're trying to get leverage on me.

You.

The series is called smuggled inside Ohio's deadly prison Trade.

How deadly has this been?

Are there any stats that really give you a sense of how dangerous and deadly this is?

Yes.

And it was hard to get it.

So we know, based on what the state reports to the federal government, that there were 336 people who died in Ohio prisons in 2023 and 2024.

If we, look at just 2024, 176 people who died, I believe there's 20 of them that we have linked to, drug related activity.

Some of them are confirmed overdoses.

Some of them are, cases in which drugs were suspected or detected either at the scene based on evidence that was collected.

And then there's a lot of these edge cases where coroners will get a body and take blood and urine samples and send it off to a lab, and that lab may not be equipped to find these new age, cutting edge like chemicals that people are just cooking up and changing the formulas daily.

And so they will write on these reports.

This may be the result of a synthetic cannabinoid intoxication, but it was unable to be detected because it broke down in the system too quickly.

Or this could be a form of bug killer.

Yeah, there was one autopsy that said it could be bug spray.

And, so the coroners are really struggling.

So it's like the BCI lab.

They're they're constantly trying to figure out what this new compounds, what what they are.

And it's it's very costly to figure that out.

You're both experienced reporters with a lot of time doing this job.

Was there anything that you saw, anything that really shocked you, surprised you, anything that really jumped out at you in this?

Because I think a lot of people watching this and this is a multimedia presentation you've put together, there's video, there's a lot that people can look at as well as read.

I think a lot of people are going to be shocked with what they read and what they hear.

But were you guys shocked?

What's not shocking is that there's drugs in in state prisons, but the the extent to which they are available and how difficult it is to detect them and to intercept them and the, the desperation that people, will go through in order to use them.

And I guess what, it doesn't really shock me, but there's a, there's a lack of transparency in the system.

So there's, there's laws that are written to prevent you from getting certain records about what happens in prison if two people, are involved in a crime on the street, I can go down and get the incident report.

I can find out who they are and what they're charged with.

When you're charged with breaking a prison rule.

You know, Ohio law shields, the system from releasing those names of those people.

And so when we talk to the head of the union for Prison Workers in Ohio, he said, these are the numbers we know.

What scares me is what we don't know.

And so if there's not robust tracking and follow up, and, really more transparency in the process, and we only can see the tip of the iceberg here.

And that brings me to what can be done about this.

Because this is a national problem, as you mentioned, Laura.

But there's also this lack of transparency.

There's this whac-a-mole approach to trying to stop this.

What what can be done about this?

I mean, DRC has invested tens of millions of dollars in the mail processing system, which should cut off a big pipeline.

They've invested in drone detection technology, cell phone detection technology, more drug sniffing dogs.

I mean, they've they've invested all of this.

I think that there there's probably room to do, more robust checks on staff members and vendors who are coming in and out of the prisons, regularly incarcerated people.

And some staff members say it is the employees who have the most opportunity to bring in high volumes of smuggled drugs and cell phones.

Yeah.

You know, the front door is where a lot of people say this stuff comes right through.

And, you know, they they're scanning incarcerated people as they come back from appointments, court dates, work details.

They're using X-ray scanners on them.

We asked DRC, a couple of times, why aren't you using those same scanners on staff?

If you say that they are safe, if you say that the level of radiation that they're exposed to over the course of a year will be completely safe if you if you have subjected one person to that.

And it's just been kind of crickets.

They haven't.

So there are some, some interventions that, we don't know if they've considered or not.

They haven't addressed them and they haven't responded to our questions on them.

And finally, you talk to some family members of some inmates who died because of drug use.

And, you know, somebody brought up the point of how do you rehabilitate someone when there are drugs everywhere.

So if they're leaving prison, how do you Oregon that they're staying in, how do you rehabilitate them?

It's harder to do that than it might be on the street in a sense.

Yeah, absolutely.

Like Catherine Dixon is a young woman who lives over in eastern Ohio, and her father, Aaron Dixon, died of a K2 overdose.

And, you know, she thought he'd be safe when he went to prison.

He struggled with drug addiction his entire life.

He got into all kinds of trouble based on that addiction.

And, she thought he'd be safe, and he wasn't.

Yeah, and I would say that.

I mean, the first step to recovery in general is that you have to admit you have a problem.

And this isn't something that state officials have openly talked about.

They'll talk about the different methods that they've implemented, or why they have to restrict access to certain liberties that incarcerated people do have.

But they don't talk about the scope of the problem and the human cost, not just for the people who are incarcerated, but the people who work there and the families who have to get the phone call and not really know what happened.

And just some final stats here.

How long did it take you folks to report this?

How much video was involved?

What what can you tell me about putting this whole thing together?

We, you know, we collected more than 120 autopsies.

We submitted more than, like, 100, public records requests.

We interviewed more than 60 people.

We've been working on it for about a year, and just.

There's got to be hours of video here, because, again, that element is really interesting to see.

Yes.

And we are still waiting on DRC to produce some of the requested videos.

Yeah, I just got a video last night that I requested months ago.

And so one of the problems with this project is that you request a certain document or a data point, and it may take you three months to receive it.

And once you get that, that spurs more questions.

And then you request those records and that takes three more months.

And you can see how a year long investigation could have taken three months if we'd have had the records when we asked for them.

But we've been waiting for many, many months for a lot of what we did get.

The multimedia news series smuggled inside Ohio's deadly prison drug trade, is available on USA Today Ohio websites.

The Columbus Dispatch, The Cincinnati Enquirer, the Akron Beacon Journal, and the Canton Repository.

And at the Marshall project.org/cleveland.

And that is it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Media.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our website at State news.org or find us online by searching.

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You.

Support for the Statehouse News Bureau comes from the law offices of Porter, Wright, Morris and Arthur LLP.

Porter Wright is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at Porter Wright.com.

Porter Wright.

inspired every day.

And from the Ohio education Association, representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools every child deserves.

More at OHEA.org