- The A&E documentary series "60 Days In" follows ordinary people who go undercover at jails in southern Indiana and Atlanta.
- Several scenes depict the ways inmates get their hands on illegal drugs, like "cheeking" their prescribed meds to save and stockpile them.
- Inmates will devise inventive ways to get high from ordinary household items, too, like smoking papers soaked in coffee.
Most drugs are forbidden in jail — but that doesn't mean inmates refrain from using them.
In fact, in two jails depicted in the gripping documentary series "60 Days In," inmates go to great lengths to get high when the guards aren't watching.
The show, now in its fourth season, follows regular people who go undercover as inmates for two months to expose problems with the criminal justice system. The first two seasons were filmed at Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and the most recent seasons at Fulton County Jail in Atlanta.
The undercover inmates, who were given false identities and booked under fake charges for their stays in jail, discovered the various ways inmates managed to catch a buzz.
In many cases, inmates used ordinary household items purchased through the jail's commissary. Some made "crack sticks" by crushing up a filter from an electronic cigarette, coating it with Orajel pain reliever, and smoking it. Others smoked paper that had been saturated with coffee — a practice known as "parachuting."
Other times, inmates relied on illegally obtained prescription drugs. One of the participants in the first season of the show,an ex-Marine named Zac, learned that inmates didn't always swallow the pills they received during the daily pill call.
"Basically they'd tuck them under their tongue or under their cheek, and drag them out and then trade them off to people," Zac told Business Insider. "Every single pill call there was someone who was cheeking their meds, either to trade them off or to stockpile them to use for getting high."
Once traded, prescription pills can be swallowed, snorted, or mixed with other drugs. One popular use for pills is "whippit" — a potent, taffy-like concoction made from melted candy and coffee. In one episode, a group of inmates celebrate a female participant's birthday by spiking whippit with Effexor, Depakote, and Remeron, prescription drugs used for treating depression and bipolar disorder.
"It tastes like candy, like a little fluffy candy," an undercover inmate named Stephanie said. "A candy I cannot stop eating. It's very addictive."
But even illegal drugs like crack, cocaine, meth, and heroin find their way into inmates' hands. As the inmates discovered, the drug trade in jail is an intricate web involving coordination between inmates and associates on the outside.
At Clark County Jail, inmates used illegally-obtained cell phones to communicate with accomplices outside the jail. The accomplices would then intentionally get arrested so they could smuggle drugs into the facility, often in their body orifices. Then, the drugs would make their way to trustees, inmates who are selected for jobs like food preparation and garbage collection.
Finally, the trustees would distribute the drugs to different zones within the jail by hiding them under food trays as they distributed meals to the inmates.
Clark County Sheriff Jamey Noel long suspected the elaborate system, but it took until the filming of the show to confirm it. Noel's findings led to a revamping of the trustee system, and the knowledge provided by one of the inmates even led to the arrest of a woman who tried to sneak drugs into the jail shortly after filming ended.
"60 Days In" airs Thursday at 10 p.m. EST on A&E.
