DRUG ABUSE IN PRISONS IS TOUGH TO STAMP OUT

Richard Pillajo, a wellness education officer at a Florida state
prison, strayed beyond his job description, according to investigators
who arrested him last year. He allegedly planned to smuggle cocaine,
marijuana and hydrocodone pills to inmates for a payoff of $2,500.

Florida's corrections secretary, Walt McNeil, praised the
investigators from his own department who cracked the case. Yet
official annual reports suggest these investigators, like their
counterparts in many states, are playing a frustrating version of
Whack-a-Mole as they try to keep illegal drugs out of America's prisons.

In many large state prison systems, a mix of inmate ingenuity,
complicit visitors and corrupt staff has kept the level of inmate drug
abuse constant over the past decade despite concerted efforts to
reduce it. A recent boom in cell phone smuggling has complicated
matters, with inmates sometimes using phones to arrange drug deliveries.

"The prison wall is not a boundary anymore," said Terry Thornton, a
spokeswoman for California's corrections department, which seized
about 5,000 contraband cell phones in 2009 -- more than triple the
2007 total.

Roughly 1,000 "drug incidents" are reported annually at California
prisons -- seizures of marijuana, heroin and other drugs. Between 2006
and 2008, 44 inmates in the state died of drug overdose deaths.

Florida has implemented anti-contraband strategies that its
legislative watchdog office says match or exceed those in other states
- -- including drug-detecting dog teams, metal detector searches of
staff and visitors at all prisons, and even random pat-down searches
of staff, rarely done in other states.

Yet despite these efforts, 1,132 random drug tests of inmates in
2008-09 were positive -- the same positive rate of 1.6 percent as 10
years earlier. Even more striking, officers seized 2,832 grams of
marijuana and 92 grams of cocaine at the prisons during the year, by
far the highest figures of the past decade.

"People are always trying to smuggle drugs in," said Gretl Plessinger,
the Florida Correction Department's spokeswoman. "Our ultimate goal is
to get rid of it, but I'd be a fool to tell you that will ever be realized."

The canine teams are given partial credit for the surge in marijuana
seizures, but there are only nine teams -- rotating among 60 prisons.

Drugs reach inmates in numerous ways -- via visiting relatives, by
mail, through the complicity of prison staff, by inmates themselves
who smuggle in drugs dropped off by associates at off-prison work sites.

Josh Gelinas, spokesman for South Carolina's corrections department,
said smuggling tactics shifted after the state installed X-ray
machines and metal detectors at all medium- and high-security prisons.
Drug packets now are sometimes launched over prison walls by paintball
guns and homemade launchers known as "spud guns."

"The imagination and creativity of people under lock and key boggles
the mind," said Dr. Westley Clark, director of the federal Center for
Substance Abuse Treatment, who suggested that the cost of creating
drug-free prisons nationwide would be prohibitive.

Corrections officials say much of the prison drug trade is controlled
by gangs -- and one result is sky-high prices. Tommy Johnson, Hawaii's
deputy corrections director, says the going price for heroin behind
bars is sometimes 10 times the street price.