JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office is putting a stop to the illegal drug flow into the Duval County Jail.
On Tuesday, JSO announced the arrest of Nathan Williams, a local criminal defense attorney.
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Williams is facing 8 felony charges.
Investigators said he coordinated with inmates and their families to smuggle drug-laced legal paperwork into the jail in exchange for money.
Those sheets were laced with synthetic marijuana.
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“When it gets brought inside, it can either be smoked or it can be ingested as a way to get the chemicals inside the body,” Mike McCormick with Florida Poison Control said.
Florida Poison Control said it is a chemically-created drug.
“It does interact with the same receptors that normal THC would have on a person,” McCormick said. “So, you can a lot of time have that same sort of high that can come from it.”
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And depending on what’s inside, synthetic drugs can bring other issues and lead to overdose.
“It doesn’t come through a quality control process where we are going to know what we are dealing with,” McCormick said. “You also have the potential that you could even have fentanyl go into a substance like this.”
Williams’ arrest is part of a long-term investigation called Operation Stamp Collection. Since February 2024, JSO has made 21 arrests related to smuggling or attempting to smuggle drugs into the jail.
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In 2023, there were 23 overdoses at the facility, and 9 in 2024.
Action News Jax asked JSO how many of those were specifically synthetic marijuana and we were told the agency does not have that statistic and those numbers would come from the medical examiner.
JSO said this is still an active investigation, and additional arrests are anticipated.
You can watch JSO Undersheriff Shawn Coarsey discuss Williams’ arrest in the video below:
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