Jail smuggler soaked drugs into pages of legal papers
A PRISONER tried to smuggle more than £225,000 of synthetic cannabis into a jail by soaking the drug into 751 pages of legal papers.
Nathan Parish (pictured) drenched his case files in 4F-MDMB before handing himself in for breaching his licence conditions, a court heard.
But the 30-year-old’s plan was discovered by suspicious guards at HMP Hewell in Worcestershire, after he kept asking to see the papers relating to his criminal proceedings.
Prosecutor Graham Russell told Warwick crown court the highly potent sheets were found to be worth up to £300 each and could have fetched more once cut up into pieces.
Parish was jailed for 16 months in June 2019 for assaulting a woman at a train station and released to a hostel in February last year.
Before handing himself in to police in Leamington Spa in April, he had texted: ‘There’s 4,500 at stake here. I can earn 4,500 on a 28-day recall.’ Parish claimed he had been forced to take the papers in for someone else to settle a previous prison debt. Derek Johashen, defending, said: ‘He was playing a limited role under direction. He was being told to take something in and hand it over to someone else.’ He has now been jailed for a further two years and five months after admitting possession of the drug with intent to supply. Lucy Young, operations manager at HMP Hewell, said there had been an increase in paper dipped in controlled substances. ‘It is difficult to detect, but Hewell has increased its use of drug dogs,’ she said.