In July 2025, searching ‘K2 soak paper’ on TikTok yielded 76 million results. These posts include videos where users discuss or demonstrate how synthetic drugs like K2 can be applied to everyday paper, some of them suggesting these can be mailed into correctional facilities as legal mail.
What These Videos Show
- Methods for soaking greeting cards, coloring pages, or fake legal mail in K2 (“spice”) or similar substances.
- Tips on how much to apply and how to dry the paper without raising suspicion or creating detectable anomalies.
- Comments from viewers openly asking how to get it into facilities.
This kind of content is not theoretical. It is a real-world, serious issue where soaked paper has led to overdoses, or worse. Overdoses in correctional facilities reduce staffing, compromise safety for both staff and inmates, and drive up avoidable medical costs and legal fees. And while many of these videos are taken down, others quickly replace them.
Why It’s a Problem
K2 is a dangerous synthetic drug that, even in small amounts, can cause severe health effects, including seizures, hallucinations, or medical emergencies. K2-soaked paper often appears indistinguishable from regular paper, posing detection challenges for terahertz-based mail screening systems.
These TikTok videos are evidence that people are attempting to exploit these challenges. Lack of detection creates safety concerns for mailroom workers who may remain unaware of the presence of concealed substances as they process the mail.
These publicly available videos highlight a concern that the playbook for avoiding terahertz-based detection is simple enough to find by anyone with the right keywords in a search engine. This criminal activity highlights the importance of advanced screening technologies providing sheet-by-sheet analysis to effectively detect contraband in mail, particularly when compared to systems designed for screening unopened mail.
Want your mail secured? The only way to secure your inmate mail from K2 or other drug-soaked paper is with a solution that advances with the changing threat landscape and includes state-of-the-art, sheet by sheet chemical analysis.
While some facilities have moved to digitize inmate mail, that approach has its own serious drawbacks. Not to mention the important legal issues of interfering with legal mail and the rights around attorney/client privilege.
What Can Correctional Facilities Do?
From a scientific viewpoint, Eclipse’s VeroVision® Mail Screener+ is the only mail screening device using short wave-infrared hyperspectral imaging, which can detect chemical signatures of drugs like K2, with no guesswork, and no digitizing. This advanced imaging can automatically detect and presumptively identify concealed drugs that the human eye, and anomaly-based detection systems, can’t. Therefore, the TikTok approaches are rendered useless.
VeroVision® Mail Screener +:
- Fits with the normal process and flow of correctional facility mailrooms
- Preserves access to original, physical mail pieces
- Supports safety without sacrificing dignity for incarcerated individuals
- Provides accurate, fast, objective results
Presumptively identifies the detected drug
If TikTok Is Talking About It, Mailrooms Should Be Too
If people are openly sharing how to make K2-soaked paper on TikTok, it’s not a hypothetical threat. It’s a real and growing risk. Facilities need tools that can identify these substances before they reach inmates. With the right screening technology, like VeroVision®, mailrooms can stay ahead of these evolving methods without compromising mail access or staff safety.
Contact us today to schedule a demo.