The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has taken rare enforcement actions against Maryland correctional officials, not just at the Baltimore jail, but also at the state’s women’s prison in Jessup, public records revealed.

After issuing warning letters to both facilities in 2021, the DEA visited them last year and performed “accountability audits” that uncovered violations of the federal Controlled Substances Act, namely through inadequate record keeping, according to records obtained by The Baltimore Banner.

At the jail, officials could not account for some 92,500 methadone pills over a three-month period — an astonishing tally that The Banner first reported in October after reviewing a leaked document.

Additional records recently produced by the state showed that those problems extended — albeit on a lesser scale — to the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women in Jessup. At MCI-W, the audit revealed a failure to maintain accurate records for 1,630 methadone tablets and 550 buprenorphine tablets. The resulting agreement restricted the facility from distributing medications to a neighboring men’s prison, the Jessup Correctional Institution.

The Baltimore jail and state women’s prison, both run by the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, are registered with the DEA for their “narcotic treatment programs,” which are used to treat opioid use disorder and, ideally, help prevent overdoses after people are released.

The correctional facilities are authorized by the DEA to dispense certain controlled substances, with tight restrictions, given the potential street value of the medications.

In a statement, the corrections department explained for the first time what happened at Central Booking last year, saying that the 92,500 methadone pills were “not determined to be lost, missing, or diverted.”

“The discrepancies arose from legibility issues in paper record-keeping, leading to disqualified counts,” said Lowell Melser, a department spokesperson. “No evidence suggests theft or diversion.”

To address the record keeping issues, Melser said the department recently moved from paper logs to “electronic systems for inventory control and medication counts,” which he said would “enhance accuracy and reduce the potential for errors.”

Corene Kendrick, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Prison Project who has toured the facility several times and is entangled in a lawsuit with the state corrections department over the jail’s treatment programs, said the state’s reliance on paper logs was a preventable error.

Dr. Michael Puisis, the former independent medical monitor for a decades-old health care lawsuit against the jail, often raised issues about the jail’s paper record keeping.

“Obviously we’re glad that there’s not a bunch of people that are stealing 92,000 pills and reselling them on the streets of Baltimore, but it still reflects some major issues, and more importantly, it reflects problems that were identified for years by the neutral court expert that they [the state corrections department] just blew off,” Kendrick said.

The DEA’s memorandums of agreement with the corrections department lock the facilities into additional reporting requirements, including quarterly audits and inventories. A former DEA official last year described the enforcement actions as relatively rare, reserved for “the most serious offenses.”

The corrections department said the agreements do not impede its ability to dispense the medications to those who need them.

Why it matters

To address the high rate of fatal overdoses for people who were recently incarcerated, Maryland lawmakers passed a law in 2019 requiring local jails to have opioid use treatment programs, though many jurisdictions struggled to set up the costly programs without state funding.

That funding hasn’t been an issue at Baltimore’s state-run city jail, which has an opioid disorder treatment program and also works with local advocates to dispense the medication.

Jim Crotty, former deputy chief of staff at the DEA, said the audits of the Maryland facilities revealed “woefully inadequate” record keeping that could have had life-or-death implications for incarcerated people relying on the medicine.

“It’s sort of a tragic story, really, to see that despite years of this opioid crisis, we still have such a long way to go, particularly in carceral settings,” Crotty said.

Dr. Michael Fingerhood, a Johns Hopkins addiction specialist who often treats people recently incarcerated at Central Booking, said the state’s operations have implications beyond the jail walls.

If the corrections department does a poor job running an opioid use disorder treatment program in the jail, it could erode the public sentiment about those programs, Fingerhood said.

“We are advocates for patients receiving medication for opioid use disorder and we want them to be administered safely and documented correctly,” he said.

Regina LaBelle, a Georgetown University professor and former acting director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the switch to electronic records at the jail was an improvement, but expressed skepticism that the state ruled out any evidence of theft, given the widespread nature of the discrepancies.

LaBelle said the state’s lack of disclosure about the DEA actions made it appear that they were trying to “hide the ball” rather than publicly address and correct the issues.

“This is why it’s so important to keep reporting these stories and make sure the lawmakers and policymakers are keeping a close watch on what’s going on,” LaBelle said.