Quick action by deputies potentially saved the lives of two female inmates at Habersham County Detention Center last week.
A female inmate came into the jail Thursday smuggling fentanyl in a body cavity, Sheriff Joey Terrell confirmed.
“She shared it with her cellmate and they both ended up overdosing,” Terrell said.
Deputies administered Narcan quickly and got them to Habersham Medical Center for precautionary observation. Both are recovering.
The sheriff’s office has a new body scanner that is able to pick up almost any cavity smuggling, but Terrell said the scans were not read correctly in this instance.
“We have a lot of new people working at the jail, and we would have seen this had the scan been read correctly,” Terrell said. “We just missed it. We are finally full at the jail now as far as employees, but the company has to come down and do the training to properly read the scans.”
Terrell said a training class is scheduled in the next two weeks. In the meantime, he said a supervisor will be checking all body scans to avoid something like this happening again.
“Our people did a good job identifying that the inmates were in distress and taking care of it,” Terrell said. “They could very well have saved their lives.”
Jail personnel monitored three other inmates for potential overdose symptoms because of potential exposure, but none became serious.
Terrell said that if something is located by the scanner in a body cavity, the deputies ask the inmate to give the item up. If they refuse, deputies need to get a warrant for the body cavity search and need to get a doctor to perform the extraction.
The inmate who smuggled the fentanyl in still had more inside her when she reached the hospital, but she willingly allowed medical personnel to remove it.
Fentanyl has become one of the most dangerous drugs in Northeast Georgia over the last few years.
The pipeline of laced drugs into Habersham County comes straight from Atlanta through Hall County, Terrell said in early June.
The sheriff added that fentanyl is dangerous even in small amounts, and larger amounts are being seized far more frequently in recent months.
“Some of the bigger drug players in the Appalachians are running through these markets,” Terrell said. “And even though Gainesville is 45 minutes south of us and Atlanta is a little further down, it directly affects us. It’s super dangerous, as these folks are always chasing a higher high. And where does it end?”