Pittsburgh woman sentenced for role in smuggling synthetic marijuana into prisons

A Pittsburgh woman was sentenced Tuesday to eight months in a federal prison for her role in smuggling synthetic marijuana, or K2, into correctional facilities, according to court records.

Sandra Wilson, 29, was ordered to spend an additional three years on supervised release.

Federal prosecutors said Wilson worked with a co-defendant in 2018 to get items with synthetic marijuana on them. She then smuggled those items to another co-defendant who was housed at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Facility in Youngstown and the federal prison in McKean in Northwestern Pennsylvania, according to court filings.

Investigators said in a sentencing memorandum they uncovered the scheme through text messages on a cell phone confiscated from the co-defendant inmate and messages sent between the pair through the Bureau of Prisons’ email system.

“She freely chose to participate in a scheme to distribute K2 into and inside prisons,” prosecutors wrote in the memorandum. “She then actively participated in the acquisition of the K2 and the distribution of the K2 into prisons. At one point, she even started to manufacture K2 saturated paper herself.”

Wilson pleaded guilty in June to conspiring to distributed a controlled substance.

She was indicted as part of a larger alleged drug trafficking network that involved several different types of drugs including heroin, cocaine and fentanyl.

Synthetic marijuana, also known as spice and K2, is created in a laboratory and can cause elevated heart rate, seizures and hallucinations, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Issues with it in prisons and county jails prompted lockdowns and changes to mail policies to prevent it being sent to inmates from the outside.