In the wake of last week’s medical event at Butler County Prison, in which six employees of the jail were hospitalized after being exposed to an unknown substance suspected of being K2, also known as synthetic marijuana, Warden Jo DeMore told members of the county’s Prison Board that it was a “wake-up call.”

DeMore could not be more correct. The same scenario played out earlier this month at the state correctional institutions in Mercer, Fayette and Greene counties.

The question is, will anyone hear it?

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is a new problem — it’s a decades-old problem that continues to change in scope and nature.

It used to be what we might now term “conventional, illegal drugs.” In 1995 hundreds of state troopers and corrections officers descended upon Graterford, a maximum-security state facility outside of Philadelphia, where they searched 3,500 inmates, the prison’s staff, and its 1,700 acres worth of land for drugs and weapons.

They found about 200 weapons, more than 60 caches of drugs, and spurred the retirement or transfer of nine corrections officers and 21 inmates, The New York Times reported that year.

These days, our system of state prisons and county jails are plagued by much more sophisticated and dangerous selections of substances.

Last year, in what now appears an ominous presage to the rash of drug-related medical emergencies that ensnared staff members at SCI Mercer and Butler County Prison, a worker at the state prison at Huntingdon was sickened by a letter laced with K2.

In July of last year the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that the maximum-security prison had “filled its harsh restricted housing unit largely with prisoners whose belongings tested positive for K2.”

In response to the recent medical events prison and jail officials have said they will introduce procedural reforms and request new equipment to help protect staff members and detect drugs like K2, which is exceptionally versatile and easy to smuggle in addition to being extraordinarily dangerous.

Turning our prisons and jails into haz-mat zones is a reaction — a necessary one, it seems — but not a solution.

Giving staffers gloves and masks will give them more protection, but does it make prisons and jails more safe? We think not.

Using technology to frustrate smugglers trying to slip K2 to inmates via laced letters and books is a smart idea, but not a panacea. It may not catch contraband secreted in mail made to resemble legal correspondence, which jail officials aren’t allowed to open.

These aren’t arguments against prisons and jails taking action to keep their workers safe and their facilities more drug-free.

It’s a reminder that our criminal justice system continues to struggle mightily with how to deal with drug offenders and addiction.

Yes, there have been victories to celebrate — among them the work of state Corrections Secretary John Wetzel, who in 2014 presided over the largest single-year drop in the state’s prison population and has managed to reverse a 20-year trend of incarceration growth in Pennsylvania.

But in 2016 the state Department of Corrections also reported that the number of inmates coming into the state prison system already addicted to opioids had doubled, from 6 to 12 percent, in the last 10 years. National studies have shown that as many as 80 percent of inmates struggle with substance abuse in general.

The response has been paltry: last year SCI-Pittsburgh was shuttered and 2,500 inmates were relocated. The state announced $81 million in savings and sent $1.5 million to 13 counties to help treat inmates with opioid addictions.

Prison and jail drug economies don’t just threaten the well-being of those who work and live at the facilities. They expose the degree to which meaningful justice reform continues to elude us.