http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.drugs.psychedelics/msg/1a055a8bda8d67d3?dmode=source
From: "y0y0 The Magic Yellow Jello Jellybean" <map8n0s...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
Newsgroups: alt.drugs.psychedelics
Subject: Rolling Stones Article (aka: stupid people shouldn't do drugs ;)
Lines: 460
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000
Message-ID: <y9R08.26021$Vq.263523@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
NNTP-Posting-Host: 12.226.192.169
X-Complaints-To: abuse@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
rwcrnsc53 1011080926 12.226.192.169 (Tue, 15 Jan 2002 07:48:46
GMT)
NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 07:48:46 GMT
Organization: AT&T Broadband
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 07:48:46 GMT
By request. I just finished scanning & OCRing, although my NTP is acting
up
again, so this
may take a while to upload. Please excuse mistakes (it has not been
proofread), and most of
all, enjoy!
__________________
This much of this drug killed this boy. And it was perfectly legal.
A journey into the designer-drug underground.
by Mark Boal
BY THE TIME seventeen-year-old Joshua Robbins was brought to Memphis St.
Francis Hospital in
the early hours of April 2nd, 2000, he was already gone, his lifeless body
dragged into the
brightly lit emergency room by two recent acquaintances: George Caruso, in
his early twenties,
and Eric Friedman, in his early thirties - fixtures, like Josh, of
Memphis'
small, tightknit
rave scene.
Josh was ****d except for a pair of bloody jeans bunched around his
ankles,
and he had cuts
all over his head, hands and feet. On his death certificate, the coroner
would scribble, "Took
too many drugs in too short a time." And that was that - another tragic
drag
death, a victim
of Ecstasy or something like it.
Yet Josh was an unlikely candidate for a fatal drug overdose. In Cordova,
Tennessee, a
Bible-thumping Memphis suburb with tract houses and tidy lawns, where Josh
lived with his
parents and three younger siblings, drugs don't often kill kids who can
quote Ecclesiastes.
But Josh lost his life experimenting with a little-known psychedelic,
2C-T-7, a perfectly
legal research compound sold via the Internet.
T-7, sometimes called 7~Up or Tripstasy for the way its effects are
described as resembling a
cocktail of Ecstasy and LSD, is perhaps one of the most potent and
legendary
compounds to have
emerged from the designer-drug underground. It was, like MDMA, originally
synthesized to aid
psychological research, but during the past two years or so, T-7 has
slowly
infiltrated the
mainstream, mostly through the rave scene and through various Web
postings.
Gram for gram, T~7 is a dozen times more psychoactive than mescaline but
government agencies
are barely aware of it. The Office of National Drug Control Policy's Web
site catalogs an
extensive list of drugs but does not mention T-7. The Drug Enforcement
Administration has
never busted anyone for buying or selling it and says the drug is "under
review."
While users have raved about its mellow and sparkling hallucinogenic
qualities, T-7 is also
highly dangerous in ways that are still not understood. In addition to
Josh,
at least two
people in the last sixteen months have died from overdosing. Unofficially,
there's growing
concern among government officials about these deaths.
"It's another one of those damn synthetics," says Kate Malliarakis, branch
chief of specific
drugs, Office of Demand Reduction, at ONDCP. "It's not a nationwide
epidemic
yet. But I say
*yet,' because every time I say it's not going anywhere, it does."
GEORGE CARUSO'S FIRST contact with T-7 was considerably milder than
Josh's.
He'd
read about it in the book PiHKAL (see "T-7's Bad Trip") and was intrigued
by
its description
of a "good and friendly and wonderful" new drug. When JLFcatalog.com (see
"20,000 Hits a
Day"), a Web site Caruso often visited, offered T-7 for sale, he sent a
check immediately.
I visit Caruso at his home in Memphis' upscale suburb of Germantown.
Caruso
wears his brown
hair long, to match his long goatee. The night he clicked on
JLFcatalog.com,
he was sitting in
his room on the second floor, illuminated by the glow of his computer
monitor - and the even
brighter glow of black-light posters that featured wizards and goblins
engaged in fairytale
heroics. This is where Josh Rob-bins came looking for T-7. "He was a
pretty
smart guy," Caruso
says, recalling that night. "He was funny. I think we joked a little. But
Ididn't know him
very well; he wasn't a friend or anything."
When I ask whether he feels guilty, Caruso assumes an air of cool
insouciance and begins to
speak expansively, almost philosophically, about the unpredictability of
psychedelics. He says
they place great stress on unbalanced personalities: "I believe there are
some people who are
not really grounded. And when they trip, they can fly off. Then they come
down and they look
for a place to land, and there isn't one. That feeling can be very scary
for
some people. It's
do***ented that it can scare people to death. I think Josh died of fright.
He scared himself
to death."
I ask whether he could remember what he'd told Josh before he sold the
dose.
"If you want, I
can show you exactly what I did," he says. He pulls a Tupper-ware
container
from a shelf and
withdraws a small plastic baggie. At the bottom, and clinging to the
sides,
is about a sugar
packet's worth of off-white powder: a gram of T-7. "I need to read you
this," Caruso told Josh
that night, glancing at a sheet of paper that came from JLFcatalog.com. "
'You agree that this
is an experimental raw material and that you will not ingest or insert it
in
your body in any
way. Do you agree?' ""Sure." Caruso goes to his bookshelf and pulls down
an
industrial-looking
scale - sort of a glass box covering a metal plate, with an LCD screen. As
I
lean in to get a
closer look at the scale, the numbers on the screen flicker. "It's
sensitive
to air currents,"
Caruso says. "This is one of the most accurate scales you can buy. It
costs
a couple grand."
Then Caruso painstakingly places flakes of T-7 onto the scale using a
small
spoon. He stops
when the
screen reads twenty milligrams. At this point in the transaction, Caruso
recalls that Josh had
asked for "a little extra." A lot had happened since then, and Caruso
can't
remember exactly
how much extra he'd added, but he's "pretty sure" it was no more than a
"tiny bit." He told
Josh not to snort the T-7.
Though Caruso seems almost sanguine about Josh's death, his girlfriend, a
crunchy, soulful
young woman of eighteen with an almost inaudible way of speaking, who'd
sat
quietly for the
duration of our interview, tells me in private that Josh's death had
"freaked him out"
considerably. And before I left Caruso, there is an incident that hints at
the social cost he
was paying for Josh's
death. We're sitting in a local bar when a stocky guy with a crew cut
stumbles over to our
table, nearly spilling his beer as he sits down in a chair no one offered.
His face is set in
a hostile grimace.
"Heard you're in trouble," he grumbles to Caruso.
"Is that right?" Caruso replies.
"Yeah, I heard it was your stuff that killed Robbins."
"Is that right?"
The guy presses ahead. Was it true? Did he kill Josh Robbins?
Slowly, casually, cool as can be, Caruso replies, "No, man, it's not. And,
listen, if you
don't mind, we're just about... to ... have ... our ... dinner." The
inquisitor doesn't look
convinced, but just the same, he apologizes.
WHEN PSYCHEDELIC WEB SITES WERE crackling with talk of T-7 in the early
months of 2000, Josh
Robbins was one of the many teens who caught wind of the fad. Researching
drugs was something
he liked to do, and he took particular care to acquaint himself with
psychedelics and the
leading psychedelic Web site, erowid.org. He kept terse notes on the
political controversies
surrounding magic mushrooms, LSD and Ecstasy on 3x5 index cards, which he
carried around in
his backpack wherever he went.
Josh was born on October nth, 1983, into a working-class family in
Memphis.
His father, Eddie,
a thickly muscled man with a buzz cut and a thin mustache, is a store
manager at a Kroger
supermarket and an artillery major in the Tennessee Army National Guard.
His
mother, Melanie,
a cheerful woman with brown bangs and a ready smile, works for Hallmark as
a
greeting-card
distributor. Josh spent his early childhood in Arkansas, where his primary
interest was
athletics. A fast, lanky youth, he excelled at football and had the
strongest arm of anyone on
his baseball team.
When he was fourteen, Josh moved back to Tennessee, where he enrolled in a
Memphis-area school
that blended home schooling with on-campus test-taking. One of his
supervisors there, Rita
McConnico, gave him the name Clip Boy because Josh clipped - the school's
word for fini****ng a
subject - so quickly and with such high marks that he was on track to
become
valedictorian.
"Right away, we recognized that this boy was very intelligent," says
McConnico. "He took one
algebra test and his answer came out different from the answer key. Well,
it
turned out he was
right and the key was wrong." His plans were to attend the University of
Memphis and
eventually earn a Ph.D.
To adults, Josh was invariably polite, soft-spoken and clean-cut. His
mother
recalls that Josh
brushed his teeth, washed his hands and did his laundry without ever being
told. "He was
almost a perfectionist about the way he looked," McConnico says. But to
his
friends, Josh
presented a different face. He was still the same soft-spoken youth, but
he
also drank hard,
smoked pot constantly and, in the years leading up to his encounter with
T-7, dealt a variety
of drugs. Josh was a popular member of Memphis' rave circuit, in part
because he was smart and
funny, but it didn't hurt that he was always willing to share his ready
supply of pot. "When
Josh said he wasn't carrying," says Josh's cousin Micah Karr, "that meant
he
had a quarter
ounce in his backpack."
Josh smoked pot for the first time on Christmas Day when he was thirteen.
"I
remember we were
out back of my grandmother's house," recalls Karr, a skinny young man who
slouches when he
talks.
"Josh had made this pipe and somehow got his hands on a bit of skank. You
know, we were kids,
experimenting with all the **** we could find." Karr remembers getting
seriously buzzed, while
Josh said over and over that the pot had no effect.
"He was always saying nothing affected him," says Karr, who is now
nineteen.
"I would be just
messed up and tripping my balls off, and he would be like, 'Well, I'm not
feeling anything.' I
don't know if it was true, but he was saying it." Whenever he tripped on
LSD, Josh always took
more than anyone else. "He would eat, like, ten hits," Karr says. "Crazy
stuff." On two
occasions, acid trips left Josh ranting and raving, and once he had to be
hospitalized.
Concerned about his son, Eddie Robbins tried to intervene. He confronted
Josh after Josh was
found with a small bag of marijuana and told him to stop. But the boy was
argumentative and
said that God put herb on the Earth for man to use. Frustrated, Eddie
called
the cops and
turned Josh in. Looking back, Eddie says he still believes involving the
law
was the best
thing for Josh at the time: "I knew he was dealing, and I wanted him to
bottom out before he
hit eighteen."
By the time he was fifteen, Josh was living with his grandmother and had
gotten into the acid
business.
He'd buy sheets of it from a friend and then turn around and sell the
individual doses at
slightly higher prices. Before long, he hooked up with a local big-time
acid
dealer who
carried around briefcases of liquid vials. This dealer would front Josh
acid
at nearly
wholesale prices, for pennies a hit. "Then Josh would turn around and sell
those for, like,
five dollars," Karr says. "That's when he started making the real money."
At
the year's end,
Josh decided to count his profits. He spread all his money out on his bed
and counted it. It
came to $5,000. He was so proud that he took a picture of the pile of cash
and showed it to
his cousin.
But before he could enjoy his gains Josh landed in jail. The police,
acting
on an anonymous
tip, caught him with marijuana. Since it was his second offense, Josh
served
a ninety-day
sentence in a juvenile detention center, and the incarceration seemed to
cause a change of
heart. He began reading the Bible, studying for his ACTs and telling his
parents he'd given up
drugs for good. In a letter home, he wrote, "I finished Ecclesiastes
yesterday, and today I
started reading about Joseph, starting with Chapter 37." After his
release,
Josh served a
thirty-day
period of home detention, but as soon as that ended he was back in the
mix,
quickly
reestabli****ng the ties he had before the bust. Karr remembers picking
Josh
up the day he was
allowed to leave his house for the first time: "He'd just gotten out, and
he
had forty hits of
acid on him."
Just as Josh was learning about T-7 online, a friend of his sampled it and
gave a stunning
re****t about the drug's "cartoon visuals." The friend, who requested
anonymity, said Josh was
eager to try it, and only a few days later, he got his chance. At a small
house party, Josh
met George Caruso. "I remember Josh came up to me and asked me some things
about it," Caruso
says.
"He was really well-informed, and we talked for a while. There was a girl
he
liked, and I told
him he should go on and talk to her. He offered me some hash, and it was
pretty good - sticky,
well-hammered." Caruso declined the hash but alluded to knowing how to
make
T-7.
A month later, Josh started a new job at a computer technical-sup****t
company named Stream. He
got the job through a friend he met on the party circuit: Eric Friedman, a
folk guitarist and
songwriter, who was born in Memphis and educated at New York University.
He
was also, as he
puts it, a former "facilitator" of Ecstasy transactions. Josh and Friedman
became friends, in
no small part, Josh's other friends say, because Friedman had enough
Ecstasy
lying around to
front Josh large batches, which he'd then turn around and sell.
Friedman, who is now in a recovery program, has a different recollection.
"I
liked Josh," he
says. "He was a very smart guy. He looked up to me, and in a funny way
that
was a good
feeling. But we also hung out because he could get me drugs."
IN A CLINICAL SENSE, WHAT HAPPENED THE night Josh Robbins died is that he
snorted a massive dose of T-7, which, combined with the lingering
aftereffects of other drugs
in his system, put more pressure on his heart than it could bear. The
details are far more
harrowing. Friedman's recollections of the night Josh died are extremely
precise in some
****tions and vague in others. "I was tripping for twelve hours, the last
seven of which I was
watching somebody die," he says, calling from a halfway house in
California.
"I couldn't
imagine something that horrible, even if I tried." He's willing to talk
about the evening, he
says, because "this was an incredibly ****ed-up thing that happened, and I
want to prevent it
happening to someone else."
Friedman and Josh had spent the afternoon of April 1st working on an essay
Josh had to write
as part of his sentence. The subject, ironically, was a statute against
possession of
marijuana. Friedman had a password for the online database Lexis-Nexis and
spent the afternoon
with Josh, Grafting the paper. By the time they were finished, around 4
P.M., both of them
felt they deserved a small reward. They each took a roll - a hit - of
Ecstasy, in the form of
a pill. Friedman booked a room in the Best Suites hotel, figuring they'd
invite people and
make a party of the evening. They went to the hotel, where they proceeded
to
consume some
whip-its - nitrous oxide capsules. They watched some TV and called some
friends, but nobody
wanted to come over and party. After about five hours, both guys fell
asleep.
Friedman woke up first and stumbled over to Josh, who was sleeping in a
chair.
"I ate a minithin [an ephedrine wafer containing 25 mg of ephedrine and 5
mg
of
guaifenisen] and was like, 'Man, how are you?' " Josh said he was groggy,
so
he ate a minithin, too.
"Then Josh started talking about T-7 and was saying George had some,"
Fried-
man says. Josh called Caruso. "They talked about it for a while, and Josh
asked
him a bunch of questions. He was really interested in getting it in bulk,
and in
how much he could make off it."
They tried to persuade Caruso to come to the hotel, but he said he was too
tired, so they went to his house. After the buy, all three went to an
apartment
kept by a couple Josh knew. It was a small place strewn with beer cans.
Josh
was all set to take the T-7 there, but Josh's friends said they had to
work
the
next day, and the last thing they wanted was a guy tripping until all
hours
in the morning. "I
told him not to do it," the apartment owner recalls, "but he was pretty
insistent."
As with many drugs, snorting T-7 drastically changes its
effect. "Snorting multiplies the potency by at least a factor of five,"
says
T-7
inventor and psychedelics pioneer Alexander Shulgin. The dosage Josh was
contemplating, around 35 mg, would be seven times higher if snorted than
anything Shulgin, a man with a lifetime's worth of experience with
psychedelics,
had ever tried. When I told Shulgin over the phone the size of Josh's
dose,
I
could hear him gasp. "That's just suicidal," he said. "It's an
unbelievable
amount."
Josh inhaled it all in one quick snort. His friends immediately started
laughing. One of them,
the girlfriend of a guy who'd taken T-7, said, "He's going to start puking
right away -
watch." The chemical burned as it surged through his nasal passages and
hit
his brain; then it
rocketed him to a mind-bending plane where time melted and colors danced.
But by the third or
fourth minute into the trip, Josh was deeply nauseated. They left the
apartment, and Josh
vomited as soon as they got downstairs to Friedman's car. "He started
puking, and he kept on
puking all the way over to the hotel," says Friedman. "By the time we got
there, he was just
dry-heaving because he didn't have anything left." "I asked him, 'Dude,
are
you OK?' "
Friedman says. "He was like, 'Yeah, man, I'm fine.' It never occurred to
me
that anything
weird was going to happen. I didn't know much about this drug except that
it
was supposed to
have an X-like effect and that it was legal. The whole premise was, this
is
a legal drug and
we'll be fine."
Back at the hotel, Friedman sat in one room of the suite watching TV while
Josh
sat by himself next door. When Friedman went in to check on him, Josh
asked
weakly, "Hey, Eric, is there any way to make this stop?"
Friedman called Caruso and asked if there was a way to counteract the
trip.
Caruso said no, it just keeps going. Then Josh said, "Eric, am I going to
die?"
To which Friedman replied, "I don't think so."
"Are you sure?" Josh asked. "Because this is stupid."
Josh went back to the adjacent room and turned off all the lights.
Friedman
followed him, and they sat in the dark for a while, not talking. Then Josh
started mumbling,
"Coke, crystal meth, LSD" over and over again. Then he changed
the refrain to the names of his relatives: ". . . Where are they?"
Friedman
said
they were probably asleep. "This is stupid," Josh said again.
"At this point he's repeating their names constantly," Friedman says. "But
instead of saying it, he becomes louder and louder and he's screaming
their
names." Then Josh started flailing his arms. He rushed Friedman in the
dark
and
hit him a few times, but Friedman managed to calm him down for a while.
Then Josh began saying he was superhot - burning up inside. To cool off,
he
went into the bathroom, where he stripped off his ****rt and sank to the
cold
tile floor.
Friedman remembers calling Caruso and asking him what to do about his
friend's strange
behavior. Caruso said it was no big deal, give him a blanket and a glass
of
water and tell him
to chill out.
Josh was not going to chill out. Friedman could hear him from the
bathroom,
and it sounded like he was having a fight with someone in there. He found
Josh
savagely kicking the toilet. Friedman grabbed him in a bearhug and again
told
him to chill out. Instead, Josh started swinging wildly. They scuffled in
the
bathroom and it spilled out into the main room, Friedman again holding
Josh
and Josh flailing.
He landed a blow on Fried-man's eye, at which point Friedman, who was the
larger and stronger
man, gave up trying to restrain him. "He started throwing himself into the
wall and screaming
and yelling at the top of his lungs," Friedman says. That's when Josh
started screaming, "I
don't want to die! I don't want to die!"
A couple from California staying in the room next door heard the wails. It
sounded to them like the cries of a woman being beaten by her husband, and
they called the police. Meanwhile, Friedman called Caruso again. Caruso
recalls
that he, too, could hear Josh's screaming in the background. "It sounded
to
me
like he was having a very bad trip," Caruso says. "But, you know, lots of
people have bad trips all the time." Still, Caruso suggested that Friedman
move
Josh someplace less public than a hotel. Friedman called some friends, who
said
they'd be right over to help.
Friedman managed to persuade Josh that they had to leave. Now buck ****d,
Josh ran down the
hotel's staircase to the parking lot, where his other friends were
waiting.
They hustled him
into Friedman's car and locked the doors, and Friedman went back upstairs
to
gather his
things. He wasn't there long when he heard a cop knocking on his door. As
the cop peered
around the bare hotel room, Friedman explained that the trouble, started
by
his friend, was
now over. The cop looked around, shrugged and left.
Friedman went back to the car. Josh was in the passenger seat, banging his
head against the dashboard. Friedman called Caruso one last time; they
agreed
they would go to Caruso's house. Friedman remembers driving at 70 mph, and
because he was tripping, he saw streaks of light fla****ng in the
pitch-dark
sky.
"I'm not religious at all, but I felt like a higher power was out there,
wanting me to know it
existed," he says. When the car pulled up, Caruso came down in his boxers
and saw Josh in the
front seat. His fists were balled up like a baby, and he had a blank look
on
his face. Caruso
felt Josh's pulse and said, "Holy ****, I think he's dead." They dragged
him
out of the car,
and Caruso performed CPR on him. He pumped and breathed and pumped and
breathed, but Josh
didn't breathe back. Friedman freaked out. Caruso freaked out. Josh was
bleeding all over the
grass from the cuts on his feet and hands. Caruso ran upstairs, threw on a
pair of jeans and
took another pair for Josh. He got them around Josh's ankles but couldn't
pull them up to his
waist because his legs were bent and stiff. They crammed him back in
Friedman's car and sped
off to the hospital.
THE POLICE IMPOUNDED FRIEDMAN'S CAR and told him and Caruso not to leave
town. The next
morning, Friedman called a lawyer, who suggested he check himself into a
drug-rehab clinic in
California, which he did. Although he showed up in Memphis a month later
to
attend a
grand-jury hearing along with Caruso, he hasn't been back home since. He's
taken comfort in
the recovery movement. "Josh's death is a horror," he says. "But I have to
say it's changed my
life completely. I got sober. I am literally scared sober. But I am
reminded
of
that night every day of my life."
Officials convened a federal grand jury, but they didn't have much to go
on,
and no arrests have been made. "There was nothing they could do to me,"
Caruso said one night as we talked about it. "Nothing that happened that
night
was illegal." Driving home from the grand jury, Caruso joked to his
girlfriend,
"Well, there goes my chances of being president."
Josh's circle of close friends all left town after he died. Those that
remained
took to wearing necklaces bearing a laminated picture of him. In the
photo,
he's
smiling; his eyes seem wider than normal; his pupils are dilated. A girl
who
decided she liked
him just days before he died says his death has "cleansed the
scene." In not so many words, she mentioned the cruel irony that Josh, who
had spent so much
of his life researching drugs, had died from one he barely knew. "This was
so unlike him," she
said. "He was so careful."
Josh's parents cope in their separate ways. For Melanie, the tragedy "was
like a dream -
unbelievable, happening to someone else." For Eddie, there is meager
solace
to be had from the
dim prospect of revenge: "I know my son was no saint, but somebody gave
him
that drug, and
justice ought to be done."
_______________
20,000 Hits a Day
Designer drugs on the Internet
THE CLEARINGHOUSE: EROWID.ORG
When Josh Robbins first wanted to learn more about 2C-T-7, he logged onto
Erowid.org, a New
Age-y site that tries to "do***ent the complex relation****p between humans
and psychoactives."
Launched in 1996 by two Web designers who call themselves Earth and Fire,
Erowid specializes
in first-person narratives, written by drug users. There are also
scientific papers and
recipes for every drug in the book - not just exotic psychedelics like
T-7
but also hard
narcotics such as crack and heroin.
Only lately has the site, which logs around 20,000 hits a day, matured
into
a full-time
operation. With that power comes a sense of responsibility. "The choice we
struggle with daily
is whether to keep information away from the people who are actually using
these substances,"
says Earth. "Or to publish information that could, and probably will, be
misunderstood by at
least a few."
Usually, they publish, and at least some people don't seem to mind. When I
asked officials at
the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Office of National Drug
Control
Policy about T-7,
they didn't have much to say - except to refer me to Erowid.org.
THE SOURCE: JLFCATALOG.COM
The American companies that began selling 2C-T-7 early in 2000
were mostly shoestring operations with limited access to raw materials
that
closed as quickly
as they opened. One exception, an outfit called JLF Poisonous
Non-Consumables, had
established itself as perhaps the nation's largest T-7 dealer. JLF is
located near
Elizabethtown, Indiana, population 391. Most of its business is done
through
the company's
Web site, JLRatalog.com. The site offers a cornucopia of
pharmacologically
active flora and
fauna -such as opium poppies and toad skins - billed as "poisonous
nonconsumables." Before
Josh's death, the fourth item listed under PURE COMPOUNDS was
2,5-Dimethoxy-4-(n)-propylthiophenethylamine hcl. That's T-7. At $425 a
gram, it was one of
JLF's most expensive items and one of its best sellers.
The man behind the company is Mark Niemoeller, a forty-five-year-old
farmer
turned Internet
entrepreneur who runs the operation out of a couple of small buildings
and
some truck
trailers. As far as Niemoeller is concerned, his stuff is sold for
scientific research, for
burning as incense or for religious purposes. "Look," he says, "people
do
strange things. I
expressly tell them not to eat or in any way ingest my products, but if
they
turn around and
do that, I have no enforcement mechanism. That puts the responsibility
squarely on the
shoulders of the customers." To that end, every one of JLF's customers
must
read a long and
blunt disclaimer that declares, "All merchandise sold in this catalog is
poisonous."
Within a few months of Josh's death, JLF removed any references to 2C-T-7
from both its Web
site and its mail-order catalog. A few weeks after that, a squad of DEA
and
Food and Drug
Administration agents raided JLF.They confiscated what Niemoeller
estimates
is around $250,000
worth of merchandise and froze a $750,000 bank account."I am just totally
shocked," he says.
"I feel raped. They took all my customer records, hundreds of thousands
of
names, and
effectively they've shut me down."
_______________
T-7's Bad Trip
"We never thought of this in terms of recreation," says the drug's
inventor
From his basement lab in a secluded pine grove in Lafayette, California,
Alexander Shulgin,
who taught forensic chemistry at the University of California at
Berkeley,
spent the better
part of the Eighties communing with test tubes and synthesizing new
hallucinogens. His
methods were unorthodox (he tested every drug on himself), but the
results
were marvelous. He
crafted around 120 new compounds, published more than 200 articles and
positioned himself as
the leading light of psychedelic inquiry.
Of all the drugs he crafted, Shulgin considered 2C-T-7 among the most
"promising." After the
requisite clinical experiments conducted on himself, on January 16th,
1986,
he widened his
subject sample, inviting a dozen or so scientists and artists he knew to
experiment with the
new drug. "Am still in a peaceful state after five days/' said one member
of
the group. "All I
have to do to remind myself is look out the window and see the glory."
In 1991, Shulgin published PiHKAL [Phenethylamines I Have Known and
Loved],
recording all of
his drug experiments. It has stayed in print ever since.
T-7 first entered commercial channels in Amsterdam in the fall of 1999.
Profiteers who'd
heard about it on the conference circuit brought the drug to Amsterdam's
"smart shops" under
the brand name Blue Mystic."I was very interested in the fact that it was
described as a
controllable hallucinogen by Dr. Shulgin," says Ananda Schouten, managing
director of De
Sjamaan's (The Shaman), one of the country's smart-shop chains. "And in
all
the written
material available, there was no mention of side effects." But after the
first re****ted T-7
death in America, in 2000, Dutch authorities threatened to ban the
product.
The smart shops
agreed to remove it from their shelves immediately.
T-7 might have gone back underground, but news of Blue Mystic had reached
the Internet, and
the buzz fostered a strong demand. This time, Americans stepped in to fill
it. The Americans
were constrained, however, by the analog drug laws, which stipulate that
a
substance that is
both similar to an already known illegal drug and sold for human
consumption is, de facto,
illegal. To get around that law, T-7 was billed as a "research chemical"
of
a "nonconsumptive,
noningestive, nonculinary, nonfood, nonmedicinal nature" and sold in bulk
form. The strategy
worked, but T-7 users ended up having to gauge dosages themselves - nearly
impossible to do
with the ****d eye, since the difference between a safe dose and an
overdose is no more than
a few specks.
It has caused Shulgin nothing but anger and sadness that the research
compound for which he
had such great hopes has become a drug of abuse. "We never thought of this
in terms of
recreation - we thought of it in terms of looking at the spiritual
aspects
of the psyche," he
says. "The idea of 2C-T-7 getting on the streets is appalling."
_______________
The Casualties
Josh Robbins wasn't the only young person who lost his life to experiments
with T-7
While thousands of people have tried T-y without incident, the drug has
been
associated with
at least two deaths other than that of Josh Robbins.
Jacob Daniel Duroy, 20, a resident of Norman, Oklahoma, was a former high
school track star
and a member of the Fellow****p of Christian Athletes. He's believed to
have snorted a
massive 35 milligrams of T-7 on October 15th, 2000. Ninety minutes into
his
trip, Duroy was
vomiting and highly agitated. Friends took him to a hospital, where he
died, according to the
medical examiner, from "an overdose of 2d-T-7."
In Seattle, a twenty-four-year-old Web designer - the kind of guy who
"liked
to party," as a
friend put it - swallowed what is thought to have been a heavy dose of
T-7,
under the
impression that it was an experimental form of Ecstasy. Around the same
time, he also
swallowed 200 milligrams of Ecstasy. After feeling poorly, he was taken
to
a hospital, but he
died the following morning, April 8th, 2001, of cerebral hemorrhaging.
|
