E-Mail This Article to a Friend One-way trip When psychedelic Web sites began crackling with talk of T-7, Josh Robbins was one of the many teens who decided to take the new drug for a ride. He didn’t make it back. BY MARK BOAL

BY THE TIME 17-year-old Joshua Robbins was brought to Memphis’s St. Francis Hospital in the early hours of April 2, 2001, he was already gone, his lifeless body dragged into the brightly lit emergency room by two recent acquaintances: George Caruso, in his early 20s, and Eric Friedman, in his early 30s — fixtures, like Josh, of Memphis’s small, tight-knit rave scene. Josh was naked 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 drug 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 research compound sold via the Internet, which was perfectly legal up until late last year.

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 (ecstasy), 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 various Web postings.

Gram for gram, T-7 is a dozen times more psychoactive than mescaline, but US government agencies are barely aware of it. The Web site of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) catalogues 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." (After learning of this article, the DEA scheduled T-7, and it is currently illegal.)

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 16 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 Alexander and Ann Shulgin’s book PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (Transform Press, 1991) and was intrigued by its description of a "good and friendly and wonderful" new drug. When JLFcatalog.com, a Web site Caruso often visited, offered T-7 for sale, he sent a check immediately.

I visit Caruso at his home in the upscale Memphis 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 fairy-tale heroics. This is where Josh Robbins 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 I didn’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 documented 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 Tupperware 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 20 milligrams. At this point in the transaction, Caruso recalls that Josh asked for "a little extra." A lot has happened since then, and Caruso can’t remember exactly how much extra he 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 18 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 leave Caruso, there is an incident that hints at the social cost he’s 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 three-by-five index cards, which he carried around in his backpack wherever he went.

Josh was born on October 11, 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 14, 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 finishing 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 PhD. 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’s 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 13. "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 shit 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 19. "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, 10 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 18."

By the time he was 15, 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 pieces, 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 $5000. 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 90-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 30-day period of home detention, but as soon as that ended he was back in the mix, quickly re-establishing 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 40 hits of acid on him."

Just as Josh was learning about T-7 online, a friend of his sampled it and gave a stunning report 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 says he declined the hash but alluded to knowing how to make T-7.

A month later, Josh started a new job at a computer technical-support 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 spent time recently 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."