E-Mail This Article to a Friend One-way trip (continued) BY MARK BOAL

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. Eric Friedman’s recollections of the night Josh died are extremely precise in some portions and vague in others. "I was tripping for 12 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 fucked-up thing that happened, and I want to prevent it happening to someone else."

Friedman and Josh had spent the afternoon of April 1, 2001, working on an essay Josh had to write as part of his sentence. The subject, ironically, was a statute against possession of marijuana. Friedman spent the afternoon with Josh, crafting 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 at a local 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 milligrams of ephedrine and five milligrams of guaifenesin] 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," Friedman 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. If snorted, the dosage Josh was contemplating, around 35 milligrams, would be seven times higher than anything Shulgin, a man with a lifetime’s worth of experience with psychedelics, had ever tried. When I tell Shulgin over the phone the size of Josh’s dose, I hear him gasp. "That’s just suicidal," he says. "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 rime 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 okay?’ " 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, asking, "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 hot — burning up inside. To cool off, he went into the bathroom, where he stripped off his shirt 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 bear hug 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 Friedman’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 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 naked, 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 flashing 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 and saw Josh in the front seat. His fists were balled up like a baby’s, and he had a blank look on his face. Caruso felt Josh’s pulse and said, "Holy shit, 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. He 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 neither Friedman nor Caruso has been charged. "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, and 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 mentions 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 says. "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."