The drug deal was just two freshmen texting each other, agreeing to meet outside a convenience store on the campus of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
Terms were set quickly, $40 and an Adderall for four hits of "acid."
"We can go up to my room if you want to not be sketchy," read one of the final texts from Chandler Thomas.
The casual tone couldn't contrast more with the tragic events that unfolded over the next several hours: university police finding Thomas stumbling around a campus parking lot before falling hard, his convulsing body rushed by ambulance to Washington Regional Medical Center in Fayetteville; Lisa Thomas, his mother, getting the call and driving all night from Austin, Texas, to see her son.
"He had his eyes open but he never spoke," Lisa Thomas said.
She doesn't know how aware he was of the family and friends at his side for the 21 days he remained in intensive care. Chandler Thomas, 19, died Dec. 2.
The university response zeroed in on the class of drugs Chandler Thomas is believed to have taken, synthetics purchased over the Internet known as 25i or 25I-NBOMe. In a mass email to students Dec. 5, UA officials warned of the "national, and possibly local" use of synthetic drugs.
In the few paragraphs, UA officials didn't mention Thomas but described the drugs, hallucinogens that can be passed along on the back of stamps or soaked onto blotter paper.
The email warned students about side effects like seizures, erratic behavior, paranoia, kidney damage, "and in some cases death." The email also included ways for students to reach out if they had further questions, listing the email address for an expert at the campus health center and the phone number for the dean of students office.
A similar message also went out to email Listservs for parents of UA students, said Melissa Harwood-Rom, UA's dean of students.
Drug overdoses of any kind are rare on the UA campus, university police and administrators said, but "we knew that the substance was on our campus," said Harwood-Rom, referring to 25i. The immediacy of the situation and the accessibility of the drug fed into the UA's thinking to send an alert, she said.
"People were just buying it off the Internet. It was coming in essentially blocks of blotter paper. It was something students could avoid if they knew what it was," Harwood-Rom said.
The 'dark web'
Thomas likely didn't know what he was taking, nor did Luke McMullen, the UA student who sold Thomas the drugs, said Denis Dean, the Washington County deputy prosecutor handling the criminal case against McMullen.
"Mr. Thomas was attempting to buy LSD, and it appears that Mr. McMullen believed the substance was LSD, but he was buying it online from Silk Road," Dean said, referring to a website operating on what's sometimes known as the "dark web," a part of the Internet not accessible through typical searches.
Federal agents shut down Silk Road in September, but other variants have popped up since. The sites offer a way of buying and selling black-market goods using the electronic-only currency known as bitcoin. In the text messages, the seller referred to the drugs as "one of the last things shipped" before the Silk Road site shut down.
A resident of Thomas' dorm, Humphreys Hall, told police Thomas "had taken four hits of 'acid'" earlier in the day on Nov. 11, according to an affidavit filed to get access to phones owned by McMullen, a resident of Yocum Hall before he was expelled.
But, despite tests at the hospital and after Thomas' death, no illicit drugs were found in his system. Hospital drug tests focus on specific substances, including LSD, Dean said, but don't catch everything.
Virginia-based researcher Justin Poklis said there's no reason to believe any hospitals have routine tests for this type of drug, and he doubted any commercial laboratory even offered such testing in November. After three weeks in the hospital, any trace of the drug in Thomas' body would be long gone, said Poklis, manager of the mass spectroscopy laboratory for Virginia Commonwealth University's pharmacology and toxicology department.
McMullen, 19, pleaded guilty June 4 to one count of delivering LSD and was sentenced to six years of probation.
"He had no criminal history," Dean said, when asked about the sentence. "This was the first time he had been in trouble of any kind, and we were concerned from a prosecution standpoint of the lack of evidence."
McMullen, arrested Nov. 14, was never found to have LSD or the synthetic variants in his possession, Dean said.
Focus on education
Lisa Thomas said she had no opinion about the sentence. She has turned her attention to educating others about the dangers of synthetic drugs. An admissions director for Hyde Park High School in Austin, she spoke to about 400 people, mostly with ties to local Austin schools, at a May event for a student-led coalition called Students Opposing Substances. The group has youths sign contracts agreeing to not take drugs, with parents then given tests that can be administered to their children. The testing gives teens an excuse to say no to drugs or alcohol, helping shield them from peer pressure, according to group organizers.
Thomas described her son as adventurous and intelligent, "my ADD, invincible kid," she said, referring to Attention Deficit Disorder, which is often treated with Adderall. The text messages included in police reports include one from the seller describing a dosage of one or two hits. Despite Chandler Thomas apparently being unfamiliar with the exact substance -- asking in one text, "It must be great .... for that expensive right man?" -- he also texted that "I normally take 4 or 5."
However, the potency and makeup of drugs can vary widely, Dean said.
"That's the danger with drugs, especially nowadays and on college campuses. You never know what you're getting because it's not regulated," Dean said.
According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, drugs like 25i, categorized as synthetic phenethylamines, were linked to the deaths of 19 Americans from ages 15 to 29 between March 2012 and August 2013. A Little Rock man, 21-year-old Clayton Otwell, died in 2012 after taking one dose of 25i at a music festival in New Orleans, according to published reports.
At Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, La., student Meghan Lopez died in April 2013 after taking a synthetic hallucinogen, according to reports. Louisiana law differs from Arkansas law for a person distributing drugs who directly causes the death of a person taking the substance, and another Southeastern Louisiana student, Cody Watts, has been charged with second-degree murder, suspected of providing the drug.
Dean said he considered pursuing a charge related to the death of Thomas, but Arkansas law requires proof of intent to harm or recklessness beyond simply the selling of illegal drugs.
Lisa Thomas said she had never heard of the drug 25i until friends of her son at the hospital said it could have been what her son ingested. Washington Regional doctors told her they weren't familiar with the drug, and she had to go online to research it.
In September, a DEA official told Congress 25I-NBOMe was first developed as a research drug in 2003, with little history of human use before 2010 when it became available online.
Poklis, the Virginia researcher, said such drugs have use in a "Petri dish" lab setting to study effects on parts of the brain known as receptors.
Synthetic drug makers know the drugs unlock an effect in this part of the brain. But apart from this limited information, "we have no data on how they affect people," Poklis said, adding that designer drug makers make constant subtle variations in what they produce.
Reaching out to students
At UA, the message of awareness includes not just the one-time email alert, but ongoing educational programs to engage students, said Scott Flanagin, communications director for UA's student affairs division.
"I don't think that the incident with Chandler necessarily changed the way we're trying to communicate information," Flanagin said. "But we're constantly on the lookout for the new trends, the issues around drug and alcohol, and finding ways to make sure we're offering the right programs and services to students to make them aware of the danger."
Dolores Cimini, a psychologist who has helped develop alcohol and drug prevention programs in New York, said some but not all universities might issue a public note offering condolences after a student dies from a drug overdose, perhaps doing so without listing a cause of death. Often the final cause of death isn't known for weeks in such cases, Cimini noted.
Cimini, who works for the University at Albany, praised efforts to reach out to students about pressing issues.
"There hasn't been any research done on the effectiveness of email communication in changing behaviors, but what we do know is after a crisis on campus, timing is very important and being transparent and giving out information for resources, for assistance is very important," Cimini said.
Thomas said more than 1,200 people attended her son's funeral at an Austin church. She said he chose Arkansas in part because of the cooler weather, with several friends he knew from Austin also attending UA. He was enrolled in UA's business college, she said.
A police report included a brief statement from a classmate that Chandler Thomas was "having a hard time in school right now," but Lisa Thomas said he had a great disposition when she spoke with him by phone on the same day he was hospitalized, a conversation about going home for the holidays.
No way could her son have realized the danger he was getting into, she told the crowd in Texas, her voice choking back tears, as she urged students to avoid drugs, and parents to be involved with their children. A video of her talk published June 8 on YouTube had more than 8,400 views as of Friday.
"I can tell you, if he had any idea -- any idea -- of what the next 22 days would have been like for his family, his sister, he would never ever have texted that boy. He would have never put those stupid dots on his tongue," Lisa Thomas said.
SundayMonday on 06/15/2014