In this Feb. 25, 2015, file photo, Wesleyan University sophomore and neuroscience major Zachary Kramer, 21, stands during his arraignment in Middletown, Conn. (Patrick Raycraft/The Hartford Courant via AP)
A former Wesleyan University student pleaded guilty to federal drug dealing charges Thursday, admitting that he distributed a party drug that sickened nearly a dozen people in February of this year.
Zachary Kramer, 22, was one of five people arrested in connection with the rash of overdoses in a case that caught national attention and roiled the Middletown, Conn., liberal arts campus, which has a reputation for progressive politics and freewheeling experimentation.
On paper, illegal drugs are as forbidden at Wesleyan as anywhere else.
But in practice, they aren’t hard to find on campus. In dorm rooms. At festivities for the end-of-spring-semester Zonker Harris Day (named for the perennially pot-smoking character from the comic strip “Doonesbury”). At parties like the one at the Eclectic Society, an aptly-named co-ed “anti-fraternity,” as Rolling Stone put it, on the night of February 22.
Drugs were coursing through the veins of Abhimanyu Janamanchi, a sophomore, as he danced at the Eclectic party. But when he started to feel sick just after midnight, according to Rolling Stone, he called Kramer, a friend of his, to pick him up. Kramer fed his classmate some water and Triscuits and put him to bed.
Early the next morning Janamanchi suddenly sat up in bed, gasped for air, then fell back onto the mattress, not breathing. His heart had stopped. Kramer called 911 and administered chest compressions while he waited for paramedics to arrive. Janamanchi was taken to the hospital in critical condition, one of 11 sick people rushed from the campus to the emergency room that night and the following morning.
As the hospitalizations mounted, Dean Mike Whaley sent out a campus-wide e-mail urging students to check on their friends, according to the student-run blog Wesleying. “Do this right now!” he exhorted.
Meanwhile, police — with the cooperation of Wesleyan administrators — were working to track down the source of the drugs that had sickened so many students. They eventually honed in on Kramer, a sophomore from Bethesda, Md.
According to a federal indictment, Kramer returned from winter break in January with at least 25 grams of what he believed to be MDMA, a Schedule-I psychotropic drug often known as “Molly.” That semester, he was one of the school’s chief suppliers of Molly, which he allegedly sold at $80 to $100 a gram. He also gave it to some friends (referred to in the indictment as “distributors”) for redistribution to other students on campus, the indictment said.
After the overdoses, the indictment said, Kramer urged his distributors not to speak with the police and told other students that that one of his “distributors” was the source of the purported “bad” Molly. He and some of his distributors destroyed their supply of the drug.
But tests of drugs seized from one distributor and sent to a toxicology lab revealed that the powdered substance wasn’t Molly at all. It instead contained AB Fubinaca, a powerful synthetic drug that mimics the effects of cannabis but is orders of magnitude more potent. Known in other forms as “fake pot,” “K2″ and “Spice,” synthetic cannaboids have been linked to hundreds of hospitalizations and a number of deaths in the past year or so. They’re made even more dangerous by the fact that little is known about them.
“You’re talking about a poison,” Andre W. Kellum, the assistant agent in charge of the DEA’s Washington Field Division, told The Washington Post in July. “… We don’t know the compounds, we really don’t know the true effect of what can happen to every individual that takes it.”
Four other students were also arrested in connection with the February hospitalizations and a previous, smaller overdose incident the previous semester. Of the five, Kramer and Eric Lonergan, a senior, are facing federal charges. According to the indictment, Lonergan, a 22-year-old from Rio de Janeiro, had been selling Molly (or what he believed to be Molly) since November 2013. He allegedly also counseled students on how to take Molly and other psychedelic drugs. Molly distributed by Lonergan in September 2014 was allegedly responsible for the earlier rash of overdoses.
Lonergan is expected to plead guilty later this month, the Hartford Courant reported.
Three others, Andrew Olson of Atascadero, Calif.; Rama Agha Al Kakib of Lutherville, Md. and Janamanchi himself were also arrested. They will be tried in state court on charges of drug possession and, in Olson and Janamanchi’s case, sale of drugs, according to the Courant.
All five students have been expelled from Wesleyan.
On Wesleyan’s permissive campus, where the exhortation “Keep Wesleyan weird” is both a mantra and a loving taunt, the arrests provoked anger and some soul searching. Not so much because students had been accused of selling dangerous illegal drugs to their classmates, but because the school’s administration had worked with law enforcement to have those students apprehended.
Though experimentation with drugs is a fixture at almost all college campuses, at Wesleyan it’s practically tradition. Documentary filmmaker Marc Levin, who graduated in 1973, told the New York Times that “acid was everywhere” when he was a student.
“The feeling at Wesleyan was not that it was just a recreational drug, but it was also part of the intellectual inquiry, and the school really embraced the incredible changes going on in the culture, and tried to embroider them into the studies,” he said.
Though alarmed by the hospitalizations, many students felt betrayed by the school’s response.
After Whaley, the dean, cited the principle of “bystander intervention” in a message to students asking them to come forward if they knew about the source of the drugs, senior Elijah Stevens published an indignant response in the student newspaper, The Argus.
“Bystander intervention is about stepping up to interrupt and stop moments of potential violence,” Stevens wrote. “… It is NOT about institutional coercion, on the basis of legal and emotional threats, to incriminate and alienate specific members of the community, regardless of their possible possession of drugs.”
Students started a Change.org petition condemning the expulsion and prosecution of the “Wesleyan Five.”
“Is this justice?” it read. “Does this resolve the crises of drug abuse or mental health on campus? Why is the university not taking immediate steps to challenge the laws that make test kits available in dormitories? Why does every word the university has spoken to us thus far speak only to a concern with image and respect, when lives were on the line?”
Online, students urged one another not to “snitch,” Rolling Stone and the New York Times reported. A post on the student-run blog Wesleying called the investigation into the drugs a “witch hunt,” and deplored the media frenzy around the story as well as the university’s response.
Most students refused to talk to reporters about the incident: “In almost every situation,” the post, by writer t is infinitely better to choose not to engage, respecting the privacy of our community, and preserving the presentation of basic truths.”
In the response, the school held a series of forums on drug use and its effects, focused on “harm reduction” rather than “prohibition,” university spokesperson Lauren Rubenstein told Rolling Stone.
“We encourage students to open themselves to new areas of study, experiences, people and points of view,” she said. “[Wesleyan] is a safe and caring community, where people look out for one another.”
At the end of the day, though, sale of illegal drugs is a crime, especially when people are hurt. Prosecution is probably inevitable.
“It struck me as a little naïve,” Talia Baurer, who graduated in May, told Rolling Stone of the outrage over the arrests. “That’s how these things work.”
