A once-promising UC Berkeley junior lies in his parents' San Diego home, a breathing tube down his throat and his imaginative brain destroyed.

This much is known: On March 18 at Cloyne Court, a co-op residence owned by UC Berkeley, 21-year-old John Gibson suffered a heart attack that caused irreversible brain damage during the three hours before anyone called 911. A hospital test found cocaine and marijuana in his blood.

Campus officials express regret. But they say students are adults, and the university has limited ability to govern the residence they lease to the nonprofit Berkeley Student Cooperative.

Students living at Cloyne Court refused to discuss what happened, and would not open the door to a reporter.

But Gibson's mother, Madelyn Bennett, blames Cloyne Court itself.

"It should be shut down," she said. "They have an atmosphere that promotes drug use and discourages people from calling 911. They consider themselves to be more like a family where you don't rat out members."

Not true, said Jan Stokley, executive director of the Berkeley Student Cooperative. She would not discuss what happened to Gibson, but said, "Cloyne is occupied by 151 of the brightest, most capable students in California. Their focus is on getting the best education they can get."

The house culture

Police records and interviews with former residents suggest both are right: Cloyne residents are bright. They love the house. And they embrace a culture tolerant of drinking and drugs. Students hunting for a substance to abuse could do worse than visit the historic house at 2600 Ridge Road.

In Cloyne's defense, Stokley and university officials say the house should not be singled out as unusual in the American college landscape.

And they're right. Cloyne and the tragedy of John Gibson serve as a microcosm not only of an explosion of substance abuse on college campuses - but of its casual acceptance.

Student drinking, use of illicit drugs, and reliance on prescription pills all rose steadily between 1993 and 2005, a study published in 2007 by Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse reveals.

So did the side effects: violence, vandalism, thoughts of suicide, and sex with strangers, the study found.

At Berkeley, campus police visited Cloyne 325 times between 2005 and 2010, mostly for security checks and loud music. There were also 13 reports of grand theft, eight burglaries, three fights and other disturbances. Five "injuries or illnesses" required police intervention. In May, police arrested a resident for possession of narcotics.

A particularly bad year for Cloyne was 2006: Three rapes, a sexual battery, 16 students in the hospital after eating pot brownies, two drug arrests, and the death of former Cloyne resident, Fre Hindeya.

Hindeya, 26, had graduated in 2002 and was visiting Cloyne on Sept. 15, 2006, according to news reports. The co-op manager who called 911 told police he had overdosed. Police found Hindeya dead in a bedroom at Cloyne.

Police visits

The university owns three other co-ops: Rochdale, Fenwick Weavers and the Convent. Only Rochdale exceeds Cloyne in police visits. But Cloyne has three times the number of calls for violent or serious incidents.

UC Berkeley's responsibility is limited, said Felicia Lee, chief of staff for student affairs.

"We care about our students," Lee said. "It's a tricky balance. Our students are adults. They make independent decisions. The co-ops are an independent housing program, and we try to partner with them as best we can."

The campus health service works with the co-ops and offers workshops about risky behavior. Each co-op also has a full-time manager and an elected student council.

"Drugs and alcohol are a problem with a certain percentage of students," said Stokley of the Cooperative, which owns another 13 student co-ops independent of the university. "These problems are not unique to our housing."

That's true, which is why college and university administrators should tackle drug problems more vigorously, said Susan Foster, who directed the 2007 study. It found that 80 percent of campus leaders said it wasn't their job to control the culture of substance abuse.

"They're loath to take a stand on this public health issue because they fear it will compromise their ability to recruit students," Foster said. "But the consequences are profound."

John Gibson grew up in San Diego, the son of a news reporter and a computer engineer. Brainy and rebellious, he played cello with a youth symphony and excelled in track and pole vault. At La Jolla High he earned the top score on the English and U.S. history Advanced Placement tests.

But on tests he preferred not to take, he'd write "tests suck" on the blank answer sheet. The Washington Post wrote about Gibson in 2006 when his principal refused to help spring him from juvenile hall, where he'd landed after being caught tossing fireworks at a friend's house.

"John was loud, obnoxious to some, brilliant and intimidating to others," said Dave Medrano, his best friend and high school classmate. "He was always clowning around looking for attention and a good laugh."

'Can't be healthy'

In an e-mail, Medrano writes lovingly about the friend he thought would one day be his best man. But he also worried: "I would wake up to texts from him about what he did that night, and I remember thinking, that can't be healthy."

Gibson, who majored in peace and conflict studies, was "the most interesting guy I've ever met," said Jenna Dickman, a girlfriend at UC Berkeley. "Everyone wanted to know him."

He achieved a college man's dream in his freshman year, taking up residence in a sorority after being booted from his dorm for lobbing paintballs off the roof. In the spring semester, he moved to Cloyne, went to a different house for his second year, and returned to Cloyne last fall.

Built in 1904 by architect John Galen Howard, who designed the famed Campanile, Memorial Stadium, Sather Gate and Greek Theatre, the brown-shingled building landed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992.

All male until 1972, Cloyne pranks typically involved stove grease, cars and nudity. Most notorious was the "Great Panty Raid of 1956," a time when Cal men still froze in their tracks, panties in hand, at an administrator's stern words: "You! I know your mother!"

By the 1980s, the co-op with the reputation for mayhem was not Cloyne, but Barrington Hall. Neighbors complained about boa constrictors, blood, drug-induced screams, and having to dodge large appliances flying off Barrington's roof.

UC Berkeley shut the place down in 1990.

Call to close Cloyne

Now Gibson's mother wishes the same for Cloyne.

"Kids do drugs openly and deal drugs in the house," Bennett said. "I'm paying taxes so these kids can take mushrooms and meth? They should be kicked out of school or sent to re-hab."

Bennett says her son might be healthy today if UC Berkeley took the problem more seriously.

Campus officials won't release the police report. So Bennett is left to piece together what happened.

She believes Gibson meant to stay clean in the days before a martial arts competition on Friday, March 19. On Wednesday, he sent her a text telling her that he was annoyed that a party had moved to his room.

On Thursday, a student going to breakfast at 10 a.m. saw Gibson having a nightmare, Bennett said. When he returned at noon, "John was blue," she said he told her. "He asked someone to call for help, but no one called until 1 p.m."

Bennett believes her son's "nightmare" was the heart attack.

She said she doesn't understand why students gave paramedics a detailed list of drugs he took, leading doctors to spend time trying to counteract effects of drugs he hadn't actually taken, she said.

As the news spread, Gibson's friend Medrano raced up to Berkeley. He had barely arrived before someone offered him marijuana, he said. On the floor were hundreds of empty canisters of nitrous oxide, and "four or five people stopped by to pick up psychedelic mushrooms," he said.

Chief: a 'hell hole'

UC Berkeley Police Chief Mitch Celaya called Cloyne a "hell hole" and said he wouldn't let his son live there.

Some Yelp reviews echo the sentiment: "It's a disgrace," and "Right out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre." Others celebrate its joys: "Drugs of every color, taste, clowns juggling purple butterflies ... ahh, Cloyne, how I miss thee."

Gibson was moved to a San Diego hospital, and eventually home.

Bennett posts daily updates on her son's Facebook page about his smiles, his pleasure at seeing mockingbirds, his physical therapy. His friends act as cheerleaders online and in person.

Those who love him are accepting that Gibson will never recover the brain power that got him to Berkeley, drove the women wild, and led him to live on the edge.

His friend Dickman assumed she had more trouble handling drugs than Gibson did, and that he was "just a college student having fun like everyone else."

Now she wants to end what she says is a culture of silence around campus drug use.

"I can't let what happened to him happen in vain," Dickman said. "It's got to mean something."