Garcia about the Death of Brent

I: "Getting back to Brent, did you see his death coming?"

JG: "Yeah, as a matter of fact we did. About six or eight months earlier, he OD’d and had to go to the hospital, and they just saved his ass. Then he went through lots of counseling and stuff. But I think there was a situation coming up where he was going to have to go to jail. He was going to have to spend like three weeks in jail, for driving under the influence or one of those things, and it’s like he was willing to die just to avoid that.

Brent was not a real happy person. And he wasn’t like a total drug person. He was the kind of guy that went out occasionally and binged. And that’s probably what killed him. Sometimes it was alcohol, and sometimes it was other stuff. When he would do that, he was one of those classic cases of a guy whose personality would change entirely, and he would just go completely out of control.

You think, “What could I have done to save this guy?” But as you go through life, people die away from you, and you have no choice but to rise to the highest level and look at it from that point of view, because everything else is really painful. And we’re old enough now where we’ve had a lot of people die out from under us. I mean, Rick Griffin just died."

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/jerry-garcia-the-rolling-stone-interview-3-99993/