The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  This new drug, crystal meth — created in Japan nearly a century ago, originally available over the counter at pharmacies, and then made popular by American bikie gangs after it was made illegal — was enjoyed so much by Australia’s drug-using population that many users quickly became addicts, and others found their lives spiralling quickly out of control.

  In early 2013, a joint state-federal police operation made a discovery that shocked them deeply. The investigation, which involved the Australian Federal Police (AFP), customs officials, New South Wales Police, and the Australian Crime Commission (ACC), was prompted by a tip-off from a member of the public about suspicious activity at a storage facility in West Ryde, Sydney. After monitoring the facility’s comings and goings for some time, the police intercepted three large containers, supposedly full of cleaning chemicals, which had been shipped from southern China. The raid turned up an astonishing 585 kilograms of high-quality crystal meth, with an estimated street value of $430 million. As a sign of things to come, the three men arrested were from different territories who had been working together to traffic the drug — a Singaporean, an Australian, and a Hong Kong man. Reporting on the bust, among many others, was the BBC, and The Huffington Post, which noted that ‘Australia seems to be a popular destination for drug smugglers’.

  The 2013 Australian Crime Commission Illicit Drug Data Report (which was released in April 2014) indicated that this 585-kilogram haul was just the tip of the … well, iceberg. According to the report, the weight of amphetamines-group detections by customs increased by 516 per cent from 347.3 kilograms in 2011–12 to 2138.5 kilograms in 2012–13. Nationally, the number of amphetamines seizures increased by 39 per cent from 15,191 in 2011–12 to 21,056 in 2012–13. Unsurprisingly, the problem began to be noticed at rehabs, hospitals, police stations, and medical centres around the nation, as many drug users quickly moved to more regular use of this high-potency amphetamine. While the media was actually slow to recognise this new trend at first, there is no doubt it was making an impact on the community. It just took a little while for the problem to make news.

  Jazmin-Jean Ajbschitz was a small, dark 18-year-old from the inner-Sydney suburb of Ultimo. When she was killed in mid-2011, the coroner who examined her corpse noted that the injuries to her ribs were so severe — her heart had been partially torn — that they were typical of injuries seen in victims of high-speed car crashes. Jazmin-Jean, however, had been killed by her boyfriend — who was high on crystal meth at the time — because she had ended her relationship with him via a text message. Twenty-seven years old at the time of the murder, Sean Lee King was sentenced to twenty-five and a half years in prison in June 2013, saying he ‘feels the pain every day’ of knowing he murdered his ex-girlfriend.

  More murders would follow, and although it was unclear just how much of a role the drug had played when the murderer had been on crystal meth, the killings often showed similar characteristics: they were senseless, often depraved, often perverted, recklessly violent, and often playfully sadistic.

  About two months after King’s sentencing, the then acting assistant commissioner, Doug Fryer, of the Victoria Police Intelligence and Covert Support Command, told the Herald Sun: ‘This is our new heroin.’ Journalist Mark Dunn reported that in at least 12 murders committed or tried by courts over the preceding two years, crystal methamphetamine had been either used by the killer or was otherwise a suspected factor in the crime. Four of those killings involved young women — including two in Smithy’s home suburb of Pakenham, in which both young women were senselessly killed in their homes — and others involved seemingly normal home robberies that became irrational, bloody, sadistic killings. So while it is true that murders occur all the time in Australia without the influence of crystal meth, police were beginning to see a clear pattern between certain types of homicides and the drug.

  Around the same time I was living in the house, the Victorian parliament was running its inquiry into methamphetamine use — the Inquiry into the Supply and Use of Methamphetamines, Particularly Ice, in Victoria — with a final report to be delivered in August 2014. The report would receive 81 submissions, and conduct hearings all over the state. The committee would hear that nearly all drug rehabs had experienced an increase in the number of clients citing methamphetamine as their problem drug, often leading to six-week-or-longer waiting lists at many publicly funded facilities. Even getting to see a drug counsellor on the public purse could involve 10-day-plus waits, which was time enough for someone to relapse and not have the presence of mind to turn up to their next appointment.

  Parliamentary submissions indicated that general psychologists and health practitioners lacked the expertise to deal with meth addiction, with conventional therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy often found to have limited utility in treating a condition that wears down a person’s reasoning and risk-assessment skills. Meanwhile, meth addicts and drug users more generally often complained about feeling stigmatised by health professionals, and having a deep sense of shame in accessing treatment for a behaviour which centres around an illicit substance.

  In Victoria’s parliamentary inquiry, frontline community workers gave evidence that at times was quite shocking. Anex, a group that works principally as a needle exchange for drug users, wrote in their submission:

  Casual users quickly progress to harmful use … long-term adverse effects of the consumption of methamphetamine are well documented and include dependence, cardiovascular complications, neurotoxic effects associated with the development of psychomotor disturbances similar to Parkinson’s disease and psychosis.

  Dr Mathew Frei, of the Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre, told the Victorian parliamentary inquiry:

  Sometimes we see people getting very overheated, and rhabdomyolysis is a breakdown of muscles which can lead to kidney failure. These are relatively rare but very significant toxic effects of methamphetamine. Occasionally we see cardiac events. You can imagine that a drug that increases your heart rate and increases your blood pressure might bring risk of a cardiac event, like heart failure or a heart attack, and occasionally we have seen seizures and actual strokes — so, injuries to the brain.

  Melbourne City Mission reported that homeless meth-using clients ‘typically present to the service paranoid and aggressive — they can often be violent and threatening and display poor emotional self-regulation — including a reduced capacity or willingness to take responsibility for actions’.

  It was obvious from the inquiry that regional Victoria was badly affected, though it was not clear whether this was because there were simply more users and abusers, or because treatment services were not as readily available. The Victorian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service told the committee that there was an ‘ice epidemic’ occurring in the Sunraysia area:

  We have had about seven suicides due to the use of ICE this year alone. … We have also seen an increase in Hume, Echuca, and Bendigo … At a statewide level estimates of the percentage of clients using ICE at the time of offending vary from around 15 per cent to 60 per cent.

  In October 2014, The Sydney Morning Herald would report:

  Amphetamine use, particularly crystal methamphetamine or ‘ice’, has risen by up to 180 per cent over two years in some regional centres like Coffs Harbour, Cessnock. and Wagga Wagga. But the scourge is also infiltrating smaller towns — such as Moree, Broken Hill, and Casino — that had never heard of the cheap and destructive drug 10 years ago.

  Over the 2014–15 period, an alleged Queensland Rebels gang member would be charged with giving a 2-year-old boy the drug ice; Harriet Wran — the youngest daughter of former New South Wales premier Neville Wran — was found sleeping rough and using ice in the lead up to being charged with murder; industrial-scale meth labs were being found in the ACT; a group of young fallen sports stars started a multi-million dollar ice syndicate in Wangaratta complete with written instructions when a new member joined; a Four Corne
rs program would broadcast allegations that bikie gangs were getting people addicted to ice as young as thirteen so the victim would manufacture and sell the drug for them; dozens of babies would be born around the nation addicted to meth; a 20-year-old in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs would rack up 107 charges on a three-month ice-fuelled crime spree; and a paraplegic West Australian man known as ‘Hot Wheels’ would be charged and convicted with dealing meth, which he kept hidden in his wheelchair. A UNSW report published in June 2015 indicates that in 2011 there were 101 methamphetamine-related deaths in Australia, up from 85 in 2010. Preliminary projections they made for 2012 and 2013 of up to 170 deaths suggest a continuing rising trend.

  Australia is just one nation among many grappling with this strange, dream-like drug. To be more precise, the reason we have high-purity crystal meth in Australia is because worldwide production of the drug has gone into overdrive over the past five years.

  Throughout western civilisation, monsters, such as Medusa, have long been associated with something dangerously alluring — at times, people can’t help but engage with a monster, even if they know there are terrible consequences of doing so. Other monsters lure victims with enchanting music, drawing the unwary in, and leaving nothing but dead bones and rotting flesh all around them.

  Being told that you are behaving like a monster when you’re on ice feels completely at odds with the way you actually feel when you are on the drug. And the way you feel is totally different to the way you look; a reminder that drugs don’t become addictive because they make you feel as if you’re eating razor blades — they become addictive because they feel bloody awesome. Meth feels … spectacular. It’s cheap, it lasts for a long time, and when you first start using it, you get a lot of work done — all while having the time of your life. What could be better than that?

  People take drugs for a number of different reasons: because they are happy, as well as because they are sad; to celebrate, as well as to escape. People often take meth to lose weight, or to share an experience with friends; they take it to let go, and also to enhance life. And when they take it, there is nothing to suggest that evil or suffering might be just around the corner. To further complicate matters, there is no one single agreed approach on what works for treating addiction. There are also a lot of different theories about what causes addiction in the first place — genetic theory, moral theory, disease theory, learning and behavioural theory, socio-cultural theory. Our culture, too, sends mixed messages about drug-taking that make it seem at once a moral failing, and somewhat glamorous. Despite being an age-old problem, the drug addict that exists today is a perfect metaphor for a consumer culture with an insatiable pit of desire, and a tendency to have us want things we don’t really need.

  But more so, there is something about the particular character of a meth high and meth addiction that mirrors the style of our culture. A dose of meth makes you feel as if you have won an award, been offered sex by a very attractive person, and are taking off in an aeroplane — all at the same time. You feel warm, calm, coherent, and crystal-clear; meth inflames your ego, your libido, and your sense of being comfortable with danger. You feel confident to the point of feeling superior — every memory of your achievements, every compliment you have ever received, seems to rush to your consciousness simultaneously. Indeed, it’s hard not to think you are amazing if you can feel so successful just by putting a needle in your arm. You feel fulfilled, purposeful, and excited. You also feel seedy, admittedly, but in a cool, edgy way. For the most part, we had loads of fun in Smithy’s house; we sat up and talked all night, we had crazy conversations and laughed so much we gave ourselves stitches. There is often an intimacy in drug circles that can be hard to find in other parts of society.

  Crystal meth, and the wonderfully mysterious vortex it plunges its users into, can make you feel that your life is one big, magical, lucid dream where anything is possible, everything and everyone revolves around you, and consequences are not binding. But then there is the flip side, when the magic potion wears off, and the dreams become nightmares. Crystal meth is a bit like the ‘old religion’ spells in the TV show Merlin — you end up feeling as if nature is punishing you for messing with the equilibrium.

  Meth, at its heights, fulfils the gap between what American sociologist Daniel Bell describes as ‘The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism’: the contradiction between the cultural sphere of consumerist, instant self-gratification and hedonism, and the demand, in the economic sphere, for hard-working, productive individuals.

  This also gives us a chance to reflect on drugs in western culture, the modern concepts of addiction, and problematic drug use. In their book High culture: reflections on addiction and modernity, American philosophy academics Anna Alexander and Mark S. Roberts write:

  Western Culture — the Bible and the heroic myths, Orphic cults and mysteries, as well as the history of testimonial writing — contains numerous references to these substances taken solely for the purpose of altering the mind. Their potential energy has conquered the earth, and established communication between various cultures and peoples … these substances have filtered pathways between people of different worlds from the tribal to the modern, and have, moreover, opened passages for us that have proved useful in a number of ways.

  Along similar lines, others note that prohibition of drugs and the ‘medicalisation of drug use’ is a distinctly modern phenomenon. Australian academics David Moore and Suzanne Fraser analyse the work of American author Eve Sedgwick thus:

  For Sedgwick, Western liberal societies reliance upon Enlightenment notions of autonomy, rationality and freedom have produced a central dualism: free will and compulsion. She argues that for as long as we have idealised and worshipped the idea of free will, we have also generated its opposite: the denigrated, devalued idea of compulsion. In this model we strive only for good: pure freedom. Dependence or reliance or compulsion to do anything becomes defined here as contamination and failure of the will.

  Fraser and Moore also draw on the work of the French post-structuralist Jacques Derrida, who says that drugs are ‘not a scientific concept’ but a political category with norms usually tending on the side of the ‘prohibitionist’. While it can be tempting to use our pre-existing gripes with ‘society’ to explain the widespread use of meth, there is an important caveat to this line of questioning. In his book Methland: the death and life of an American small town, which documents the drug culture of Oelwein, Iowa, Nick Reding suggests that meth use in the American mid-west can be understood, at least partially, within the context of the loss of traditional local industry to globalising forces, and the social and economic decline that followed. Yet history shows that meth use occurs across all sectors of society, and in times of both economic prosperity and social decline. In Methamphetamine: its history, pharmacology, and treatment, medical doctor and author Ralph Weisheit says that:

  drug surges can ignite quickly in conditions characterized by high availability, the absence of legal drug controls, a vulnerable population of users, and social and economic distress resulting from conditions such as cultural demoralization, mass unemployment, poverty, or mass migration. They may also arise in conditions of sudden economic prosperity, excess income, and the search for new symbols of status and pleasure — conditions that spawned Amercian amphetamine use after the Second World War and the cocaine surges of the 1980s.

  With all that in mind, I think it’s noteworthy that meth often leaves the user highly individualised, robot-like, and egotistical. It is a drug developed and spread in an age of technology, productivity, prohibition, a globalised economy, and the subsequent global black market that grew alongside it, and in a culture dominated by big pharmaceutical companies and a highly medicalised society.

  My experience is not everyone’s experience with the drug, and this is not necessarily how everybody becomes addicted. I have known many users over the years who use, even weekly, and still hold
down jobs, and don’t appear to be adversely affected.

  I have had drug addictions before. I took time off from my job at triple j to spend two months in rehab in 2008; after breaking up with my partner and failing at a big work project, I used every drug I could lay my hands on — including heroin and powdered meth — until I was a blubbering, teary mess. But since leaving rehab, though I did crave meth from time to time, I had been able to stop myself using it many times. I believed my life was so full, and my addiction-strategies so sharpened, that I could live in the Pakenham house, take the drug occasionally, and still function well enough to write a profile piece about a chronic drug addict. In truth, however, and as I shall explain, there are complex reasons why I succumbed to the drug, which go beyond the fact that I was taking, and indeed injecting, a far stronger dose than I was used to. I had suffered trauma as a teenager, but addiction itself is complex: seventeen years of using drugs, regardless of my initial reasons for taking them, have created a void — a drug-shaped hole — in my heart that not only leaves me susceptible to the ‘substance of the day’, at times and to this day, but that still seems impossible to fill with something else. I have always preferred fantasy to reality — particularly fantasy of the self-aggrandising type. I am often irresponsible, reckless, volatile, self-involved. I hate rules and limitations, such as the fact that humans don’t live forever, don’t have wings and can’t fly, and I can’t deny that a syringe full of meth brings me pretty close to flying and feeling immortal. This book is partly an invitation for you to go on a journey with me as I try to identity and then exorcise, or at least mitigate, the problems in my own character that led me to addiction.

  Chapter Two