The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  McKetin’s research has also shown that up to 25 per cent of regular users experience psychosis, and that overall about 13 per cent of users report that they’ve experienced some kind of psychotic episode while on meth. ‘One of the most common psychotic fantasies that people tend to have is that they are being watched,’ McKetin said. ‘For some reason a lot of meth users think there are secret cameras in the house or that the government is spying on them.’

  McKetin explained that as many as half of current meth users have previously experienced mental-health problems and taken medication for this condition — most commonly for anxiety, depression, and psychosis.

  Yet, at the same time, she told me, ‘Our research tends to show that those who experience meth-psychosis rarely have any personal or family history of schizophrenia.’

  McKetin told me that the less talked-about, but more common, problem for meth users was mild to moderate depression that often lingered for a long time after someone stopped using, making a relapse more likely. What is not clear is whether a person’s depression or suicidal thoughts are caused by the prolonged use of meth, or whether some people who take meth are self-medicating their pre-existing depression. It seems unlikely we will ever have a clear-cut answer to such a complex question, although one 2012 University of Melbourne research project did find that ‘72 per cent of participants reported that methamphetamine use preceded the onset of mental health problems’.

  It would seem that the longer-running risk of meth use is depression and anxiety. Research by Dr Nicole Lee (associate professor at the National Centre for Education and Training on Addiction at Flinders University and adjunct associate professor at the National Drug Research Institute) and her colleagues has found that among 126 Australians who used varying levels of methamphetamine over a certain period of time, 69 per cent had been diagnosed or treated by a doctor for a mental-health problem, most frequently for depression (50 per cent) and anxiety (29 per cent).

  Yet, these facts beg an obvious chicken-and-egg question. It seems quite likely that a person who is already down in the dumps (or anxious, or stressed) would take the drug. Meth has quite specific effects — it doesn’t bring the connectedness or light-heartedness associated with marijuana, ecstasy, and LSD, but it can make you feel as if you are living in a 1980s TV advertisement, where you have success, friends, boundless energy, endless sunshine, and instant gratification. It makes all your dreams come true, while you become your ego-ideal: an experience I call ‘Fantasia’.

  In Fantasia, you are not just more successful and powerful than in your wildest dreams, you are the most successful and the most powerful. In my experience, crystal meth provides you with something that is increasingly rare in modern life — it enables you to live in the moment, right-now-in-that-moment when nothing else matters. Meth gives its users many things that seem lacking in our mainstream culture: a chance for unconventional thinking, and a window to mysticism, ritualistic spirituality, drama, and intimacy. These experiential aspects of meth lend themselves to some important cultural analysis: it is the perfect drug in a society where happiness, individual freedom, productivity, and self-esteem are our ultimate goals, but where loneliness, a loss of connection, exhaustion, and insatiable, inexplicable feelings of failure often reign. It is a synthetic drug for a synthetic culture: a modern-day nerve tonic for a 24-hour society. It is an anti-anxiety drug in the age of anxiety: a depression-busting, awe-inspiring chemical that brings a tribe, adventure, and excitement to an often monotonous, uneventful suburban life lacking in community, fun, and meaning. Crystal meth, therefore, has much to offer somebody who is feeling disenchanted with themselves and the modern world — though it can simultaneously inflict the same egomaniacal, lonely, deluded misery that you are trying to escape.

  For me — someone who used crystal meth and had a history, and indeed a family history, of both psychosis and addiction — I found that, after a while, life stopped seeming interesting when I was not on meth. In his book Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: a neuroscientist examines his former life on drugs, developmental neuroscientist Marc Lewis explains how taking crystal meth gradually seemed to take the kick out of everyday waking life:

  [T]he subterfuge of drugs like methamphetamine culminates in one brilliant trick: the message of meth is that goals don’t matter anymore. When engorged on dopamine, the ventral striatum acts as if it’s pursuing goals and gloriously, magnificently, achieving them. Yet there are no goals. The excitement is bogus. It’s free. It’s detached from any actual internal desires or external accomplishments.

  I remain deeply sceptical, for several reasons, about casual users who say that meth isn’t harming them. First, they may not recognise the harm that is being done (and the idea that a person couldn’t be harmed by their drug use because they still work and remain productive really does make me squirm). Second, they may recognise it, but not want to admit it. Third, they may be in a state of denial about how much they are using. Last, one consequence of meth use — even of the kind that cannot be termed addiction — is that people will defend the drug because they want to keep the drug in their lives. Their brains have become so convinced it is good for them that they will use any justification to keep using it, even if it does not appear to be benefiting them, even if it appears to be causing them harm, or, even at the very least, if it is not allowing them to live life to the full or take pleasure in other things.

  For me (as for Marc Lewis), the risk of using meth even occasionally is that you stop striving for new goals or new life-experiences that give you the same kind of thrill. Meth attacks your ability to reason, your sense of time, your counting skills — I admire anybody who is able to control their use of it. Indeed, the notion that meth use can be non-problematic or even life-enhancing must be tempered by the fact the drug wears down your self-awareness. Meth is not unlike the bite of the blue-ring octopus, whose poison is worse than its bite: it takes quite some time to realise you have been poisoned. With meth, you can go on functioning and feeling while addiction wraps itself around your body and mind.

  Ms Trish Quibell from Berry Street South services in Shepparton told the Victorian parliamentary inquiry:

  A lot of our young people would not see themselves as having an addiction; they would completely deny that they have an addiction. That would be prevalent regardless of what strata of society you come from. Most people do not believe they have got an addiction until something hits them and they have hit rock bottom.

  With more than a bit of uncertainty floating around my mind about these issues, I decided to ring Dr Nicole Lee to ask some of these questions, knowing that she has a reputation for being fair, centrist, open-minded, and compassionate. In addition to her positions at Flinders University and the National Drug Research Institute, Lee is a practising clinical psychologist. In 2012, she co-edited Australia’s most extensive academic book on amphetamines, and her consultancy company, LeeJenn Health Consultants, was hired by the Victorian parliament as part of its inquiry to provide answers to some of the trickiest questions about methamphetamine use in the community.

  Lee, a friendly and gentle-sounding person who spent much of our interview listening closely to my questions before giving long, considered answers, told me that she believes there are three broad types of users: acute — who are what we might term meth addicts, and use upwards of once a week; long term — who use intermittently over a long period of time, or go on binges before getting clean in a fairly constant cycle; and occasional users — users who use very, very occasionally, sometimes as infrequently as once a year. To this, she added the caveat that ‘unlike many other drugs where addiction is black and white, meth use occurs along a complex and varied continuum’.

  So if we are able to draw something of a contingent, cautious line between addicts and non-addicts, where do we go with the question of harm? Does the occasional user risk becoming depressed, anxious, or losing enthusiasm for life?

 
Lee told me that there is a risk,

  but that the risk of occasional users getting any of the serious mental-health issues are very low. It’s the long-term users who we often worry about because they always run the risk of becoming an acute user … it can also be very difficult for people to recognise their depression is being caused by their meth use, and what our research also indicates is that there is often a five-year gap between when people first develop problematic use and when they first seek treatment.

  And, of course, there is always the risk that when people report their drug use to a researcher — particularly if they want reasons to continue their meth use — they will both understate how much they are using, and overstate the positive impact it is having on their life.

  I also called Neil Mellnor, drug counsellor and lecturer at the University of Sunshine Coast, who told me he thinks there are three ways in which people go from being a meth user to being a meth addict:

  1.They drift slowly into ice, and unexpectedly become addicted.

  2.They take ice without understanding its full effects, prefer using meth to other drugs because its effects last longer, and eventually become addicted.

  3.They are in a scene where it is acceptable or ‘cool’, and begin using it as a drug of choice.

  ‘When somebody gets too far into meth addiction, daily life just starts to feel like a grind,’ he said. ‘They prefer being on meth than not. Their health starts to decline, their everyday reality feels less and less tolerable — they start to struggle financially. Then a classic addiction-cycle starts — the worse life gets, the more drugs they take, and the more drugs they take, the worse their life gets.’

  Even in retrospect, I have trouble piecing together exactly when the bit-of-fun use ended for me, and the serious, abusive use began. I can see only the after-effect, not the exact moment when I slipped from user to addict. In his book Crazy Town: money, marriage, meth, former addict Sterling R. Braswell compares the experience of being an addict to being Gollum from Lord of the Rings: ‘We forgot the taste of bread, the sound of trees, the softness of the wind, we even forgot our own name.’ My time in the house became a mess of sped-up time and drawn-out days, of coming down in bed, of blackouts, and of excursions into make-believe. The defining moment may have taken place when I started shop-lifting food; the day I thought everyone was going to kill me; the day of my bloody needle-stick injury; the day I started using two days in a row; the moments I spent fantasising about my next high while walking through the homogenised streets of inner Sydney. It may have come around the time I began having a recurring dream of walking along a field, and suddenly realising I was surrounded by steep drops, and was desperately hanging on, so as not to fall. When I had these dreams at Smithy’s, I eventually decided to let go, and enjoy the exhilaration and thrill of the fall. Falling can be joyful, even if you know that death awaits, and especially when you are so tired of holding on, and so sick of being scared.

  Even still, I have met users who suggest that meth makes them better people, and improves their lives; people who think the drug brings them experience and thrills that are beyond the normal, limited realm of human experience. They think meth makes them perform better, think better, and become better, faster, more evolved human beings.

  ‘I cannot imagine living without it,’ one user told me. ‘I get so much done, I work so much out when I am on it. Actually, I don’t think I am that different when I use it, and often people around me can’t even tell.’

  Many people simply think that meth isn’t affecting them at all. Apart from the possibility they are delusional, perhaps this also reflects the way new technologies have come to play an apparently inconspicuous role in our lives, while at the same time radically altering the experience and understanding of our own nature. Meth is a wholly synthetic drug, one of over twenty-million chemicals that have been created in the past hundred years, and it is often, and ironically, providing a pathway for many of us to discover the beast of yesteryear.

  Chapter Three

  Converging paths

  THE ORIGINS OF meth can be traced to the chemical-research labs of nineteenth-century Japan. The late nineteenth century was a time of considerable scientific advance: medicine was riding high on the discoveries of microbes, vaccines, anaesthetics, painkillers, and the realisation that humans had powerful biochemical signals called ‘hormones’. Scientists around the world had set about trying to find a synthetic compound of the human hormone adrenalin, which was at that time particularly expensive to make because it had to be extracted from cow glands. Attention turned to the Ephedra plant, an unremarkable-looking organism that grows in sandy soils in sun-drenched environments, and that had been used for centuries in Chinese medicine. Its purported energy- and mood-enhancing effects came to be seen as a potential base for a new adrenaline-like product, as scientists believed it held the secrets to human fatigue and the common cold.

  Dr Nagai Nagayoshi commenced work on his study of ephedra after returning from Berlin University in 1883. Nagayoshi was wide-eyed and impeccably dressed, and his lab at the Tokyo Imperial University consisted of wooden tables, with chemicals held in bottles like old-fashioned lolly jars. Like all lab researchers at the time, he did not wear lab coats or masks to work, but dressed as if he were working in an office.

  Nagayoshi spent two years studying the plant, eventually finding the active alkaloid, ephedrine. Amphetamine sulphate (not meth, but similar) was actually the first compound to be developed, a few years earlier. It was made accidentally by the Romanian chemist Lazăr Edeleanu when he was trying to synthesise the world’s first amphetamine (speed, not meth) while making new fabric dyes. Eventually, Dr Nagayoshi used Edeleanu’s formula to synthesise amphetamine from ephedrine, creating a more powerful formula: methamphetamine (powdered meth).

  Today ephedrine and pseudoephedrine are the two most common precursor chemicals used in making crystal meth.

  Professor Nicolas Rasmussen from the University of New South Wales writes in his book On Speed: the many lives of amphetamine that methamphetamines and amphetamines developed in the tradition of ‘old human fantasies of magical cures and elixirs of youth’. He writes that in ‘the age of science-based pharmaceuticals … we expect new triumphs of science that, in our lifetime, will eliminate mankind’s most ancient enemies — the illnesses that bring pain, sorrow, frailty, and ultimately death’.

  Intrigued by this observation, I decided to ring Professor Rasmussen — who has earned, by the way, no less than a PhD from Stanford and a Masters from Cambridge — to find out a bit more about his studious work on the history of the drug. I found him to be a fast-talking, fastidiously helpful American who stops every now and then to ask — as a matter of genuine courtesy — ‘Are you following?’

  Rasmussen’s history lesson taught me a few things — first, unlike cocaine or heroin, meth is a purely synthetic substance. Second, methamphetamine differs from amphetamine only in the addition of a methyl group on the chemical chain; the difference of just one extra carbon — ‘meth’ (actually methyl) — is what makes taking meth feel as if you’re taking off in aeroplane, and makes taking speed feel as if you’re ‘merely’ travelling in a V8. Third, that perhaps it is no accident that methamphetamine was born in the age of scientific advances, the rise of the corporation, and the rise of a liberal society in which there is a perpetual promise that hard work will pay off.

  In April 1981, Rob Smith was seven years old. Waking up one morning in his cosy three-bedroom brick house, on the foothills of the Melbourne’s tree fern-covered Dandenong Ranges, his ears fixed on a strange howl coming from somewhere inside the house.

  He followed the sound. His feet tapped along the cold floorboards, past a picture of a little English cottage surrounded by autumn trees. The path took him to his mother’s room. The door was half-open, and his mother was sobbing on the end of her bed, her head resting on her left hand. Feeling his stare, sh
e sat up, wiping her face with her hands. She smiled at her son, saying in her soft voice: ‘Hello, darling, how ya feelin’ this morning? You’re awake very early, mate.’

  He trotted up to her and wrapped his hands gently around her neck. His face pressed against hers, and he felt the hotness of her tears as they soaked into his skin. She smelt like make-up, hairspray, and sweat. She smelt like his mummy. He didn’t understand why she was crying, though, and instinctively he began to sob as well.

  ‘Dad’s gone,’ she said with a look of anguished, apologetic horror.

  She told him to go back to bed. As he lay down, he could hear his mother’s howls starting up again, more intensely, and she continued right through the morning.

  In 1996, two awkward teenagers were sitting by the fire, wrapped in blankets, drinking sugary tea and enjoying each other’s company at 2.00am on a Sunday. Those teenagers were Beck and me, and the lounge room was in her parent’s musty, homely place in our rough bush-town. Beck had turned off Rage over an hour before; the open fire was only just still burning, and fatigue was slowing her monologue and slurring her words.

  ‘Some people are good at sport or maths, some people are pretty,’ she explained. ‘I don’t think I’m good at anything. I was hopeless at netball, I dropped out of school, and the best I ever got was a B. I’m not particularly good-looking, I don’t even really have an identity — I’m not really anyone. Do you get what I mean?’

  Beck continued at length, detailing all the things she wasn’t good at before concluding: