The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  ‘Yep,’ he replied, turning around to reveal a spatter of blood on his forehead that had somehow already dried.

  ‘You are not really going to slash Thor’s throat, are you?’

  ‘Well, what else am I supposed to do, she wants me gone.’

  ‘Listen, Nick, I’ll look after Thor, Beck will look after Thor, and if we can’t, then someone else will.’

  He turned around again, looking across the palm trees and the dishevelled little houses.

  ‘Nick, Thor is a very nice dog. He is his own being. He deserves to have a full, lovely life and we can all make sure that happens.’ At that, Nick put on his backpack and stomped down the steps. ‘It’s a shame nobody ever gave a living fuck about me,’ he said, his anger escalating. He was breathing faster and faster, his body heaving like the Incredible Hulk, until finally he began to scream. He left the house, and walked (and screamed) all the way down the street. He never came back.

  By the end of the year, Beck and I had both returned to Melbourne. For a long time after this, we again went our separate ways. But in her world, I had started to grow into myself. I had survived and even thrived around her criminal friends. It gave me confidence, and, no longer crippled with anxiety, I felt it was time to get more involved in life. In Melbourne, however, I found people a little more intimidating, and I had next to no friends by the time I got back. Also, I was nearly twenty-one and had neither been in a relationship nor really even had sex. But the biggest problem, the one that had stayed with me since my drug binges of the late 1990s, was that strange thing I had been unable to articulate — my confusion about what was real, and, in particular, the fact that I kept hearing hidden meaning in people’s words. I would be talking to someone, and I would hear a word and believe it was referring to me, or that the other person knew something secret about me, or that they were doing an impersonation of me. I couldn’t even explain at the time, but I was — to put it mildly — one drug-fucked fucker.

  I picked out a psychologist at random from the Yellow Pages. A week later, I had an appointment at his Clifton Hill terrace house. He was a small man in his seventies, crippled in some way — he had both a limp and shoulders that sat crookedly enough to suggest he may have had a slight hunchback. When I told him about my lack of friends, he went quickly to work through the categories and criteria he had learnt over his many decades of work as a therapist, and suggested that Schizoid Personality Disorder (SPD) possibly summed me up best — but that ultimately I didn’t fit the criteria.

  (SPD is a personality disorder characterised by a lack of interest in social relationships, and a tendency towards a solitary lifestyle — which could also describe somebody who is introverted or whose confidence has been destroyed by being alienated from society because of the moral taboos of the time.)

  When I explained to him that I kept hearing nasty references about myself when I heard people talking, and that I had ‘paranoia’, he disputed this, saying it wasn’t paranoia but ‘low-grade depression’. He suggested I take anti-depressants, but I didn’t want to because my only experience with them had been negative. But, of course, in retrospect what I was suffering from was low-grade psychosis, and what I needed was a short course of low-dose anti-psychotics.

  In the second session, he told me to join groups that fitted my interests if I wanted to make friends. In the third session, he asked to see my penis.

  Yes, my psychologist asked to see my penis. Out of the blue, and over and over again.

  Needless to say, I left, but eventually I took him up on his suggestion of getting involved in things that interested me, in order to build a life and make friends.

  I started volunteering for a gay community-television program, and soon after met my first boyfriend, and another guy whom we moved in with. We started doing a radio show together — twice a week, midnight till 6.00am — on an outer-suburban radio show in Mill Park.

  Around the same time, on a warmish, breezy night in the slightly old-fashioned, middle-class, beachside suburb of Moorabbin in the south-east suburbs of Melbourne, just before the start of the new millennium, Neil Mellnor was working his usual phone shift at a drug and alcohol counselling line. After more than twenty years working as a social worker, Mellnor had pretty much seen and heard it all. On that night, he received a call from a woman who earlier that night had been forced to call the police after her daughter’s boyfriend had destroyed the house. The police in turn called an ambulance, and paramedics administered drugs to bring the boyfriend under control. Of all the phone calls and clients he had seen over the years, he couldn’t remember anybody else who had presented as this distressed and confused. This would be, in fact, Mellnor’s first professional encounter with methamphetamine, and it left him with no doubt that something had changed.

  ‘The extremity of the event and the distress involved really stood out for me,’ he said. ‘The mother was absolutely petrified. What also struck me was that she said the boyfriend — who was coming down at the time — was not usually violent. The reason why I became so fearful of this drug, despite working in the drug and alcohol field for so long, is the way it changed people’s character; it seems to make people violent, aggressive, impulsive, and it gives them strength and a sense of purpose that alcohol doesn’t.’

  After doing some reading, Mellnor realised he was dealing with methamphetamine, and a deluge of similar calls would follow in the coming months.

  As Burma’s opium fields wilted at the end of the millennium, and were then all but destroyed by the extreme flooding that broke the drought, and the highly abnormal frosts that followed, the Taliban cracked down on opiate production in Afghanistan. At the same time, the Australian Federal Police were given extra resources and began to get a handle on, and thereby reduce, high-level heroin importation networks; a number of key arrests and some major seizures would follow. Around Christmas in 2000, Australia experienced an unprecedented reduction in the supply of heroin. Unsurprisingly, the price of heroin rose from $218 a gram to $381. Dealers went to work with cutters — the purity of heroin fell from 60 per cent to 20 per cent. The Illicit Drug Reporting System found a continuing drop in the number of fatal heroin overdoses, which went from 345 in 1999–2000 to 265 in 2000–01. This was the period that became known as the ‘heroin drought’.

  Many people thought that if heroin became more expensive, dealers’ profits would increase and heroin users would commit even more crime to fund their habits. What happened instead was that heroin use, and crimes such as theft and robbery, fell like a stone.

  The national robbery rate fell 30 per cent; the national burglary (which, unlike robbery, does not involve the use of force) rate fell 50 per cent; and the national motor-vehicle theft rate fell 56 per cent. The New South Wales robbery rate is now back to where it was in the early 1990s, while the burglary and motor vehicle theft rates in New South Wales are lower than they were in 1990.

  The absence of heroin didn’t mean the nation’s chronic drug-injecting population just gave up drugs and started mid-week social tennis, though. The hunger remained; many injectors love the medicinal eroticism of the needle, as well as the ritual of injecting. Australia’s intravenous-drug users would go searching for something else to fill the hole. In 2003, a former prison inmate named ‘Scotty the Barber’ told Radio National’s Background Briefing that in some cases, he knew users who shot up conventional medicines (that they knew would not give them a high) and even Vegemite. So, taken altogether, it’s not really surprising that it didn’t take long for Australia’s cohort of drug addicts to shift to another white substance, which offered a very different type of buzz — methamphetamine.

  Dr Sandy Gordon, then head of intelligence for the Australian Federal Police, would tell the Global Economy of Illicit Drugs conference in London on 26 June 2001 that the East Asia-Pacific’s economy had grown by 8 per cent in the 1980s and 7 per cent in the 1990s:

  Although there a
re clear benefits from development, it can also bring harm, especially in the social sphere. In Asia, rapid urbanisation and development increased working hours in the building, transport, and service industries, resulting in major labour market dislocation. Consumption of amphetamines helped workers cope with these longer hours.

  Indeed by this stage, methamphetamine had already replaced heroin as the problem drug in Thailand, and crystal meth was the most commonly used drug in the Philippines. Gordon went on to explain that crackdowns on heroin and methamphetamine by authorities in Thailand had created opportunities for crime groups operating in the Golden Triangle:

  Production of amphetamines in Burma was also facilitated by another development, this time in China. With the advent of economic liberalisation in China, many of the inefficient state-run chemical plants lost their captive markets and could not find new ones. This provided an incentive to ‘turn a blind eye’ to chemical precursor diversion. It is noteworthy that the very routes now used to take heroin out of Burma could also be used in reverse to bring precursors back in.

  The ‘Burma problem’ resulted in China signing an anti-drugs cooperation agreement with ten other Association of Southeast Asian countries. Intelligence would later reveal that Asian organised-crime gangs targeted war-torn South Pacific nations to manufacture drugs in the hope of targeting Australia. In June 2001, then new AFP chief Mick Keelty told the Herald Sun he believed that the heroin shortage may have been a deliberate strategy by crime czars to shift their business to the more profitable methamphetamine, which could be made entirely inside drug factories.

  All the signs were pointing in the same direction. A total of 82 kilograms of crystal meth was seized in the 2000–01 year compared with 971 grams in 1997–98; the number of police detainees found with methamphetamine in their system jumped from 10 per cent in 2000 to 31 per cent in 2001. Research from the Illicit Drug Reporting System showed that of the 910 illicit- drug users surveyed in 2000, just 16 per cent named meth as their drug of choice; by 2001, that figure had jumped to 25 per cent. By the end of 2000, The Sydney Morning Herald would publish an article saying that ‘researchers across Australia have documented an unprecedented rise in the presence and use of methamphetamine, the derivative of amphetamine best known locally as “ice” or “shabu”. The numbers, they say, are unexpected and the fear is that it is being manufactured locally, heralding further rises’. Nearby New Zealand witnessed a similar increase in methamphetamine use, with past-year prevalence increasing from 2.9 per cent in 1998 to 5 per cent in 2000.

  Throughout 2000–01, the use of methamphetamine among injecting drug-users increased in almost every state and territory. Relaxed and comfortable Australia was speeding up.

  The number of clandestine-lab detections in Australia rose from 95 in 1997 to 201 in 2000, and to 240 in 2001. In March 2003, the annual Australian Crime Commission Illicit Drug Data Report found that amphetamine labs had increased fivefold since 1996 to almost 250 in 2002. The report would say that the overwhelming quantities of methamphetamine precursor chemicals that were being imported (ephedrine and pseudoephedrine) were coming in from Chinese and Filipino ports, with Myanmar, China, and India also playing key roles in meth production across the Asia-Pacific region. A few years later, it was thought that Myanmar was the biggest amphetamine producer in the world, though most of its precursor chemicals would come from China. Three hundred and fourteen clandestine labs were detected in 2002–03, gradually rising to 390 in 2005–06.

  While Australia’s first meth outbreak was making old criminals richer, new criminals rich, and plunging ordinary citizens into the world of crime, others would see their burgeoning criminal careers draw to a close. By 2001, Richard Walsh — the truck-driver turned dealer we met in Chapter 3 — wanted to limit his risk by making sure he was only dealing to and with high-level bikies who he could trust. By now, Walsh was a sergeant-at-arms in the local chapter of the Nomads and one of his customers, a man called Peter Bennett, had been unable to repay a drug debt to Walsh’s de facto Julie Clarke. So Walsh agreed to let Bennett work off the debt by running drugs between Queensland and Newcastle. Peter’s wife, Wendy, was also employed by the Walsh household as a nanny, cleaner, and tester of amphetamines.

  The Nomads lent Bennett a gun to provide him with protection during his inter-state drug runs, but it was seized by police during a search. To punish him for losing the gun, the Nomads beat Bennett so badly he needed hospital treatment. A short time later, Walsh denied Bennett a long-promised Christmas bonus.

  By this stage, Bennett was furious and plotted his revenge, deciding to become a police informer in March 2001. His wife also informed, all the while working for Walsh and Clarke. The quality of the information being received led New South Wales police to throw more funding at the operation and the Drug Squad — along with Northern Region police — set up Strike Force Sibret.

  On 23 September 2001, Strike Force Sibret made their penultimate move: Walsh’s HiLux was stopped near Murwillumbah with a heavy load of drugs — he now had to do the runs himself without Bennett around. At the same time, raids were conducted at thirteen properties in Newcastle, northern New South Wales, and on the Gold Coast; forty-three people, including sixteen Nomads, were charged. Walsh’s de facto Julie Clarke also gave evidence against the accused. Among those arrested, charged, and eventually sentenced was Todd Little — the illiterate drug cook who had become rich making his meth formula. Police recovered $1.5 million in stolen vehicles and other items from the Nomads in Newcastle. As for Walsh, he would receive a sentence of thirty-two years — the longest ever given for a non-importation drug offence in Australia. Walsh had been charged with supplying an entire tonne of kilograms, but pleaded guilty, and was sentenced for, supplying 400 kilograms. Sibret would go down as one of the biggest hits on an outlaw motorcycle gang in Australian history.

  In September 2002, a softly spoken 33-year-old, Damien Peters — slim, tattooed, with messy, wavy hair — murdered two male lovers in the house the three of them shared. In a gruesome scene, he cut off one of their heads, before disembowelling them, and flushing their organs down the toilet. Peters had taken meth on the afternoon of the crime, and was also found to be using steroids, methadone, and anti-depressants. Psychiatrist Dr Yvonne Skinner, who examined Peters in preparation for the trial, found no underlying pathology, personality, environmental, or cognitive factors that created a basis for his attack. Instead, Dr Skinner’s report concluded that Peters’ actions ‘did not arise from an underlying condition, but from the transitory effect of the drug “Ice” amphetamine’.

  It’s unclear from the legal records whether Peters was taking crystallised meth or powdered meth. But the crime occurred just before several major hospitals around the nation — one of which was St Vincent’s in Sydney — began reporting daily or near daily incidence of patients presenting with amphetamine psychosis. Perth seemed particularly hard hit, with record seizures at customs; The West Australian newspaper would report Graylands hospital being the first to report that ice was wreaking havoc in their emergency room. Although there was increased awareness of these drugs, there was also a misunderstanding about the difference between ‘speed’ and ‘meth’. ‘Ice’ and ‘meth’ were used interchangeably when referring to both crystallised and powdered meth, which are very different drugs.

  We didn’t know it then, but the worst was yet to come.

  By 2001, I was working as a glassie at a big nightclub on Chapel Street. This is a time I remember for cleaning up toilet paper and vomit, for the odours of sweaty bodies, cigarette smoke, stale cellar beer, and Scotchguarded carpets, and for thunderous beats that vibrated through my body at six in the morning when all I wanted to do was go home. I was soon involved in Chapel Street’s ‘hipster’ drug scene, and was taking drugs all weekend as I worked. I remember walking outside into the bright spring morning light and sitting in the car, waiting for my friends to come.

  This was also
a time of important political change: September 11 happened, and then the Afghanistan invasion and the subsequent debate over refugees. At that moment, sitting in the car with no energy and no direction, my life felt frivolous, selfish, and insular. I felt like a stupid, hyperactive kid who hadn’t been allowed to go on a rollercoaster, and then, when his parents were out, snuck into the fair and went on the rollercoaster over and over and over again — up/down/vomit/thrilling/surprising/look-no-hands/up/down/up/down for weeks and weeks and weeks. Eventually, it got, well … boring. After three days of not sleeping, when the thrill was well and truly gone, I stopped to rest. I thought of all the beaches, all the forests, all the things I was missing out on, realising that there was more to life than a joy ride. Aside from anything else, in 2001 it was still more socially acceptable to be homophobic than to be homosexual. My battle scars from high school seemed to have healed, though; I met gay men who had suffered far worse, and I decided now was the time for a second round at bringing down the bigots.

  I also felt like a failure career-wise — that I had wasted a few crucial years I could have spent building my resume. I was nearly twenty-two, and working deep into the night sweeping floors and picking up glasses. Many of my peers had graduated uni, and had already started their careers. I had an abiding sense of status anxiety when I started my quest to have a professional, middle-class job — but it was then or never.

  We had stopped doing the community radio show, and instead were doing theatre. We had also continued with TV, and over time I did a few things on camera. I’d created a character called ‘Peter Puffpaint’, which I performed at the Fringe and Midsumma festivals, but I knew this wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I decided that — with everything I had been through and the sudden interest we all had in current affairs — being a journalist would be a good career path for me.

  I had the sense that the freethinking transcendentalism of the 1990s had flown off somewhere on a unicorn. Little mattered in my life, and the lives of those around me, except career success and finding somewhere nice to live. But it wasn’t just that: I now had friends, a relationship, an interest in community radio and TV — in sum, I had a brittle but growing sense of achievement and belonging.