The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  It took me years to get into the media industry. I often wept at how hard it was, how embarrassed I was at having to continue working as a telemarketer at night to support my various low-paying media jobs. With higher ambitions — and without the option of jumping off and falling — my anxiety, and certainly my status anxiety, increased. I felt as if I was two steps behind everyone else; my colleagues were eighteen and nineteen years old, while I was twenty-three and still working part-time in a call centre. I dealt with my anxiety by cutting myself with a knife until my partner told me I needed to get help — so I got a referral to see a psychiatrist in Clayton.

  Dr Lennon was a man in his mid-forties with an orange beard and a nice car. Over time, he undoubtedly helped me a lot: I stopped cutting, I got my career on track. He told me that part of improving my life had to involve the delicate balancing act of simultaneously realising that things hadn’t gone right in the past, but not sending myself into despair with self-loathing commentary at every step I took. I guess I was looking for a kind of father-figure, with whom I could discuss even practical things — something I had been unable to do with my own dad, whose behaviour had been become increasingly erratic and self-centred after his boss decided to close the abattoir, where he managed the piggery section, just after 2000.

  It was fitting, therefore, that Dr Lennon started looking at me — after a while — as if I had just been to the toilet and not washed my hands. Eventually, in his well-crafted accent, he told me that he didn’t like the fact I came to therapy without showering, dressing properly, or styling my hair. He cancelled the sessions as soon as I told him I was struggling to pay them, and he immediately sent the remaining debt to a debt collector. I would later get my hands on a progress report he sent to the referring doctor. There was no mention of anything I went through in high school in this letter. Instead, most of it was dedicated to whether or not I had a Borderline Personality Disorder, because while I self-harmed, and had a history of substance abuse (and a ‘history of confusion over his sexual identity’), I had shown signs of having both empathy and long-term friendships. In the end, he concluded that I didn’t have a BPD.

  My partner and I moved into an apartment in the city, and we had a cat, and a nice life by the Yarra. This time would be part of a five-year period during which I didn’t take drugs, and so I was unaware, for the most part, that Australia was having its first methamphetamine surge. During this time, Beck moved into a housing-commission house in the country. She got back together with Nick, and gave birth to her second child, another girl, whom she called Alice. Smithy lived all over Melbourne; he had periods of working and then periods of lying on the couch with the curtains closed for a long time. He continued taking ‘speed’ — as in, powdered meth — on weekends. He was moody, volatile, often charming, and at other times verbally abusive. He met a woman, got her pregnant, and then one day — for reasons he says he does not understand — she snuck away in the middle of the night with their 6-year-old, and never came back.

  While all this was happening, I first got a job at the ABC in Ballarat, then Mt Gambier, and then finally as a reporter at triple j. Each of these gave me a confidence boost at the time, but I still didn’t feel completely comfortable in my own skin.

  My parents, meanwhile, changed a lot during this period. Dad had something of a breakdown after the abattoir closed, and eventually went to the doctor, where he was diagnosed with Bipolar II (the less severe variety). After beginning to take anti-depressants, he found a level of happiness that he hadn’t experienced in a long time. Seeing the difference in him, Mum also went to the doctor, and was placed on an anti-depressant that also worked to reduce anxiety. I cannot begin to describe how much Mum changed. She became happy-go-lucky, she grew her hair long, and she was always ringing to see how I was. She was silly, and funny, and was always making jokes. I had never imagined that the reason for her being so aggressive all the time was actually anxiety.

  Eventually, my parents moved to Queensland. A few years later, Mum paid for me to go travelling up the east coast of Queensland with her, and I had a marvellous time. Along the way I took her to a few gay clubs, which she in turn experienced as a marvellous time.

  I guess things were looking good for us, in some ways. By 2005, I had spent nearly four years without touching a single drug except alcohol.

  It was a smarter decision than I realised at the time.

  In 2004, experts from both academia and the medical frontline were claiming that the meth problem was at least as large as the heroin peak in the late 1990s. A National Drug and Research Centre (NDARC) study in 2005 suggested there were 73,000 people nationwide addicted to methamphetamine — about 1.5 times the number of heroin addicts. Meth users were also found to have a rate of psychosis 11 times higher than the general population, and many of those had no prior or family history of mental illness.

  While crystal meth was then only making up a tiny proportion of meth use, the ACC would warn in its 2004–05 Illicit Drug Data Report that:

  Increasing demand for high purity crystal methylamphetamine, which is readily available in Asia, is likely to create an increase in attempted importation and domestic production in the foreseeable future.

  The ACC’s 2005–06 Illicit Drug Data Report would follow, stating that: ‘Globally, approximately 50 per cent of all global ATS (Amphetamine-type stimulant) production takes place in East and Southeast Asia, Burma, and China’ and that there had been ‘a significant increase in the number of ATS laboratories dismantled globally, from 547 in 1990 to 11,253 in 2003’.

  Indeed, in winter 2004, long before Breaking Bad hit our screens, Fijian police, in collaboration with the Australian and New Zealand authorities, discovered a massive methamphetamine lab hidden in a three-storey building complex near the Fijian capital Suva. The laboratory had an estimated production capacity of 500 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine a week.

  More ‘super-labs’ would be found in the Philippines, Malaysia, China, and Indonesia over the coming years. Burma would remain the world capital for producing powdered meth pills, also known as Yaba. However, the vast majority of the meth being consumed in Australia was still homemade then, and all of it was powdered meth. Some of it was being made from cold-and-flu tablets obtained from chemists; the rest of it was relying on overseas imports of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.

  Further research from NDARC in 2005 suggested that in some parts of Sydney, the domestic production and supply of meth was entirely controlled by outlaw bikie gangs. But the criminal market was becoming increasingly diversified, fragmented, and difficult to crack — it involved new alliances and new groups. Legitimate businesspeople in Australia were also mixing their lawful activities with forays into the drug trade. Many manufacturers were small-time, and others simply made meth for themselves and a few friends. There was now no set of key groups or individuals that controlled the national meth trade, the links of which often stretched right across Southeast Asia.

  So meth — though not yet crystallised meth — was both proving popular and doing damage in the nation. With apologies to Tolstoy — while every meth abuser and addict ends up looking and behaving roughly the same, each has their own reason for getting hooked.

  At the beginning of 2007, my life had been steadily improving for five years; I had been drug-free for six. I was clean for a long time. A long time is good, but it is not forever. Despite my good intentions, and despite ticking what I thought were ‘life’s boxes’, at the age of twenty-seven, my life rapidly unravelled. As is characteristic of a breakdown, it seemed like a mess of random events at the time, but looking back now, it all seems patently and painfully logical. This is how it went: I broke up with my partner after a six-year relationship, an amicable and mutual split — we both agreed the relationship had run its course. The apartment felt half empty when he took half the furniture, and entirely empty when he took my beloved cat. I hadn’t realised how much of my time and
life was taken up by a relationship, and the force of the break-up proved to be bigger than I could handle. I tried going out to clubs, but had little confidence after being in a cozy relationship for so long; I started to feel lost, lonely, and ugly, and felt too intimidated to go out and meet people. When I did go out, I started searching for drugs, pills mainly, as soon as I walked in the door. Amphetamines always did the trick; I was able to go up and talk to people without a second thought. The more I looked in the mirror, though, the more I hated what I saw. I had forgotten how often I’d felt like this before I was in a long-term relationship.

  It wasn’t all bad, though — I also saw the end of the relation-ship as a chance to have more fun, to date young guys I hadn’t had the chance to date when I myself was eighteen and nineteen, and, most importantly, to concentrate on my career. I decided that six years of radio — including two award nominations and getting a job at triple j — would culminate in me getting my own show on Sunday nights over summer. I had been making comedy for triple j’s evening show, done some work on its TV show, written for its magazine, and appeared as a guest on nearly every other of its shows. I decided the best way to deal with not having anything to do on weekends was to go to the studio and work on my demo.

  The program director called me into his office a month later, saying that he liked the idea for the show, but didn’t want me presenting it. I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t say yes straight away because the demo was, in the end, an over-baked mistake. But his feedback was particularly disheartening: he suggested that I had a ‘long, long, long way to go if you want to present a show on the station’ but didn’t tell me what I needed to improve upon. His attitude seemed to suggest that I was not very good at being a presenter, and that there was very little point in me pursuing this line of career; or, at least, that is how I remember it.

  I bought $450 worth of cocaine the weekend after the project failed. In the coming weeks, my feelings of loneliness and rejection morphed into abject feelings of self-disgust. I became so miserable that life felt surreal. I had spent five years building up a radio career, sure that it was my destiny, and now my career — which had been all-important to me — felt like a complete waste of time.

  The only relief was drugs, which I had started taking every weekend. At first I took ecstasy, which filled me with hubris, deception, and all things nice. Going to work at my job as a reporter began to seem utterly pointless, and I started taking days off during the week, turning up late, and missing deadlines. Soon I was going to nightclubs and taking drugs Thursday through Monday every week. By then I was using GHB and ketamine, and when they stopped working, I started smoking meth. I spent all week at work fantasising about being high, which gradually turned into crying at my desk, then having lines at my desk, and then I stopped turning up at work altogether.

  For a long while, my weekends were amazing. I went to a now defunct nightclub called The Market — this was just before the emergence of Facebook and smartphones, when people still went out. Thousands packed the place every Friday and Saturday night, from all walks of life, and partied until the place closed at 11.00am on Sunday, amid balloons, streamers, transvestites, and drugs.

  I would dance for hours, and talk to strangers all night long. Before things got really bad, I knew that my work performance was seriously dropping, but while I hated getting yelled at, I just didn’t care. I had what seems now to be a rather prophetic dream one night that I was on the dance floor at The Market when I realised I had marbles in my pockets, and that I had just spilt them, and that my boss was standing there, hands on hips, demanding I pick them up. I did try — but by then they had scattered everywhere.

  It was hard for me to imagine, at that point in time, how anybody could get through the week without having a party on the weekend to look forward to; it was certainly the only thing that got me through the week. And as the winter set in, that week took on a slow, sickly rhythm, during which I was tired, and desperate, and obsessing over every second guy I met. There was one who became a full-time obsession; when he didn’t text me back, I felt so miserable I would pile on the pills and the meth to forget about him, but when the drugs wore off, he would come back into my mind, bit by bit, until I took more.

  The therapists I saw were expensive and didn’t seem to get it; I was taking anti-depressants that didn’t do much good either. A psychologist I was seeing called a CAT team after I told him that the Zoloft I was prescribed made me feel like stabbing random people at a shopping centre. They told me to see a therapist, to keep taking my anti-depressants, and to stop using drugs.

  Work noticed that I was going downhill. They calculated all of the sick leave and annual leave I was owed, and gave me six weeks off. I went to Queensland and stopped using drugs; when I came back, though, I felt depressed also immediately, and starting using again.

  When I got back, the ABC sent me to a psychiatrist — as far as I know, it cost them $1,500. But this was not for treatment — which, as I was only working part-time then, I couldn’t afford — it was, at HR’s initiation, a Fitness for Work Assessment. The report came back with the use of Axis and Criterion (which are the diagnostic tools used by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)) to conclude that I had ‘Major Depressive Disorder in the context of Substance Abuse and Borderline Personality Traits’.

  Meanwhile, I had begun to obsess over guys again: one day, when one of them didn’t message me back, I sent him flowers. When he still didn’t reply, I took a knife into the work bathroom, and made a long, thin cut from my knee to my groin.

  I didn’t feel as though I could tell anyone about these humiliations. Whenever I did start to talk to people about what I was going through, I could see them either getting very uncomfortable or they would start lecturing me on what I was doing wrong. That, or they just couldn’t have cared less.

  At home, I spent hours staring out at the grey Melbourne sky from my high-rise Southbank apartment, miserable and anxious. One day, I decided to give Beck a call; it had been about two years since I had last seen her. As soon as she asked me how I was, it all came pouring out. She listened to everything, and then relayed three or four stories from her own life that seemed to not only encapsulate how I felt, but were remarkably similar to what I had been through. Only Beck, it seemed, had the empathy and the selflessness to admit to having endured the same humiliations as me when it came to unrequited love.

  She asked me to come over, and I ended up basically living with her. While there, I met a friend of Nick’s — he was by now well and truly off the scene, but his friends still came around — who had recently gotten out of jail. We started a romance as well as starting to use heroin together — never enough to get me addicted, but enough to stop me from killing myself.

  I started taking Beck to The Market, where, like everyone else, she had the time of her life. One night, she told me she was going home early because she had bumped into the guy she’d met in a Ferntree Gully pool hall a few weeks earlier, and they were going back to his house to smoke some meth with his two gay mates.

  She gave me the key to her place, and returned the next day in a riotous mood. The following weekend, that guy — Rob Smith — was over again, and the weekend after that, and soon enough he hardly left.

  From the outset I found ‘Smithy’, as we called him, to be kind, friendly, down to earth, generous, and very quick to give a compliment. He and Beck hung out together for a good few weeks before they finally slept together, and he seemed — in his own rough way — to be a real gentleman. He came out with just me a few times, and one night we were joined by another friend; we went back to her house and shot up some heroin. I’ll never forget him sweating so much that she — on a fairly cold night — took him out to the backyard, and hosed him down with the garden hose. Around the same time, the guy who I had met at Beck’s died from a heroin-related illness.

  Needless to say, my work was suffering more
and more, and I was quickly becoming a liability. Work managers were very supportive until they got the psychiatrist’s report — when they realised I was also using drugs, my manager told me I was an ‘occupational risk’ to other employees (at triple j). I was eventually called into a meeting with HR and my manager, who said if I didn’t go to a residential rehab I would almost certainly lose my job; she felt I was underperforming to such an extent that I could be placed under a performance review. She said that over 160 people had applied for my job, and that there were award-winning young journalists who had worked on 7.30 and Lateline who had missed out to me — even though I was less qualified — and she was now beginning to believe that she had a mistake. I sobbed loudly in front of them for ten minutes, and agreed that yes, rehab was only the option. I went back to my parents, and in the sunshine and isolation, my need for drugs subsided, and by Christmas of that year I was clean. As a condition of getting my job back, though, I still had to go to residential rehab.

  As quickly as methamphetamine use had risen in Australia, it now — almost inexplicably, and without the fanfare of its dramatic introduction — began to drop. According to the 2007 National Drug Strategy Household Survey (NDSHS), the proportion of Australians who reported use of these drugs in the previous twelve months decreased significantly, from 3.2 per cent in 2004 to 2.3 per cent in 2007. The meth scare seemed to be over, and it also seemed as if many people had been guilty of engaging in a bit of moral panic. In fact, ecstasy use was still far higher, and used by far more people, than methamphetamine in 2007. The proportion of Australians who had ‘ever used’ methamphetamine also decreased significantly, from 9.1 per cent to 6.3 per cent.