The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  Meth’s popularity — at least as we understood meth then — seemed to be in free-fall. Perhaps the world had moved on, and the nation’s drug users were re-collecting their marbles and going back to work and regular play — including me.

  Chapter Six

  Every creature has its soft spots

  IN A CLASS, in a public rehab on the rural outskirts of Brisbane’s southern suburbs, Audrey, a thirty-something black New Guinean with a slight, almost European-sounding accent, was telling her group, ‘Addiction is an illness, addiction is a coping mechanism. Addiction is about survival.’

  Audrey was methodically making eye contact — through her 1960s-style eyeliner — with each of the 11 people in her rehab class. Half were jailbirds who were being forced to attend; there were also two former school teachers, a guy with schizophrenia, a bespectacled middle-aged librarian addicted to sleeping tables, and Richard, the self-described ‘bisexual bipolar bear’, who was in rehab after neighbours found him trying to gas himself in the car while on amphetamines. Many eyes were drifting off Audrey, onto the gum trees and the farmland out the window, and perhaps to the future (their plans for when they leave), or to the past (the joys and sorrows of drug use).

  ‘The brain associates drugs with pleasure, the opposite of pain and death — but instead of giving yourself something that nourishes you and gives you strength, an addict is engaging in behaviour that will make their life worse in the long run,’ Audrey explained. ‘You face a problem, you take drugs, your problem gets worse, you take more drugs and on it goes; that is what we call the cycle of addiction.’

  Sitting among this motley crew was me: I had arrived three days earlier with my head wrapped in a skull bandana, and my stomach a mess of angry echidnas. I was clean by this stage, and wasn’t too keen on going to rehab, or even going back to my job, but the prospect of life on the dole — that is to say, life without parties or drugs while living at my parent’s house, an hour away from Bundaberg — didn’t grab me either. I was, however, keen to work out what had gone wrong, and how I could go back to normal life without experiencing the flood of misery that was my usual experience. I didn’t really believe that rehab would help, but I was curious to see if it could.

  So in February 2008, Eileen the admin lady picked me up from Beenleigh train station in a minivan. ‘It’s quite an interesting area around here,’ she remarked. ‘A few years ago it was all rural; now it’s becoming an outer suburb of Brisbane.’

  We were actually about half-an-hour’s drive from my old haunt of Woodridge, which seemed appropriate. Logan House was a publicly funded rehab; the weekly bill was taken straight out of my Centrelink payments. By way of comparison, the Sanctuary, a luxury private rehab in Byron Bay, costs $30,000 a week, and you can get in straight away. Logan House cost $220 a week. It was a bargain, really; for that we got three meals a day, and about a tenth of the medical staff that are employed by the Sanctuary.

  Eileen drove me up the driveway, from where I could see the tennis court and the pool. Like the rest of the buildings, the front office was made of ‘he used to give me roses’ brown brick.

  There were three villas, holding about 24 residents in total, and each of us shared a room with two others.

  Eileen explained the rules:

  •There was no contact with anybody from the outside for the first twenty-one days.

  •Urine and breath tests twice a week.

  •The day started at 6.30am with exercise, then classes, four days a week.

  Eileen asked if I had deodorant or Listerine or any medications. I answered yes, and she took them off me and put them in a locker, telling me that people can get high on deodorant and Listerine in rehab. I was allowed to keep my asthma medication in my room, but she took my Zoloft from me: I could only take that during specified medication times.

  The first resident I met at Logan House was a guy in my villa: he was a talented musician in his early twenties called Max.

  ‘What’s your poison?’ he said.

  ‘Party drugs; I partied Thursday through Monday,’ I replied. ‘And eventually heroin on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Until my managers at my radio job told me to take time off or face the axe.’

  ‘Here sit down, have a smoke with me,’ Max said. ‘This is how it went wrong for me, dude. My ex-girlfriend and I were supposed to go to Europe together. I started, like, partying and dealing and stuff, and she told me I couldn’t come. But that’s why I was dealing, so I could save money. Well, she went to Europe and I’m still here, and with all the money I saved, I spent it on heroin.’

  A second guy sat down with us, having overheard Max talking. He was tall with brown hair and a deep Scottish accent.

  ‘I had a breakdown,’ he said without being prompted. ‘And then I went back to the booze.’

  ‘How are you now?’

  ‘Getting there. It’s difficult. I’ve been here six weeks. I’ve been to rehab before, but I really want to make it this time ... and don’t worry there are lots of educated professionals here, you’ll fit right in. There are all kinds of people here: teachers, business owners, musicians, even a psychologist.’

  ‘A psychologist in rehab? You mean as a client?’

  ‘Yep.’

  And a few days later I would meet her — her name was Holly — while she was raking up some leaves outside one of the villas. She had brown hair and brown eyes. She told me she became an alcoholic a year or two after her husband died. ‘You know, the thing about grief is, the more you hold on to it — the worse it gets,’ she said.

  Unlike most rehabs, which are based on the 12-step program, the rehab course at Logan was based on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT); we were taught that our thoughts control our behaviours and emotions, and our willpower controls our thoughts. We would have a weekly one-on-one counselling session, using techniques by which we would learn to expect and tolerate restless or low moods. We learned to question those assumptions that reinforced our habits (for example, ‘I’ll never make friends who don’t do drugs’), and to focus on engaging our non-drug activities and creative interests.

  The classes were certainly interesting. We were told that thoughts control everything, and that we had complex psychological reasons for drug triggers. According to Audrey, most of our heartache is caused by our own thinking. She told us that most negative thinking is the result of errors in reasoning; what she called ‘thinking distortions’, such as ‘overgeneralisation’, and ‘all-or-nothing thinking’.

  In class, we discussed triggers and traumas. Men talked about being dumped. A young stripper said she used to get so smashed she would peel her cigarettes and eat them like a banana. We each made a list of events that often led to our drug use. For many people, those triggers were similar: ‘Friday nights’, ‘having an argument with my partner’, or ‘hearing dance music’. Audrey explained that ‘hearing dance music’ belongs to a category called ‘euphoric recall’. I wrote my list of risky events:

  •Being dumped

  •Going out

  •Being at a venue

  •Stressful day at work

  •Having something good happen

  •Having something bad happen

  Audrey was also my individual counsellor. We had our one-on-one sessions by the river once a week. The thing I found most irritating about her was the way she kept about asking about my homosexuality, and whether or not I had been mistreated because of it. At the time, this seemed completely irrelevant to me.

  During our first sessions, I told her I was worried that I might seem a bit boring without drugs.

  ‘Boring?’

  ‘Yeah, like when I was a workaholic journalist and a nerd.’

  ‘Luke, if I saw you at a party, I would want to talk to you. You are interesting.’

  ‘Are you spinning me a line, Audrey? As in a standard psychology how-to-make-someone-feel-better line
?’

  ‘I’m not that sort of counsellor, Luke. From what I’ve seen of you in class today, I like you a lot. You’re a deep thinker, and I think you have a big heart. You have a tough facade to protect yourself, but I think you’re very sensitive underneath.’

  By our second session, I realised I struggled with group situations, and that my parents had mental-health problems, and so I over-achieved or recklessly under-achieved to get their attention. Audrey asked me to write a list of things I had achieved in life, and to ‘take full credit for them’. I have to admit, I started to feel better and more in control of my life after just a few days.

  But even still, I was nervous, my thoughts were racing; I couldn’t sleep, and all I wanted to do was sleep.

  Come week three, and although many people had been listening and agreeing, a dissenter emerged in class. This dissenter was Max, who said, ‘Audrey, we keep hearing in class that drugs are the result of a lack of something else in our lives. But lots of people here are confident and seem happy. I just don’t think I will ever find the same high I found on drugs anywhere else.’

  Although Audrey was quick to disagree, telling Max that that kind of justification was ‘cognitive distortion’ and that 90 per cent of people with addictions have a mental illness, the damage had been done. I was having a lot of trouble coping without drugs, and Max’s line of reasoning made it worse.

  I found myself walking around at night: pacing, wanting to leave, hating being there. I couldn’t sleep, I was up all night, my mind racing and worrying. I wanted to leave; I felt like an idiot, it felt melodramatic to be there in rehab. I made small incisions with a pair of nail scissors on the inside of my thigh. Halfway through my next counselling session with Audrey, after pushing myself again and again to tell her what I did, I told her that I had cut myself.

  She put her hand on my leg. She told me cutting didn’t help. I told her I felt that it did. She told me I cut myself when I was anxious, and I needed to do breathing exercises instead. She told me that my thoughts caused my anxiety, and that my thoughts were things I could control. She told me there was no need for me to be anxious. She said I was funny, and attractive, and smart. She told me I was safe.

  ‘Anxiety comes in waves,’ she said. ‘It peaks and then it goes. You need to identify when it is starting, and slow down your breathing. When you slow down your breathing, your body will relax, and you will feel better. You don’t need to cut yourself to feel better.’

  Audrey then took me into the director’s office. Apparently, an episode of self-harm was considered a serious incident in rehab. The director was a tall, strong-looking woman with greying hair cut in a kind of flat-top.

  ‘Luke, self-harm is a maladaptive way of dealing with anxiety,’ she said. ‘Your body is preparing itself to fight or to run when it senses danger. You are becoming aggressive when you feel anxious, but you are turning your aggression on yourself. It’s not actually helping your situation to cut yourself. Do you understand what I mean?’

  ‘I think so,’ I replied.

  ‘You feel scared or worried about something, you can’t cope, so you lash out at yourself,’ she said.

  And suddenly I did understand; the concept of internalised aggression made perfect sense. It was what we called in rehab a ‘light-bulb moment’, and the urge to self-harm started to dissipate thereafter.

  But I still felt anxious, and I still had trouble sleeping. Audrey asked again and again whether I was comfortable with my sexuality, and I began to resent her for it.

  More classes followed. We talked about boundaries, and the ways in which they can be violated: physically, sexually, socially, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually.

  The vast majority of people relapse shortly after they leave rehab, whether they finish the program or not. Many people fail at rehab. One patient asked nearly everybody — including me and including all the staff — for sex. It was near constant, and he was eventually kicked out. The librarian was expelled a short time later for smuggling in anti-psychotics, and taking them in the morning, so she could sleep all day and avoid class. A few weeks later, a resident with schizophrenia left in the middle of the night, bought some heroin, found a syringe, injected it and died almost instantly — a reasonably common problem among addicts when they leave rehab, and, after having had a break from their drug, take a dose that is far too high for what their body is now used to.

  But there are also people who graduate and stay clean. Holly, the psychologist, graduated the eight-week program. Her mother and daughter attended the graduation, beaming with smiles. Before she left, she thanked the girls in her villa for ‘making me feel beautiful again’.

  And me? Well, I still couldn’t sleep. And I was still annoyed at why Audrey kept asking me whether or not I was comfortable with my sexuality. One night, my annoyance with her turned into an extensive diary entry about high school — the first time I had written any of it down. When I had my next session with Audrey, she became the first person I told what had happened at high school.

  She gently rubbed my back as I went through all the details; I sobbed, but by the time I’d finished, I had become angry.

  ‘You’ve got through the worst of it,’ Audrey told me. ‘You have already survived it; it’s time now to accept yourself and be kinder to yourself.’

  I stayed awake all the next night, feeling tender and exposed; a soft spot had been uncovered.

  I learnt a lot about soft spots during my time in rehab. That started when I saw a guy named Billy punching a boxing bag. He looked like Rocky; he had a boxer’s nose, and was Italian or Greek, and he was really going at it. I knew he had just spent a fair bit of time in jail, but he was actually pretty friendly, and when he saw me walking past he called me over.

  He said he used to be a competitive boxer, and asked if I had ever boxed before. I laughed nervously and said no. He got a pair of boxing gloves for me, and proceeded to show me the basics of how to throw a punch.

  ‘Turn your arm as you do it, so it’s all knuckle,’ he said. Self-consciously, I started hitting the bag again and again until I found a rhythm, and I ended up doing it for about half an hour.

  We had a few more boxing sessions after that. And then, the day after my big day with Audrey, Max came up to me, announcing he had come up with a plan for me, inspired by a highly effeminate champion Thai kickboxer he once saw on TV.

  ‘I am going to turn you into society’s worst nightmare,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A poof who can kill.’

  ‘No, Max,’ I said. ‘I don’t need to know that kind of thing, not anymore.’

  ‘C’mon,’ he protested. ‘It will give you confidence.’

  So he took me into the shed with the boxing bag.

  His philosophy was simple — your hard bits thrown at full force to the other person’s soft bits.

  Elbows to eye sockets.

  Knees to testicles.

  Fists to windpipe.

  Shin to stomach.

  Legs to ribs.

  Head to back of head.

  And so on.

  Even with all this activity, I couldn’t sleep, so the rehab took me to the doctor. I was prescribed anti-psychotics, and woke up after weeks of not sleeping properly, light as a feather with a peace I had never known before: fear could be overcome, failure was simply a matter of perception, demons had been slayed, and there was a light shining out of my heart.

  I wrote this note in my diary:

  I go back to my room. I think about, for some strange reason, Easter, and I thought about boundaries. What is in my boundary? I thought. Me, self-love, me, good stuff, me, me, me. I start feeling a strange sensation in my chest. Perhaps it’s some epithet of narcissism, but it feels like something else. It feels like I’ve tapped into some kind of divine energy. I feel a little white light or something glowing out of
me. I feel connected with all the living things around me. I think about Jesus Christ. I never got the myth of Jesus, it never made any sense. Now it seems to have kind of clicked. It’s like no matter what suffering and hatred we endure in life, we will always rise up because we will always have our essence. We can all rise again cos nothing ever kills our essence.

  I am not saying I want to be a Christian, no way, but I understand the spiritual messages of Christianity now. But it feels right. And it feels like for the first time, maybe I have grasped what it means to have a soul.

  I woke that day feeling light and lovely, feeling as if anything at all — including complete sobriety — was now within my reach.

  Then suddenly my time was up. I gave a goodbye talk to the group, in which I revealed I had cried over things that happened to me fifteen years ago. I told them I’d recognised that my drug abuse was a form of poorly expressed, internalised rage. Everyone clapped, and I left. It felt life-changing, revelatory; nothing could stop me, anything could be achieved.

  Meanwhile, methamphetamine use had continued on its downward fall, which began toward the end of 2005 and went through right until 2011.

  In 2010, at 2.1 per cent across the population, use of methamphetamines had fallen to the lowest level seen since 1995. A similar trend was seen among young people, where students were less likely to have ever used the drug in 2011 (2.9 per cent) than in 2005 (5.3 per cent). Clandestine-lab detections had also dropped, as had meth imports and drug offences.

  There was a sense — at least in drug circles, and by following what the media were saying — that meth had come and gone. However, others — and by others I mean here experts in the field — were less convinced. They tended to see the drop-off in meth use as either 1) too insignificant to be statistically meaningful or 2) simply part of what many see as the inherently cyclical nature of population drug epidemics.

  ‘Drugs, for a number of different reasons, come in and out of fashion all the time,’ Geoff Munro, national policy manager with the Australian Drug and Alcohol Foundation, told me. ‘There will always be a population cohort of addicts who abuse the strongest drug they can find; drugs throughout history follow an often inexplicable cycle of being widely abused, and then use falls off again, before we get another spike a few years or a decade later.’