The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  According to the cyclical perspective on community drug ‘epidemics’, the dynamic nature of drug markets — both supply and demand — means that today’s problem drug could well be replaced by a new problem drug tomorrow.

  Another possible reason for the decrease in use was the tightening of restrictions governing the sale of pseudoephedrine-based cold-and-flu tablets in some states. Most meth being consumed in Australia in that decade (2000–10) was being made here, and intelligence suggested most manufacturers were sourcing their precursor material through ‘pseudoephedrine runners’ who went from chemist to chemist all over the state, and sometimes interstate, to buy cold-and-flu tablets in bulk. Queensland, perhaps because of its vast geography and scattered populations, has always been Australia’s meth-making capital. So in November 2005, the Queensland state government brought in Project Stop, an electronic tool and database that allowed for sales of pseudoephedrine to be tracked in real time using a Global Positioning System. This system aimed to prevent individuals from purchasing small quantities of pseudoephedrine from many different pharmacies. In the short term, the project seemed to work; the number of clandestine labs in Queensland dropped between 2005 and 2007 by 23 per cent. By 2006, nationally, all products containing pseudoephedrine had been rescheduled as either ‘Pharmacist Only Medicines’ (Schedule 3) or ‘Prescription Only Medicines’ (Schedule 4), depending on the amount of pseudoephedrine in the product. This means that prior to 2005, anybody could buy pseudoephedrine off the shelves without asking a pharmacist, or showing ID, let alone getting a prescription. Given that nearly all meth is made with either ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, it’s not surprising that many people were taking advantage of this loophole. Jason Ferris, a senior research fellow at the University of Queensland, has extensively studied Project Stop, and told me that a national compulsory system would reduce the opportunities for addict-based manufacturers to make meth.

  However, others, such as the ACC, have suggested that the tighter controls on pseudoephedrine simply resulted in the growth of the illicit-precursor importation market. Indeed, the US introduced the federal Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act in 2005, which increased restrictions on pseudoephedrine sales. Similarly to Australia, pharmacists and sellers of medications containing pseudoephedrine were required to place these medications behind the counter, and buyers were required to show a state-issued identification card and sign a log that could be used to track their purchases. Two researchers, Dobkin and Nicosia, studied the effect of this legislation, and concluded that this intervention substantially disrupted the supply of methamphetamine, but that the effect was only temporary.

  All things considered, this legislation may have opened up a market for more sophisticated meth manufacturers overseas and here. Meth’s minor drop-off at the end of last decade turned out to be the calm before the storm — from where we are now, we can see that Australia’s meth story goes something like this: The first clouds of meth were detected in the syringes of Sydney’s injecting drug users in the mid-1990s. Then came the thunder — crime bosses across Asia stopped producing heroin, and started making the profitable, easier-to-make methamphetamine in 1999. Local drug dealers and crime gangs got on board and starting making gear; as a result, it rained powdered meth in Australia from mid-2000 to mid-2004. Then things dried up. Years later, without any apparent warning and before we had a chance to notice the dark clouds, it started raining crystal hail.

  And before the storm, and after rehab, I was back living at Beck’s.

  Rehab is a bit like an idealised society, where you don’t have the usual life and money pressures. When I returned to real life, I was relegated to part-time work because of my breakdown; I couldn’t afford my own place, and my family lived in Queensland, and couldn’t help me. So I wasn’t really able to cut ties with the only people who could offer me a cheap room: people who were always using drugs. That is to say, Beck — and Beck’s place was now hers and Smithy’s.

  I returned to work in Melbourne. While I never reached the same levels of misery and low self-esteem, and my life was without a doubt better after I got out of rehab, I still fell back into addiction. Non-drug-using people tended to avoid me, and I them; I continued hanging out with my drug-using friends instead. We smoked pot most nights, and some mornings, and on Friday nights, we snorted powdered meth.

  And these Friday nights were undoubtedly the best night of the week because everyone was so happy and upbeat. But the meth was so weak then — this was back in 2008–09 — that I found it easy not to use; when I did use, I usually fell asleep, and when I woke up the next day I always regretted it because I had less energy in the gym — though I still went. I didn’t really go out, because living with Beck and Smithy meant that I felt less lonely.

  Smithy and Beck, meanwhile, had settled into a life together: a life of silly jokes, bad TV, and drugs. During the week, Beck would yell and scream. Smithy would take at least one day a week off work — usually on Tuesday or Wednesday — when he would literally just lie there awake, staring at the wall, and wouldn’t answer if you spoke to him. He dealt bits and bobs of pot to make ends meet.

  Smithy did bring an element of stability to the household, if for no other reason than that he actually did work (apart from those mid-week days off). He also loved sport, and went to work quickly to ensure both of Beck’s daughters played sport. He went along and watched their games every week, and referred to both of them as his ‘champions’.

  With a more stable household, Beck always offered a couch to anybody who needed it (and in my case a room to someone who needed it). One day a woman from the neighbourhood said she was going through some issues and dropped off her cat. Beck took George — a cat with a gimpy leg — in, no questions asked.

  Later, the same would happen with somebody’s dog. The dog had a large cyst on its face, and Beck sat by the heater with the dog, squeezed the entire cyst out onto a tissue, and cleaned it up with antiseptic — the cyst never grew back. A short time later, somebody dropped off another dog, which got the first dog pregnant. The male dog was then adopted out, and the female died during birth. Beck bottle-fed the puppies for the first six weeks, setting her alarm every six hours. She gave away three of the puppies, and kept one for herself — that dog is now seven, and as far as I know, it still lives with Smithy.

  But all was not well in Beck’s world, and by the time she reached the age of thirty, it was beginning to show. I’m not sure exactly when it started, but she began to experience a smouldering resentment towards others and the world, which, over time, became an obsessive, perhaps pathological, jealousy.

  Beck regarded anybody who had any measure of success with open disdain, and sometimes subjected them to abuse — and she had an extremely wide definition of success. She regarded my achievements as a mere consequence of my parents having money, or the fact that I received private tuition, or the two years I had spent at a private school.

  It wasn’t just people from our general area who had gone on to have money (or mediocre journalism careers) that Beck resented; it was anybody who had a mortgage or a nice car. One day in Coles she commented that the ‘women working in the deli are up themselves’ and the gay guy who supervised the checkout area was also ‘stuck-up’.

  The only jobs she worked as an adult were as a factory-hand, or on a production line in the slowly disappearing manufacturing industry of a rapidly changing Dandenong. When I asked her one day why she hated all the people who worked in the supermarket, she explained that she had applied for a traineeship a few years back at Coles, and after a day-long workshop-style selection process, she was rejected because she had ‘poor group skills’, didn’t listen and ‘constantly talked over the top of people’.

  ‘Too socially retarded to even be a check-out chick,’ she said one day, giggling, when she was stoned.

  Beck was still funny — even delightful — when she was stoned, and was super-friendly and happy on th
ose Friday nights. In between, though, life could be pretty grim — especially for her kids. Beck’s sense of unfairness about how her life had panned out was, after a while, being taken out on her children every morning, as if she had been unfairly sentenced to living in a small house with a partner who slept in a separate room, and two children who she often couldn’t stand. Beck’s weekday mornings were unpleasant for her, and even more unpleasant for her children after two years of using powdered meth every weekend. The problem was yelling and screaming, and a mood that seemed to have no discernible cause but manifested itself in huffiness and screams of ‘fucking hurry up you little cow’, ‘move it’, ‘who drank all the milk, there’s no fucking milk’ before refusing to take her daughters to school, and making Smithy crawl out of bed to drive them. Beck went from waking up with no energy to smashing dishes with such panic-driven hysteria that her youngest would often go to school in anguished tears.

  I am not sure why I never said anything; I often heard it, and I was usually glad it wasn’t directed at me. I guess we all just sort of got used to it, and tried to stay out of her way.

  By about midday, when the kids were at school and Beck had had some more sleep, and smoked some marijuana, she was marvellous again. Witty, funny, offering to get Smithy and me something from the bakery. Whatever we asked for, she would come back with twice as much. I believed that Beck wouldn’t have behaved like that if she was fully in control of herself, and I understood why she had a degree of anger — whether in good or bad faith — about the way things had panned out for her in life. If I gently raised the issue of her anger, most of the time she would claim she was ‘crook’ because she had a cold.

  Roughly every second Saturday, Smithy would go out with some mates, and Beck would call him and call him. He’d say he would be fifteen minutes, and would then be away for six hours — with her car. It was as if he liked being out with a man-friend, and having her call every ten minutes, and not answering her calls. That way he could tell his mate — or perhaps just leave the impression — ‘bitch wants me’. It was unclear to me, though, whether she wanted her car, him, the drugs he said he was buying, or all three.

  Amid all this, Beck got pregnant for the third time in just over two years; Smithy was convinced she was deliberately getting herself pregnant to 1) keep him at home more (she used to call him dozens of times and cry for hours on end if he was out for too long on the weekend) and 2), and more importantly in his eyes, to get a financial claim on his father’s estate, which by now was worth several million dollars. Smithy was incredulous when Beck got pregnant the third time and urged her to have another abortion. ‘Urged’ might actually be too nice a way of putting it: Smithy told Beck that if she didn’t have an abortion this time, he would leave. She cried for days on end, before agreeing that she would give herself a miscarriage by injecting herself with an enormous dose of powdered meth. When she went to the doctor a short time later, she found that not only was her attempt unsuccessful, but also that she was having twin boys. She sat me down in the lounge room when she got home and said, ‘I want to have these kids because being a parent is the only thing I am good at.’ She promised Smithy that he could be the stay-at-home parent, and she would go and work fulltime at her job packing boxes at a factory. He agreed, and eventually he seemed quite taken with the idea of twin boys. Excited, even — but he made no plans to give up his party lifestyle.

  In September 2009, two splendid little beings were born, and brought with them hope, and sunshine, and giggles, and all things that babies give, no matter who their parents are, and no matter what the circumstances of their birth.

  Meanwhile, my work situation had become untenable. One day, I got a call from a friend who worked on the same program as me, doing the same job, but who had started about two years later. A top guy, he’d called to ask me why I hadn’t applied to present any programs over the summer because, he thought, I would be a very good presenter. He said management needed people to present shows, and when he’d asked to present, he’d been given a heap of graveyard shifts, and — here is the clincher — he didn’t need to put in a demo. The next day, I emailed the program director to ask if he needed anybody to do shifts over summer, and whether he needed a demo. He said no, he didn’t need anybody, and upon that I got up, walked out of the ABC, and never went back. I took multiple legal actions, won some, lost some, and won enough to get me a big trip to Europe, where, inspired by the fact my legal actions had been more successful than my radio career, I took up a law degree.

  By this stage, I was fuming — I felt as if my life had been derailed over and over again by people who had abused their power and screwed me over for no good reason. I was convinced that the reason this has happened was simply because I hadn’t been powerful enough. I read my law studies like a madman, and enrolled in boxing (which by then had replaced self-harming as an outlet for anger — but like most things I became obsessed with it and at times I took it too far). I began using steroid cream, and packed on a heap of muscle, which led to heavy weight-lifting and Muay Thai kickboxing, eventually training with competitive teams.

  I became very volatile and vicious — looking back, I was not a very nice person a lot of the time. I not only didn’t take shit from anybody, but the slightest provocation would see me with my hands around someone’s neck, and/or an email to them explaining that I had initiated legal action. By the time I got halfway through my legal studies, several people I knew had employed me as their pro-bono legal advocate (not as a lawyer) in workplace injury, bad loans, and unfair dismissal. They did this knowing I would charge into conciliations and trials using a combination of broadcasting skills, legal know-how, bitchiness, vengeance, and testosterone to scare their adversaries into handing over money.

  I was eventually so angry that I would, on occasion, be walking down the street and start punching the Christ out of a tree. In the end, I had to wind things back, as being in a constant state of rage aggravated a neck injury that I had gotten at the ABC; I had to take long periods off from studying law because I was in pain and depressed. I still smoked pot and did a bit of powdered meth, but only to help me focus and prepare for the next battle.

  For the most part, Smithy and Beck — along with my parents — were the only people I didn’t fight with. By midway through 2011, in fact, Smithy had been spending more and more time on those Friday nights chatting with me while Beck was in bed (she always crashed early). We talked about all manner of things, mainly sport, and he was almost certainly my closest friend for a long while. Over time, however, something curious happened. He stopped talking about sport and started talking about sex.

  In particular, he asked me over and over again what I thought about when I masturbated. Usually I would just pretend to go to sleep, and not answer him, but he persisted for months and months. It seemed really grubby and childish to me.

  The final straw came late in 2011, the day my alarm went off on the opposite side of the house to Smithy, and he started bitching and mumbling. I had had enough. I walked into his room and told him, in great detail, what I thought of him: he was a fat, lazy, sleazy piece of shit who had done nothing with his. At the end of the tirade, as he sat there stunned, I gave him a decent shove. Then he got mad.

  He grabbed me and effortlessly — the guy hadn’t done any exercise or work in two years, but was still as strong as an ox — threw me to the ground. He got on top of me, and held both my arms to the ground as I struggled to get up, tearing a muscle in my shoulder in the process. Beck walked in, saw the scene, and screamed, ‘I am sick of you coming here, causing trouble between me and Smithy; get out!’ So I did, and I didn’t speak to either of them for two years after that.

  I moved to St Kilda; I found anti-depressants that actually worked; I calmed down, and my neck pain went away. I saw three therapists in this time; the first told me that my rage came from a narcissist’s sense of entitlement because of my ‘narcissistic personality traits’;
the second told me that I nearly met the criteria for an anti-social personality disorder; and finally I found a softly spoken African-American who sent me inside the dreams I had in which I was falling off something. Through this process, I realised that the object I was falling from was life itself, and that when the going got tough, I decided to jump off.

  This period when I was away from Smithy and Beck, doing my own thing, was a largely positive one for me. Between 2011 and 2013 — although I still had the odd marijuana and MDMA binge — I finished my law degree, got a job in a community legal centre as a media officer, and was nominated for a Human Rights Media Award for my long-form written journalism. The more I wrote, the better I felt. I started getting paid good money for my print journalism. And, gradually, my dreams changed, too; now when I dreamt I was falling off something, I grew wings. At least once a week I would have a lucid dream in which I flew all over the country, and then deep into the galaxy: when I wrote, I felt as if I could fly.

  This feeling of flying was becoming more common, for different reasons, around Australia.

  From around 2011 onwards, we had what was basically a new drug on the market — crystallised meth, which was far stronger and far more addictive than the powdered meth that most of us knew only as speed. So it’s not surprising that by the reporting period of 2012–13, every state and territory reported an increase in the median purity of methamphetamine. Victoria reported the highest annual median purity of 76.1 per cent in this reporting period, the highest median purity reported in the previous decade — a massive jump when you consider that in 2007 it had dipped to around 17 per cent in most states across the nation. As criminal networks and drug manufacturers got smarter, though, even the powdered meth on the market was of an exceptionally high purity.