The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  On one level, the explanation is simple — more of the drug was getting into the country, and that’s because more of it was being made all around the world from around 2011 onward. The cause of our current crystal-meth problem is that so much of the drug is coming through our border, while local production has also risen — as indicated through the detection of clandestine labs — but at a much smaller rate. A few years ago, it was thought that 90 per cent of the meth being used here was locally made; today, that figure is thought to be to around 60 per cent.

  As Australians grew tired of powdered meth by the mid- 2000s, our local dealers seem to have fallen ‘victim’ to the forces of globalisation — a higher-quality imported product, produced at a cheaper cost. Crystallised meth is now being made all over the world: in the jungles of Burma, in the densely populated slums of Manila, in the deserts of Nigeria, and, perhaps most importantly, in the shantytowns of China. Australia was seen as an easy market for these producers, and soon our hospital emergency rooms were awash with wide-eyed, psychotic meth users.

  How exactly did this happen? We need to back up a few steps, and examine what took place in the sub-regions of East and South-East Asia in the first decade of the millennium. For an overview, we can start with these four points, taken from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) World Drug Reports from 2008 to 2010:

  •While opium cultivation levels worldwide had also restored to and stabilised at pre-2000 levels, drug manufacturers and users were showing a preference for synthetic stimulants. Global seizures of amphetamines increased some threefold over the period 1998–2010, far more than the increases for plant-based drugs.

  •In 2008, UNODC reported that methamphetamine use and production was starting to rise, and that 55 per cent of the world’s 14 million amphetamine users were in Asia, most of those in the East and Southeast sub-region.

  •In the same year, more and more industrial-scale meth labs were being discovered across South-East Asia, ‘run by large criminal organisations’ according to the UN. By 2009, China accounted for the majority of reported methamphetamine laboratories seized in East and South-East Asia.

  •The 2009 UNODC report concluded that Amphetamine-type stimulant (ATS) producers adapt to evade law enforcement. There are signs that criminal organisations are adapting their manufacturing operations to avoid control by: 1) utilising precursor chemicals not under international control; 2) moving manufacturing operations to more vulnerable locations; and 3) shifting precursor chemicals and drug trafficking routes to new locations to avoid detection.

  By 2010, there were an increasing number of countries reporting methamphetamine seizures — by now, West African nations were well and truly on board as places to manufacture and distribute drugs, as well as to launder drug money. Iran, Syria, and Pakistan — all of which already had big markets for the legitimate use of crystal-meth precursor drugs — were also developing large black markets. Although the proportion of people requiring treatment for amphetamine abuse was just 5 per cent in Africa, 10 per cent in Europe, and 12 per cent in the Americas, UNODC would report that the number of people seeking treatment was ‘particularly high in Oceania (20 per cent) and Asia (21 per cent), reaching 36 per cent in East and South-East Asia with proportions exceeding 50 per cent in Japan, the Republic of Korea, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines, as well as in Saudi Arabia in the Near and Middle East’ and that ‘Government experts have reported that methamphetamine ranks among the top three illicit drugs consumed in several countries in this region, including China, Japan, and Indonesia’.

  Although the proportion of people treated for crystal-meth use in Indonesia was far lower, at around 25 per cent, this still signified an increase of almost 80 per cent from the previous year. Crystal-meth users also accounted for the second-largest share of newly admitted patients receiving drug treatment in 2013 at 31 per cent, after heroin users who accounted for a 36 per cent share. Moreover, in China, crystal-meth users accounted for 70 per cent of synthetic drug users receiving treatment in 2013, while methamphetamine tablet users accounted for about 16 per cent.

  And it was Asian nations that would continue to drive production, distribution, and demand: and further, it was the growth of richer, younger, more urbanised populations in these nations that was a driving force behind the increase of meth use. These were societies where new opportunities were growing exponentially, and there was a perception that hard work — and having the ability to put in very long days with little sleep — would pay off.

  ‘It originated as a drug that was taken by poor people, traditionally workers. That migrated into youth culture over a decade ago,’ Jeremy Douglas, UNODC regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, said in a press statement in 2014. ‘More recently, that has evolved into a growing prosperous youth culture … You have rising incomes occurring across the region. You have a large, large youth population. So you have natural growth of the market.’

  As these, particularly Southeast Asian, nations became richer, and their populations skewed younger, consumer demand for strong amphetamines increased. Between 2008 and 2013, crystal-meth seizures in the entire Asian region almost doubled, while methamphetamine tablet seizures rose at an even more rapid rate, resulting in a seven-fold increase. In November 2013, an ACC report, ‘Patterns and Trends of Amphetamine-Type Stimulants (ATS) and Other Drugs — Challenges for Asia and the Pacific 2013’, said that:

  Seizures of methamphetamine in both pill and crystalline forms reached record highs [in Asia] in 2012, with 227 million methamphetamine pills seized — a 60 per cent increase from 2011 and a more-than seven-fold increase since 2008 — along with 11.6 metric tonnes of crystalline methamphetamine, a 12 per cent rise from 2011.

  In its submission to the 2015 Australian federal parliamentary inquiry, UNODC would write that the ‘rapidly developing chemical and pharmaceutical industries’ in Asia posed a serious threat:

  There is evidence of domestic production in most of the countries of the region, but two countries have advantages that allow them to undercut local prices. The first is Myanmar, where political instability in Shan State and the Special Regions adjoining China has provided cover for large-scale drug manufacturing and trafficking. The second is China, where large quantities of precursor chemicals are produced domestically and industry scale of methamphetamine labs have been continuously dismantled. Myanmar, however, does not have a legitimate pharmaceutical industry, which means practically that precursor chemicals such as ephedrine and pseudoephedrine must be smuggled from outside Myanmar for the production of methamphetamine. Therefore, precursors have been smuggled from neighbouring countries with large pharmaceutical industries including India and China, whereas the finished methamphetamine products have been trafficked in the reverse direction.

  Dr Alex Wodak, from the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, told me that drug manufacturing reflected not just an increasingly globalised and outsourced international capitalist economy, but also an economy that creates vast inequality in developing nations, with slick skyscrapers and shopping centres growing around slums, stalls, and beggars.

  ‘People are joining the drug trade to get a slice of this pie,’ he said.

  In a 2015 report, among the 95 countries and territories worldwide identified as destinations for the meth ATS seized between 2009 and 2013, three of the five most frequently mentioned ones were located in East and South-East Asia and Oceania: Australia, Japan, and Malaysia.

  The ACC’s CEO Chris Dawson explained to me that the way the world markets for methamphetamine and crystal methamphetamine work are similar to traditional markets — that is, they function according to supply and demand. The supply has increased significantly in recent years because there are more transnational organised crime groups in the market.

  Crime groups with international links to the Middle East and Asia have also demonstrated the ability to manufacture and traffic methylamp
hetamine and its precursor chemicals into Australia. Australia has for several decades had a relatively high level of demand for illicit stimulants, and illicit drug users in this country pay a premium for illicit drugs compared to their overseas counterparts. This has made Australia an attractive market for transnational crime groups.

  And somewhere along the line, probably around the southern summer of 2011–12, Beck and Smithy stopped taking powdered meth, and started taking crystal meth.

  Come 2013, and Beck rang me to say she was well and truly over our fight, and she missed me. By now I felt exactly the same, and I told her that. She started visiting me again in my new pad in St Kilda. She told me she had moved into a nice new four-bedroom house in the Toomuc Valley — ‘new Pakenham … I’ve finally made it in life’ — and that Smithy was also over it. He knew I wasn’t very well at the time, and was busting for me to come down. But I stayed away, for whatever reason. While I did want to be friends with Smithy again, it just felt too awkward.

  Not long after we started talking again, Beck rang me to say she was so sick of Smithy’s weird, sleazy games, and his whinging, and his verbal abuse that she had tried to hit him with a toaster. He had gotten a restraining order against her. She moved into another house in the Toomuc Valley, on the cusp of the 100-metre stay-away mark, and, bit by bit, the two started spending time together again.

  Chapter Seven

  Ridgey didge

  A FLOCK OF white cockatoos screeched as they flew across the horizon; it seemed as if they had fallen from the last white clouds that remained in the sky’s west. The sun was beginning to set, and the clouds surrounding it looked as if a toddler had spilled pink, yellow, and purple paint all over a perfectly blue canvas, which now threatened to drip to the ground. It would only be a few more moments before the night would wipe the sky clean. It was the autumn of 2014, and it was dusk in the Toomuc Valley. Deep in one of the suburb’s terracotta-coloured houses, the blind was shut, the lights were off, but Beck was there in her lounge room — just around the corner from Smithy’s — staring at the television. Crystal meth had well and truly taken hold of certain sub-sections within the community, Beck among them.

  Gravity — or perhaps more specifically, reality — had been treating Beck rather harshly all day. In fact, Beck had only fallen from paradise — the crystal-meth high — a few hours earlier, and now the forbidden fruit which had gotten her there was rotting at her heart; she was tumbling, weakened, in freefall. In her own mind, she was a passive victim of this imminent crash — perhaps she was getting sick, perhaps something had infected her.

  There was a sensation digging like a butter knife at the base of her skull, and the more she concentrated on it, the more it felt like two sharp screws in her temples, and now she noticed it was blurring her vision as if she were slightly drunk.

  Not helping matters was the odour of cat shit coming from the other end of the house. It hit her nostrils only occasionally, and yet it was, to her, a definitive smell: the smell of waste, the smell of something which been kept inside all day. Beck was worried that she would need to put her poor old cat down soon — it had been going to the toilet inside almost every day. Probably, she’d concluded, because the old boy was starting to go senile.

  She wished she could be bothered getting up to get her phone. Smithy might have been getting more gear tonight. Meth — make that crystal meth — would have been a spectacularly useful ‘pick me up’, especially as she thought she was coming down with a flu, and the kids had made a mess of the house, and the stray cat she took in ten years ago was now shitting everywhere, and ‘I have to fucking cooking dinner tonight’, and Smithy had probably given her less than he was supposed to the night before — like he always did, even though she put out, and did ‘all the dirty, disgusting things’ he wanted her to — and, in fact, Smithy had probably given her share to Luke when she wasn’t looking, that was why Luke ‘bloody well moved in there in the first place’.

  And right at that moment, there was a knock at the door. It was Luke; in other words — me.

  I had walked over from Smithy’s — a walk which took no more than a few minutes — with something on my mind: a life-changing revelation that had been baking inside my head all day during my own slow drift down from a high. One particular idea was stuck in my head; I felt like a child who’d gotten on a Gravitron before realising I was going to get more than I’d bargained for. When I walked into Beck’s house, the first thing I noticed was the aforementioned smell, and just as I came into the room, Beck picked up her iPad and started playing her favourite game — Zombie Apocalypse. Her forehead was deeply creased, like a plant that had not been watered for a long time; she had bags under her eyes, and lines on top of those bags. She also had a rather ominous-looking open sore, which had taken up one corner of her chin, and ran roughly half the length of her lips. It was weeping pus, and bleeding slightly. Her shoulders were slumped over. Her eyes seemed darker than normal, and bloodshot; they reminded me of a syringe when its water is mixed with blood.

  ‘Beck, mate, there is something I have to tell you.’

  ‘Mmmm?’

  ‘It’s about Smithy,’ and at the mention of his name, her face lit up a little. ‘I’ve been in a real panic; I think Smithy has been fucking me, y’know. He hasn’t really been giving me meth; he’s been giving me acid, and everyone has been laughing at me behind my back. He just took $700 off me; he knew I would say yes because I was on acid. Because I have been getting in all these vortexes, y’know, and wanking constantly, and I’ve never had meth which has done this before and I think it’s because he’s charging me for meth and just giving me acid trips and I think everyone is in on it.’

  And on I went — and on and on — and Beck’s expression didn’t change much, but her ears pricked up each time I mentioned Smithy. Eventually she interjected with, ‘Smithy is a psychopath, Luke, he would have done that.’

  ‘Has he, Beck?’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe. Stealing money is the kind of thing he would do. Ring him, Luke. Ring him and tell him what you think is going on.’

  And so she handed me the phone, having already dialled the number, and said, ‘Ask him, ask him.’

  ‘Hello,’ Smithy answered in his deep, gravelly voice.

  ‘Smithy, I gave you $100 last night,’ I said. ‘And I didn’t feel shit; it’s nothing like the meth I had the other week, I feel like shit now.’

  ‘I fucking told you it was shit gear, you gave me the money anyway,’ he said.

  ‘Here’s my theory, Smithy — you took my portion, and then gave me acid instead,’ and then I left a long silence, waiting for him to put his foot in it.

  Emboldened, I took a deeper jab. ‘Go on Smithy, I’m listening,’ I said.

  ‘How could you fucking say that about me, you are supposed to be my friend, fuck you, you are a fucking arsehole. I gave you acid the other day, remember, does it feel like this meth does?’

  And I think honestly and deeply, and I guess it doesn’t …

  ‘Well, does it?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said, realising that this was yet another paranoid delusion that had built up, bit by bit, over the day.

  ‘And you didn’t give me $100, you gave me $700 — and that was for rent and drugs in advance — remember?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, as my panic turned to relief and then to guilt. ‘I’m sorry, seems I got a bit paranoid. Can we perhaps just put this one behind us?’

  Smithy started laughing and said, ‘I’ll see you later on, we need to go and get more gear.’

  My fear having been alleviated, all I could sense was the smell of shit, as Beck explained that her cat had gone senile. The odour was becoming unbearable; I got up and followed the smell to find a sloppy, mousse-like turd on the floor of the bathroom. There were a few blowflies buzzing around it. The cat ran up to me — poor old George, the ginger cat with the gimpy fo
ot that Beck had taken in — and started meowing around my legs. I noticed all the doors were shut, so I opened one, and he immediately ran outside and started pissing like a hose. George wasn’t senile at all, I thought. Beck hadn’t been opening the door for him. More to the point, she didn’t need to get him put down. Beck — in her state — was undoing all her good deeds.

  I cleaned up after the cat, and went back into the lounge room, where I sat on the couch next to Beck. Tears fell down my cheeks. Beck saw this, and turned back to her iPad.

  ‘People were just so horrible to me, for no reason, no fucking reason. I had so many friends, Beck, everyone liked me — and then suddenly nobody would be my friend — nobody!’ I said.

  My sobbing turned into howling, and upon hearing this, Beck put down her iPad and picked up her book — a second-hand geology book about the structure and metamorphosis of rocks. Something seemed to have drained out of Beck; it seemed to have drained out of the ever-growing hole in her arm. She was so sick of giving a fuck. Nobody ever gave a fuck about her. Nobody ever stuck up for her, patted her on the back when she talked about the torment she had experienced. The same people who picked on her went on to have careers, mortgages, husbands, and twice as many Facebook friends.

  She believed that all my paranoia was a symptom of my narcissism; that I wanted everything to revolve around me. Her facial expression had moved slowly over the hour from fatigued to embittered. She was still reading her book on rocks, which was now half covering her face. I had a feeling of clarity, as if I had been working on a maths problem all day, and had just had a ‘Eureka!’ moment, where all the faulty reasoning and wrong turns seemed worth it to get to this point.

  My anxiety lifted along with my psychotic fog. ‘You know what, Beck?’ I said. ‘You haven’t been very sympathetic.’