The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  She peered over at me. ‘I’m sick,’ she said.

  This lit my fuse.

  ‘You’re always sick, Beck — always. What’s wrong this time?’

  ‘I’ve got sinus pain.’

  ‘So you can’t comfort me because you’ve got a blocked nose?’

  She gave me an evil look.

  ‘Ohhh, isn’t that sad,’ I continued. ‘Poor little Beck has got a blocked nose.’

  Beck jolted, as if she’d received an electric shock, and shouted, ‘Perhaps I would have given you a bit more sympathy, Luke, if you haven’t had sat there crying like a fucking girl.’

  And then it was on.

  Let me interject here for a second, and state what is probably obvious — I was in the beginnings of my crystal-meth binge. I had been using for about a month. I had become a little preoccupied myself, with maybes, and apparently probable — to me, at least — theories, and possible subterfuge. By this stage, my mission — to investigate crystal meth — had almost been forgotten. This was supposed to be my daring comeback into journalism, my chance to prove the haters wrong. I was here to cut through the spin and the hearsay reportage, and to find out precisely why meth had made a comeback of its own — into my life, and into the lives of many others — and was wreaking such havoc. Even if it wasn’t the sort of havoc that made the news, and it was nothing like the havoc on the anti-meth adverts, it was havoc, nonetheless. The average drug-user — the one who used ecstasy and stayed away from heroin — was finding profound new highs in a substance that few of us had ever tried ever before, let alone understood. I, for one, was too involved in my elaborate paranoia to realise that what I was taking now was crystal meth, and that what I had been taking for the past few years had been powdered meth. This fact had been obscured to me by another fact: I had started injecting drugs again for the first time since my brief heroin foray in 2007.

  When I first took the crystallised variety of meth at Smithy’s in early 2015, I had no idea I was taking something different, and I wonder how many users were in the same boat. The fact that so many different substances are all referred to as ‘meth’ only adds to the confusion. I thought the reason it felt so much stronger was that I was injecting it again, but it wasn’t that simple.

  The key to understanding how crystal meth came to supersede powdered meth in Australia is in, as explored in previous chapters, the growth of the production and consumption of the former in South-East Asia. Figures from the Australian Crime Commission show that while there was a 15 per cent increase in domestic lab detections between 2010–11 and 2011–12, and a steady increase over the past ten years, this figure did not compare to the enormous increase in international imports. And what was being imported was either crystal meth (which until very recently was almost certainly not being made here) or much more potent varieties of powdered meth.

  The statistics on border detections tell a large part of Australia’s crystal-meth story. The peak year for border detections of amphetamines between 2003 and 2011 was just under 600 detections in 2006–07 (years are counted in financial years), equalling about the same in kilograms. During many of the years throughout the 2000s, border amphetamine detections were at near negligible levels; for the year 2010–11, less than 100 kilograms were detected, and in 2011–12 there were about 300 kilograms discovered, relating to 1000 detections (then the highest number of detections on record).

  Then, in 2012–13, the number rose to 1,999 detections. Yes, you did read that correctly, and it meant that the amount of meth being smuggled into our country increased by about 700 per cent, in terms of weight, from 2010 to 2013. The 2012–13 record high was eclipsed a year later, in 2013–14, by the new record of 2,367 detections.

  As a result of the sharp increase in the amount of high-purity meth coming across the border, meth’s purity in Australia saw a rise from an annual average of 21 per cent in 2009 to 64 per cent in 2013. In Victoria, the purity of meth rose from about 20 per cent in 2010–11 to more than 75 per cent in 2012–13. All in all, in the decade since 2004, the purity of methamphetamine (ice and speed) in Australia has generally increased, ranging between a median of 4.4 per cent and 76 per cent. The Victorian police — whose state records the highest purity — have labelled this a major factor in the meth problem: higher purity makes the drug more addictive.

  And it wasn’t just more pure; there was also more of it.

  The reported use of powdered methamphetamine fell significantly between 2010 and 2013, but the reported use of crystal meth — what we by now knew as ice — more than doubled. People were also using ice more frequently, with many people using it daily or weekly. First, the number of methamphetamine users who prefer ice to other types of methamphetamine doubled from 27 per cent in 2007, and 22 per cent in 2010, to 50 per cent in 2013. The proportion of people using it at least weekly grew from 9.3 per cent in 2010 to 15.5 per cent in 2013. There was a corresponding increase in people seeking treatment at drug and alcohol clinics. The proportion of treatment ‘episodes’ where methamphetamine was the principal drug of concern doubled from 7 per cent in 2009–10 to 14 per cent in 2012–13.

  The 2013–14 Australian Customs and Border Protection Service Annual Report shows crystal-meth detections by kilogram at our border. And when I say border, I should explain that crystal meth is mainly found amid the letters and parcels coming in via international post. According to data from the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, 86 per cent of all crystal meth is coming via the parcel post, with another 9.5 per cent coming in via air cargo. According to data from the ACC, no fewer than 49 countries were identified as countries of origin over the 2012–13 period. However, to simplify things somewhat: three territories account for 88 per cent of the total detections (when measured by weight). They are Hong Kong (96 detections, weighing a total of 224.1 kilograms); Thailand (43 detections, weighing a total of 313.9 kilograms); and China (8 detections weighing a total of 1224.6 kilograms). Therefore, based on figures of what is actually intercepted (2000 detections totaling 2,138.5 kilograms during that period), more than half of the amphetamines that are imported here are coming from the world’s biggest nation.

  Yep, China: the world’s most populous nation is third behind the US and Mexico on the global meth pie chart, and is where most of our meth is coming from (this doesn’t mean it’s all being made in China, but it is certainly the major transit point). Indeed, meth is big business in China: confiscations of meth pills went up 1,500 per cent across the nation in the four-year period from 2008 to 2012. There is mounting evidence that the nation is actually supplying the cartels with precursors — that is, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine — which isn’t surprising when you consider that the country is filled with, and surrounded by, ephedra plants.

  According to UNODC, the average street price per gram of methamphetamine in China is A$105, whereas in Australia it is $500. Wholesale prices in Australia have been recorded as ranging from A$90,000 to A$325,000 per kilogram.

  And to be even more specific: thanks to United Nations data, we know that most of the meth coming to Australia from China originates in Guangdong, a province of over 100 million people on the South China Sea.

  To give you an idea of where the meth so many Australians are taking is being made, and just how engaged some of these southern China communities are in meth production and distribution, let me take you to a little Guangdong village called Boshe. Boshe is isolated, right on the coastline. It has no more than 1,700 households, and the last official estimate put the village population at approximately 14,000. Boshe isn’t much to look at — in fact, it’s like the worst of the old and new worlds deliberately came together on the marshy, sandy flatlands of the Southern Chinese coast to highlight what happens when a society fails. Boshe resembles some kind of mythic dystopia, with a mix of rural despair, urban decay, a few trees, abandoned buildings, cramped living, and a Technicolor dream-coat of plastic rubbish enmesh
ed in the soil just about everywhere you step. Amid this ghetto-come-junkyard — though it’s not quite bleak enough to be classified a slum — if you were to walk through the mud, the pollution, and the litter, you would most likely notice an acidic, cat-piss-like odour that hits your nose like a bunch of blunt needles. The closer you look at the piles of garbage dumped around vacant housing lots, the more you notice the used glass flasks and other lab equipment, surrounded by pools of sludge.

  Boshe, as it turns out, has in years gone by been one of the biggest meth producers in China, and probably the world. Guangdong police estimated that around 20 per cent of the town was involved in meth production in Boshe, and corruption went all the way to the top: the people running the meth trade in Boshe were government officials. Fourteen of them all up, and the local Communist Party secretary was in fact the local drug king pin, Cai Dongjia. Local police were in on it, too, colluding with local criminal groups to provide what seemed like a watertight and highly profitable illicit market. Today, there are even signs that read ‘discarding of meth lab garbage here is forbidden’.

  Chinese police knew what was happening in Boshe for a long time. In August 2013, police had tried to enter the village, but were met with roadblocks, people hurling abuse, and violent resistance. Peter Barefoot on Chinasmack.com writes that before the Thunder Drug Raid:

  As soon as the police entered the village, they’d be surrounded by the two to three hundred motorcycles in the village, with nail boards placed on the roads in the village, and rocks thrown from the top of buildings. Villagers would hold imitation firearms, even AK47s, homemade grenades, crossbows, and other deadly weapons.

  The police retreated and re-evaluated the situation, deciding that they needed to go in better armed and better resourced — although few could have imagined just how well armed and resourced they would be when they finally returned a few months later. In China’s coldest month, amid the drizzle and grey, 3,000 police surrounded Boshe. When the police got out of their vehicles, they were dressed in camouflage gear, and so the raids began. There were police vans on top of police vans, speedboats, and at least two helicopters accompanying the raid.

  Police arrested 182 people, destroyed 77 methamphetamine labs, and a massive three tonnes of meth was seized along with 100 tonnes of meth ingredients. Cai Dongjia was the first to be captured. After completing the raid, the police said Boshe and the surrounding region were the source of a third of China’s crystal-meth supply.

  They later discovered that the village had become so polluted with chemicals for drug manufacturing that the groundwater could not be used for farming. Locals reported that a huge wealth gap had developed between the farmers in town and those involved in the drug trade. Indeed, entrepreneurialism and economic inequality could have a lot to answer for in explaining why China has become our biggest trading partner in both legal and illegal markets. Australia pays a lot for meth compared to our Asian neighbours. While China has increasingly advanced technology, it still has very low production and labour costs — big profits are to be made by making meth in poorer nations, and then selling them to high-income nations like Australia. Trafficking a highly addictive, highly pleasurable drug into a nation that is surrounded by some of the biggest meth-producing countries in the world must seem like a no-brainer to drug barons all over the world.

  And we are not talking about one particular set of groups with names or brands, or any one particular country or region — in the transnational illicit-drug game, allegiances often only exist for a short time, and most of these ‘groupings’ are informal, fleeting, and very hard to track down.

  With all this taken together, it is very tricky for our authorities to get a handle on the problem.

  If there is one common fuel to this engine right around the globe, however, it is the bribing of high-level government officials in often weak, poorly resourced states that help get the drug cartels into gear. While we might know this is happening, stopping it is another thing altogether, especially when crime cartels are paying members of the government far more than they would be getting on their taxpayer-funded salary. In this way, poor and weak nations make the perfect hunting ground for criminal entrepreneurs to make it rich. And indeed, some of them are very rich — the illicit-drug trade makes up 1 per cent of the total global economy. The illicit-drug trade is the largest in value among global illicit commodities, at some US$320 billion, according to the United Nations World Drug Report — an unwelcome, though arguably inevitable, consequence of an increasingly globalised economy.

  Robert Mandel, who is the professor of international affairs at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, argues in his book Dark Logic: transnational criminal tactics and global security that while Ronald Reagan started the ‘global war on drugs’ in 1985 with that very catch-cry — as well as with an allocation of hundreds of millions to the defence department to ‘combat’ the problem — the endeavour met with limited success:

  Any attempt to interdict global drug smuggling faces nearly insurmountable problems including (1) the eagerness of users/victims to imbibe, making them unlikely to press for prosecution of distributors; (2) reduced government monitoring of domestic activities due to economic liberalization and deregulation; (3) the proliferation of weak states which have remote areas conducive to drug growing and; (4) the scarcity of alternative sources of income for impoverished workers involved in the production of drugs.

  And what I have told you about southern China is really just the cherry on top: it is unclear how much of the meth sent from Guangdong is being made in China, and how much of it is just distributed from there. If it is the latter, it is also not known precisely who Chinese criminals are linking with internationally. In many cases, it is likely to be groups in the jungles of the Golden Triangle — that infamous patch of jungle comprised of Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand where crystal meth is known to be made en masse. Much like the Mexican cartels, the Golden Triangle is likely going through an ‘upgrade,’ as a paper from Brookings Institute put it, and ‘transforming from traditional drugs to new synthetic drugs, following demand of the international drug market’.

  So our relationship with the illicit drug trade is ‘complicated’, and to make it even more so, today’s problem region might be tomorrow’s massive headache. The latest intelligence suggests parts of the Middle East and western Africa — regions usually associated with transit points for drugs — are now increasingly producing meth, particularly Iran and Nigeria. In fact, there is at least a 50 per cent chance that the gear my friends were selling was manufactured overseas. AFP Assistant Commissioner Ramzi Jabbour told the Victorian parliamentary committee at a hearing that: ‘These very large seizures were being attempted to be imported into Australia, or in this case particularly Victoria, from overseas, and we allege by sophisticated organised criminal syndicates which have tentacles both in this country and reaching out through numerous countries overseas’. In many cases, crystal-meth users in Australia don’t even go through their local dealer — they simply order from one of the many websites from which people can purchase meth and other drugs from overseas. While the notorious Silk Road site has closed down, many others have emerged in the space known as the ‘Dark Web’.

  The net result has not just been a stronger drug flooding our drug markets, but a significant global shift in drug use: according to 2013 data from UNODC, ATS were used, in 2011, at rates higher than any other drug class with the exception of cannabis. The number of cannabis users worldwide (on an annual basis) is estimated to be about 180 million, ATS users about 34 million, opiate users 16.5 million, and cocaine users about 17 million.

  Today, we live not so much in a meth nation as a meth world: meth use is now an issue in most parts of the world, from the working classes of the United States to the middle classes of New Zealand, and from the shanty towns of South Africa to the increasingly affluent young people in Indonesia, the Philippines, Fiji, Thailand, and I
ndia. In Europe, the Czech Republic remains the focal point for the drug in the region, where it is called Pervitin. In Sweden, Finland, Slovakia, and Latvia, UNODC reports that amphetamines and methamphetamine users account for between 20 per cent and 60 per cent of those seeking drug abuse treatment. There are few nations around the world that remain untouched by meth.

  After the argument with Beck that day, Smithy and I made up from our little incident a few hours earlier. Our physical altercation in 2011 (and our recovery from it) had actually strengthened our friendship — I think we both knew how difficult we could be. A little while earlier, I had thought he was orchestrating a cruel and vengeful plot; now we were the best of buddies again, with bong smoke consuming the space between us, and most sentences finishing with uncontrolled giggles. He had come back from Beck’s, where he’d given her a small fix. She had, reportedly, lost her grimace, cured her cold, and was now vigorously washing rocks in her basin with her rock book next to her.

  Smith had given me a tiny hit, too. It hadn’t knocked my socks off, but it was enough to make me feel more energised: like a car that had been running on a low tank, but now had a bit in reserve. I felt calm — intensely calm — and knew that Smithy was a blood brother once again.

  ‘That’s it, the last of it,’ he said, looking at me meaningfully. ‘Y’know what that means?’

  ‘We are both going to go clean and never use drugs again?’

  ‘Hilarious — it means we have to go for a drive.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘St Kilda.’

  So we jumped in the car. We drove along what was in reality an uneventful freeway, but which felt, on this day, like the road to some of the greatest pleasures a man could ever know. We threw words around like confetti; Smithy talked about cricket, I talked about the way I got my job at triple j. Smithy said he had been texting Beck’s oldest daughter for the past few months because it was ‘important she had a parent right now’, and as the wind blew around the car, and we smoked cigarette after cigarette, Smithy said ‘Is it just me, or do you smell like cat shit?’