The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  Fry’s comments are important because they suggest that gaps in mental-health services are now joining up with gaps in drug and alcohol treatment, and, I would further suggest, with gaps in a lack of affordable housing to create ever-growing gaping holes.

  It is, perhaps, worth reflecting here on the issue of ideology and the role of government. Since the 1980s, and under neoliberalism, the government’s role has been, in theory at least, to help people help themselves, determined that it would not be seen as a panacea for all social ills. In another paper from 2011, ‘An assessment of illicit drug policy in Australia’, Alison Ritter explored the move in the 1980s from governments ‘rowing’ to ‘steering’, suggesting that it has particularly impacted on drug policy and service provision. These changes in the provision of services, traditionally government-run and now privatised (including not-for-profits within this definition), are consistent with pluralised governance. Known by various terms — harnessing of non-state resources; co-production; multi-lateralisation; interagency/multi-agency partnerships; third-party policing; and hybrid governance — this new mentality reflects an acknowledgement that the state has limited resources, cannot manage everything in the best way, and that non-state actors can play an effective role.

  Australia’s crystal-meth surge occurred after the GFC, and while we came out of that largely unscathed, it did have an impact on unemployment, which rose from 4 per cent previously to 6 per cent by the start of 2010, and has since hovered somewhere between 5 per cent and 6.5 per cent. Since 2011, job vacancies have dropped around 25 per cent. Youth unemployment has been particularly high: in 2015, the official unemployment rate for 15–24-year-olds was, at 14 per cent, the highest since 1998. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s 2015 report showed that in 2013, 24.9 per cent of unemployed people reported that they had used illicit drugs in the past twelve months, compared with 16.8 per cent of employed people.

  Former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett has said that one of the major reasons for the increasing prevalence of ice addiction is the growth in youth unemployment: ‘We don’t have any idea of how we are going to grow society in a way that will provide employment for those who are out of work — and that’s a failing of the political system on both sides,’ he told The Sydney Morning Herald in April 2015.

  Geoff Munro from the Australian Drug Foundation told me he thinks that the cyclical nature of drug taking means that even if methamphetamine was taken out of the picture, a new and potentially more harmful drug may be abused in its place:

  I think we have had a bit of a breakdown in our community and we need to re-think the way we operate. We need to create a better framework for our children, we need to re-engage the extended family in children’s lives, we need to make sure children have a wider network who taken an interest in them. We need make sure schools are creating a better environment, we need to make sure we are building a society that overcomes social disadvantage and that is helping people build a king of emotional framework that is strong and deep enough so they don’t feel the need to abuse drugs. We need better early intervention for mental health, we need actual psychologists in public schools, and we need to make sure schools are helping us build a cohesive society, were people feel like they have a place. Unless we look at what kind of society we are creating then all these other ways of treating problem drug users are merely a band-aid.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Beyond excess

  STU FENTON, FORTY-TWO, is ruggedly handsome and softly spoken. Ten years ago, he found that despite joining Narcotics Anonymous, and despite trying to take on what he was being taught, he was still going on crystal-meth binges. Nearly every time he did, he had recurring psychotic delusions: his prior sexual encounters were being shown on a television channel or being broadcast somewhere in a public space. It was either that, or he believed that the police were going to arrest and imprison him for something, or perhaps for nothing in particular — just for being himself.

  Fenton told me that there was no apparent reason for when he called it quits other than he was exhausted. He moved into a residential rehab. He stayed for ten months. During that time, he thought through his early childhood on a rural Victorian farm, and, when searching his mind after I asked him for an example, he ummed and ahhed before finally saying: ‘It might sound trivial, but my dad never picked me up, never hugged me, never told he loved me.’ Fenton grew up in his small country town to find other boys didn’t like him because he was gay; this was during the 1980s, and at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

  During his time in rehab, he began to feel a deep shame that he related back to his sexuality, and this shame played out in the delusion that his sex life was being played on televisions for all to see. These emotional realisations were only a starting point, though: ‘I think when I developed a belief in a higher power, that really finally allowed me to move on from drug abuse and drug addiction,’ Fenton told me. ‘I am not talking about God, but something greater than yourself. Once I found that greater power then I started praying to it; it was like a life force, a higher intelligence, and it gave me a great sense of energy. It made me want to live life for the here and now.’

  Over time he said he became ‘other-centred’ instead of self-seeking. Today, nearly ten years clean, he said part of the process has been abstaining from all things — he hasn’t had a drink of alcohol or smoked a cigarette since.

  Jack Nagle (who you may remember as the guy who thought he was living in a ‘Truman Show’ world) told me that he quit crystal meth shortly after that 10-day binge during which he smoked $7,500 worth of the drug. ‘It was standing in front of the mirror that I had a moment of clarity. It sounds funny to say, but the truth just kind of dawned on me — I stopped worrying about being filmed or being followed, and I just saw myself for what I was. I had dropped down to 66 kilos and for someone who is nearly 200 centimetres tall, that is bone-thin.’

  After going through rehab, he, too, came to see his delusions of being recorded as having their roots in a deep sense of shame. ‘I think I was just quite insecure about myself … I always thought of myself as not being smart enough.’

  Cassy McDonald sent me a Facebook message: ‘I did manage to get clean on my own without seeing a counsellor, but I found that when I quit I had a “feel for the steel” so I was shooting up water with syringe even after I stopped using just because I liked the routine of using it.’

  In Memoirs of an Addicted Brain neuroscientist and former coke- and meth-addict Marc Lewis talks about a two-year period after a lifetime of drug use where his life was a ‘wide-open passage to nowhere’.

  He described this time as consisting of periods of ‘resolve, even peacefulness, interspersed by bouts of depression’. Eventually Lewis starting working at a crisis centre for street kids; he became a development psychologist, and then a professor, before taking up his main gig in emotional neuroscience.

  ‘You could say my life became too full even to consider a return to drugs but that wouldn’t tell the full story. Not at all the sculpting of synapses in my early twenties is irrevocable. The meaning of drugs, the imagined value they represent, is still inscribed in my orbito-frontal cortex … As is well known in addiction lore there is no final cure, just recovery, abstention and self-awareness. But there are happy endings.’

  I found it tempting to write a joke here about how there are definitely ‘happy endings’ to be found in crystal meth, particularly when one masturbates. More so, though, I was loath to write a ‘happy ending’ when drug addiction more generally, and this book more specifically, deals with so many stories that end with anything but a meaningful resolution.

  Writing an ending with a resolution is deeply problematic, too, when you consider the trajectory of Smithy and Beck. By the time I got to Melbourne, I was afraid to ask the few people I knew who had stayed in contact with them how they fared — particularly after they lost custody of the twins (and I was very co
nscious of my part in that).

  And back in Melbourne, admittedly, I was often too deep in delusion or too distracted by simply surviving, to fully consider the fate of my former friends. Even the most terrible habits can be comfortable and comforting, and so, with no further ado, let me tell you about my crystal-meth relapse, which started in a half-empty, two-bedroom brick unit in Noble Park in early 2015. A relapse that must have occurred, let’s see, about a week after I got back to Melbourne from Bundaberg. In truth — just as when I had left rehab in 2008 — I hadn’t made a commitment to go 100 per cent clean. Despite seeing the obvious danger in using again, I had cravings for the drug, even on the plane (or especially on the plane because of the way it mimics that feeling) that made me daydream, shift excitedly on my seat, and begin to drool.

  The night I relapsed I didn’t actually seek it out, but drugs aren’t hard to find when most of your friends are people you met through drugs or clubs. A guy named Steven who I had met in a nightclub about a decade prior contacted me via Facebook: he was moving out of his house, and asked if I wanted to come over and ‘hang out in the garage’. When I got there, I found that he was off his dial on crystal meth, and we soon ordered more. I smoked it and smoked it and smoked it all night with him in that musty, cluttered garage — sitting on an esky, on a cool summer night, as we plummeted the pleasurable ‘depths’ of our bullshit and shallow self-love. In fact, it is fair to say I smoked until I went cross-eyed, and until I got out a piece of paper and started writing. I did some work on a creative writing piece, and for some reason during this, I started thinking about a bad argument I had with one of Steven’s friends many moons earlier. I began to think that he had only invited me over to make fun of me, and that what we’d smoked wasn’t really crystal meth. Then everything Steven said began to be interpreted through this psychotic prism — my ideas were resistant to whatever he said, so resistant that everything he said simply reinforced the idea that he was up to something really quite sinister. So even when he broke into his own psychosis, and believed that police had surrounded the house (Steven has never got into trouble with the law), I thought that this, too, was part of his nasty plot against me.

  Eventually I left, and caught an early morning train. I thought that everyone on the train was talking about me and staring at me — words people said were references to me, and any look in my direction made me feel as if they knew everything that was bad about me. I had begun to wonder how people knew all this, and I concluded that the Coffee Club incident had been broadcast around Melbourne. It felt if the interior of Melbourne’s bright-green and yellow modern trains had served up some kind of proverbial hell where I was being judged and punished for all my sins. When I got to the city, I got off and caught the tram, and again I couldn’t look anybody in the eye because I felt so guilty and so ashamed.

  I went to the Alfred; I wanted to be in a locked psych ward because I was worried that with this level of public humiliation I would eventually crack and kill myself. At the counter, I saw a nurse who spoke in a stern Irish tone, and the first thing I did was apologise to her. I told her I was sorry to all the women at the hospital for everything that I had done, and that I knew that I was on the news.

  ‘I’m a mess of different things that don’t all go together,’ I told her.

  I was admitted straightaway. I told the next nurse I saw about how I was worried I was on the news.

  ‘Oh, honey,’ she said with a warm smile. ‘You are not on the news; I’ll go and speak to a doctor.’ She came back with a small yellow pill, and said, ‘Put this under your tongue until it dissolves, and if you feel like lying down after that you are more than welcome.’ After a very short period of time, perhaps less than ten minutes, I felt very, very tired. So I rested in the small white room, with the door open, until it hit me — ‘I’ve been psychotic’ — and I left with my tail between my legs.

  So while it was fair to say I was nonplussed by life in general, it was after this incident that I began to form a new conclusion: Crystal meth was just as predictable as everything else in my life.

  Thereafter, I tried living ordinary waking life to its fullest in Melbourne. I didn’t have any work at that time, but I exercised, I went for walks, I read a lot, I sought to be as kind and open to everyone as possible. One day I went to the cinema, I went out for dinner, I went out to the gym, I read, I walked around Melbourne. It was pleasant, and I felt good, very good, but I was left with two complementary emotions: ‘this still isn’t enough, I want more’ and ‘that was a nice day; wouldn’t it be even nicer to finish it off with some crystal meth?’

  Later that day, I met up with an old school friend.

  We had used together in the past, and I knew we would use again that night. We got drunk, and eventually I suggested we get some crystal meth — this time, I got a syringe and injected it. I did not go into psychosis, but it was the same old Fantasia, in which we exchanged tales about how good and how underappreciated we were. After that I went back to The Gatwick, the notorious St Kilda hotel I was staying in to research an article, and masturbated for twelve hours — alone, stuck in the same repetitive, amoral sexual fantasies that I would never carry out in real life. It was boring, and I wondered if I could ever get my addiction under control. I went to a St Kilda drug clinic, where I was told it would take four days to see a GP and ten days to see a drug counsellor. Over the next two weeks:

  I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.

  I read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: the psychology of optimal experience.

  I daydreamed about my trip to Asia.

  I started drinking most nights in St Kilda’s Fitzroy Street bars.

  I came back to the musty, grotty Gatwick one night drunk, and saw a woman injecting crystal meth in her neck. When I asked her why she was injecting it in her neck she said ‘Straight to the brain, brother’.

  She huffed and puffed, eyes wild, before introducing me to the woman standing behind her: her daughter, Anna, who repeated her mother’s ritual with her own syringe. ‘Are you sure you don’t want some love?’ she asked, and I answered yes, of course I did.

  Anna took me to a room — let’s say room number 666 — where I was handed a point of meth for $100, and a clean syringe still in its packet, and I went back to the bathroom and injected the old-fashioned way — on the inside of my elbow.

  Over the course of the night, I bought and injected some more with a young homeless man with autism, who spent the entire time we were injecting reciting tracts from what seemed to be a high school science book off the top of his head.

  My bank account ran dry.

  I forgot my bank account ran dry.

  I ordered more meth off a guy I remember as The Bald Man and his dodgy-looking goons.

  He followed me to the ATM.

  When he realised my bank account was empty, he went ballistic, threatening me, and ripping the chains from my neck, and telling me I could expect to be visited by him later and have my jaw broken.

  I retreated to my Gatwick room, where I saw maggots crawling all over the floor and a series of detailed plots began to form in my head. As the morning progressed, I concluded that somebody had broken into my room while I was out and had stolen my laptop to give to a journalist who had hijacked my internet history — my internet porn history, to be precise — and broadcast it on the news.

  In no time, it was a bright late-summer morning.

  It dawned on me that I couldn’t ask my parents for money.

  I went to the St Kilda Crisis Centre. While waiting outside, a woman came up to me, with the regular two eyes most humans have, and told me one of her eyes had been stolen.

  I believed she was part of the mob who were after me, and that she was telling me my eyes would be cut out. And on it went. I visited my publisher during this time as well, believing that they wanted to cancel the book. I tried to access crisis housing, but w
as told it was full.

  Eventually, I had to return to the Gatwick.

  During my sessions with Jay in Bundaberg, she told me many things, and two in particular stuck in my mind while I was at the Gatwick: the first was to think about drug addiction like ‘a stray cat that you don’t want to feed; the more you feed it the more it keeps coming back’, and the second was that I needed to take responsibility.

  By the end of my third relapse, I decided, that yes, I was very much over crystal meth. But there was still the pressing question of what freedom from drugs and freedom from addiction would mean for me, and indeed, what freedom means for me more generally.

  In Being and Nothingness, Jean Paul Sartre writes: ‘We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are — that is the fact.’ While I can admit that Sartre — albeit just my first-year philosophy understanding of him — wasn’t on my mind when I was at the Gatwick, freedom, responsibility, and their respective limits were. The Gatwick was a place full of people whose notions of freedom and responsibility are surely limited by both madness and economics. The extent to which Australia’s underclass are trapped in their existence occurred to me shortly after my final binge at the Gatwick. Yet many of its inhabitants remained joyous at times; self-pity was kept to a minimum, and people were doing their best to find meaning in the abject and grossly unfair economic conditions that most of them couldn’t escape.

  I don’t quote Sartre’s work here to justify a kind of ‘cult of the will’ — it is about people’s capacity to make their own meaning of their situation. Sartre would in later life become a militiant neo-Marxist who saw economic scarcity as an obvious limit on human freedom — the point being that one cannot be free or authentic when all your energy is expended on finding the next meal or on feeding your family.