by Malcolm Knox
Malcolm Knox is the author of three novels, Summerland, A Private Man, and most recently, Jamaica. Each has been published internationally. Malcolm was formerly literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, where he broke the Norma Khouri hoax story, for which he won a Walkley Award. He is also the author of Secrets of the Jury Room, a non-fiction account of his experience as a juror, and a history of the jury system. He lives in Sydney.
www.malcolmknox.com
SCATTERED
THE INSIDE STORY OF
ICE IN AUSTRALIA
SCATTERED
THE INSIDE STORY OF
ICE IN AUSTRALIA
MALCOLM KNOX
First published in 2008
Copyright © Malcolm Knox 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Knox, Malcolm, 1966-
Scattered: the inside story of ice in Australia.
ISBN: 978 1 74175 358 5 (pbk.)
Methamphetamine abuse - Australia. Methamphetamine - Social aspects - Australia.
362.2990994
Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE GOING UP 1986–2000
PART TWO THE HIGH 2001–2003
PART THREE COMING DOWN 2004–2008
ENDNOTES
INTRODUCTION
Q: What’s the best thing about being an ice addict?
A: Only two more sleeps to Christmas.
(Joke heard on 1 December 2007)
On the first Saturday of October 2007, the pay TV music channel [V] posted a mischievous double entendre in the guise of a viewer poll. On What U Want, its video request show, [V] asked its young, hedonistic audience to describe ‘Your favourite memories on ice’.
Although the question was ostensibly a promotional tie-in with the newly released ice-skating movie Blades of Glory, viewers were quick to see a second meaning. The text responses rolled across the TV screen:
Too many to name
Lots of sex
Everything’s great on meth!
The TV station’s response to the ensuing controversy was as paranoid and fast-moving as if it was itself affected by stimulants.
‘Channel [V] in no way endorses the use of drugs and in fact it is currently in development on an educational series for a youth audience on the drug ice,’ Tara King, Foxtel’s director of music channels, said in a written statement.
There is, and was, no suggestion that Foxtel believes ice, or crystal methamphetamine, is fun. But many of its viewers do, and therein sits the big elephant in the debate over drug education.
Most people who use illicit drugs do so because it is fun.
When I was a teenager, we were told that the effects of smoking marijuana on boys included growing breasts and becoming a heroin addict. The prospect of turning into a buxom street junkie proved as effective a deterrent as the threat of masturbation leading to dark glasses and a white cane. Someone dared to try it, and it didn’t happen. The entire official message therefore lost credibility. The real education on forbidden pleasures was subsequently taken into the hands of the kids themselves.
This remains the case, as the [V] incident demonstrates. What the authorities tell you is that marijuana smoking can lead to schizophrenia, a loss of motivation and devastating drug addiction. What they don’t tell you is that you have to smoke a hell of a lot before that happens. Most young people know this from the age of twenty. They are immediately at a knowledge advantage to their parents and teachers.
Likewise, as this book will demonstrate, using crystal methamphetamine can lead to paranoia, psychosis, violent actions and a smorgasbord of consequences that place it alongside heroin and cocaine as the most dangerous of the commonly used illicit substances. But it doesn’t happen immediately.
Ice also leads to a euphoria that is seldom, if ever, produced by natural causes. It leads to great sex. It leads to exhilarating moments with friends. It leads to self-confidence and clarity. It leads to an overwhelming feeling that everything in the user’s life is perfect.
This is not just anecdotal assertion, as the following pages will show. One of the biggest surveys of young drug users was carried out by the Australian Drug Foundation in 2007. The anonymous online survey of 6801 people found that 895 had used methamphetamine in the previous year. The study assessed the effects of different drugs on skilled activity—specifically, driving a car within three hours of taking the drug. Users of alcohol, cannabis, heroin, ecstasy, LSD, ketamine and GHB all tended to think their driving was worse on drugs. Only the stimulant users—those who had taken methamphetamine or cocaine—believed their driving improved after taking the drug. Of meth users, 56 per cent said their driving was unchanged, and 27 per cent said their driving was better. Everything’s great on meth: even activities that are mundane, such as work. As we will see, ice is the one illicit drug that is used not to relax from work, but to turn it into fun. Ice users feel not only euphoric, but more able. As one user who took ice before work told me, ‘It is the ultimate performance-enhancing substance. It enhances everything you do.’ Even though he has overcome his addiction, he still believes he has never performed better professionally than when he was using ice.
Perhaps the greatest danger in crystal methamphetamine, as with all mind- and mood-altering substances, is that the majority of the people who are using it are doing so lightly, and without drastic ill-effects. There is a silent majority of working, functioning, fun-loving young adults who enjoy ice occasionally. The addicts whose lives have fallen apart, the parents neglecting their children, the vulnerable individuals whose ice use tips their everyday conflicts into scenes out of horror movies, are a minority. They do not represent the typical drug user. I want to stress from the start that the majority of ice users are using it within safe limits and will give it up as they grow up.
There is a narrative arc to the ice phenomenon in Australia. Crystal methamphetamine appeared here in the mid to late 1990s, it caught on with thousands of mainstream middle-class users after 2000, it peaked around 2003 and 2004, it plateaued for a couple of years, and now it appears to be in a slight decline.
Coincidentally, this decline was noted in the same week as the Channel [V] incident. The leading fact-finders on illicit drug use in Australia, the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, reported that for the first time since the 1990s injecting drug users, the bellwether cohort—or, as NDARC researchers put it, the ‘sentinel group’—for emerging drug trends, were reporting a significant drop in the use of crystal methamphetamine. In 2006, 57 per cent of injecting users were using ice. By 2007, this fell to 47 per cent. Big drops were recorded in Perth, Brisbane and Canberra, where ice had been extremely popular compared with other injectable drugs. The lead researcher, Assoc
iate Professor Louisa Degenhardt, had looked at the possible causes for the decrease. Sometimes it is because a drug becomes more expensive, or less available. That hadn’t happened. Instead, Degenhardt discovered that the word had got around about the negative consequences of ice use. The drug was getting a bad reputation among the people who really mattered: those who use it. (On the downside, the old perennial, heroin, was undergoing a resurgence after a seven-year downturn.)
Ice is not about to disappear again, and to a degree the changes in overall use are always overstated. About 3.9 per cent of Australia’s population use amphetamines at least occasionally, and that figure has been reasonably stable for more than 30 years. It’s not the same 3.9 per cent of people—most users phase in and out of drug use as a rite of passage in their late adolescence and early adulthood—but the overall usage rate is remarkably steady, and is a salient and simple warning against hysteria.
Yet crystal methamphetamine has a story to tell in this country. The advent, growth, peak, plateau and decline of ice use, all in the last decade, have each had their causes. These causes have to do with the economics of drug supply, social and cultural factors, education, law enforcement, hospital treatment, criminal justice and the magical X-factor of the spoken word that is passed from person to person in homes, workplaces, nightclubs, pubs and on the street.
How all these factors interlock, and what they tell us about our country in this decade, is the subject of this story.
PART ONE
GOING UP
1986–2000
For Vicki Wolf and her boyfriend of four years, Mark Thomas, the trip to Thailand was something of a contradiction in terms. Having been committed and well-known weekend hedonists in the law faculty and their residential colleges during five years at Melbourne University, they wanted to celebrate the end of their final exams in November 1995 with a big detox. When it came to drugs, they’d experienced pretty much everything that was around—except heroin—and now they wanted to turn a corner. Life was about to get serious.
They chose Thailand almost as a challenge to themselves. They had been there for their first trip away together, back in 1992, and had spent a fortnight in a twenty-dollar-a-week beachfront bungalow in Koh Phangan, struggling out of bed only long enough to roll a hash joint and loll about in the water. Aside from the fogged-up sense that they’d had a blast, now, three and a half years later, they didn’t remember much of it, which saddened them. To go back to that part of the world and enjoy it healthy, straight and sober would be, they resolved, a kind of making up as well as a test.
As far as this objective was concerned, they succeeded, spending ten days in Krabi swimming, sailboarding, sleeping, enjoying each other’s company, and imbibing nothing stronger than a ritual early evening cocktail. When they returned to Bangkok for two nights before their flight home, they were feeling dangerously fit and healthy.
Vicki and Mark stayed with some Australian friends in Bangkok. These friends, who worked for the Australian government, mixed with some of the more glittering locals, bright and sophisticated twenty-somethings who seemed to have close connections with top families in the Thai national administration, or the royal family, or both; it was never quite clear and asking questions was considered bad form.
The night they arrived, Vicki and Mark were taken by their friends to a party in a high-rise apartment. Although the residential block was new and, by Thai standards, opulent, the apartment itself had only a few black-and-white leather couches and beanbags scattered around its white-tiled floors. One bedroom had a couple of single beds, but the other two bedrooms were empty save for futons and piles of clothes. The apartment was, someone explained, not a residence but a ‘party house’.
Vicki was, by her own account, ‘a two-pot screamer’ after her week of near-abstinence and healthy living on Krabi. She and Mark were soon happily drunk among Bangkok’s burnished youth, sitting on a couch listening to music and watching others dance, when someone passed Vicki a small folded sheet of tinfoil and a short thin straw. She had seen people smoking something off foil earlier in the night and assumed they were ‘spotting’ hash. Others had been smoking joints and cigarettes, and there was no peculiar smell to suggest anything else was going on. Instead, though, when she looked at the foil, there was a coarse pale-yellow powder.
She looked at Mark and asked him what it was. His response was to take the foil from her—he’d always been the willing guinea pig—hold a lighter under it, and suck the vapour through the straw. He passed the foil back where it had come from, gave Vicki a thumbs-up and mouthed ‘goey’, or speed. They’d done speed many times back in Melbourne and, although she hated the crash—which was drawn-out and depressing—it had always been one of Vicki’s favourites. It made you dance and chat and drink. Speed was simple, it didn’t bend your mind.
The foil took a while to come back. Mark had sprung up and, without inviting or consulting her, gone off to dance. Vicki took the foil and copied what he’d done.
‘It wasn’t like any speed I knew,’ Vicki says. She began to dance with Mark and with the others on the floor, but dancing didn’t seem enough. She wanted to—not sing, but roar. She remembers coming face to face with Mark on the dance floor and the pair of them roaring at each other, eyes wide, mouths split like jack-o’-lanterns, for what seemed like hours. At some point Mark had a group of Thais around him and was teaching them how to pack down in a rugby scrum. Later in the night, Vicki helped another woman take all the glassware and cutlery from the kitchen and organise them in order of height and length down a corridor.
‘It was just a lot stronger than speed, like the difference between drinking a schooner of spirits compared with a schooner of beer,’ she says. ‘You could tell it was the same thing, but you were instantly much, much higher. It’s hard to describe.’
But there were other, quantifiable differences from the amphetamines they’d snorted back in Melbourne. Where usually on a speed binge they’d refresh by doing more lines every few hours, they didn’t have any more of the stuff on the foil that night in Bangkok, yet were still high for eight to ten hours. Where speed usually gave Mark an immediate and long-lasting case of genital shrinkage (‘needle dick’ is his term), this stuff made both of them horny and helped them have marathon sex. And after they had a sleep back at their friends’ place, there was no hangover, no crash, no anxious-depressive speed comedown. It was the best of all worlds.
Back home, they moved from Melbourne to Sydney. They did get serious and relatively drug-free as they both joined commercial city law firms and mixed with a new set of friends. With their old Melbourne friends from time to time, they would speak about this ‘super-speed’, the dream party drug from Thailand. The Thais had called it ‘shabu’. Through the late 1990s, Vicki and Mark heard about shabu surfacing in Australia, but they believed it belonged to their past. They had two children eighteen months apart in 1998 and 1999, and settled down to a life of nappies, bottles and interrupted sleep. Their priorities changed, and they consigned their drug-taking days to their shared history. Many of their friends still partied, and it wasn’t that Vicki and Mark wouldn’t have liked to dabble again, but they never had the requisite two or three nights for the full-on experience; they were simply too busy and too tired.
That night in Bangkok wouldn’t be their last experience with shabu, as it turned out. Shabu would re-enter their world under another name some years down the track. But they still hold to the belief that they were among the first Australians to dabble with crystal methamphetamine, or, as it became commonly known, ice.
It travels under different aliases. Ice, gas, crystal, glass, shabu, tina. Paul Bennett’s mob called it ‘pure’—not as an adjective, but a noun. Bennett, a Maori raised on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island, was living on the Gold Coast in 1995 and working as a formwork carpenter on construction sites.
At 38 years of age, Bennett had plenty of regrets. He’d once been a leading surfer, entering professional even
ts in Australia and New Zealand with the dream of joining the world tour. He’d had a daughter when he was 24, but had not seen much of her for the next decade, which he had pretty much blown through a prodigious alcohol and drug habit.
A heavy pot smoker and heroin user since his teens, Paul Bennett had been using speed since around 1988.
‘I started using it as a recreational drug at first, and only on special occasions. This substance had been around me for years, but after my handbrake (the missus) gave me the flick, I started to have the odd dabble at it, because there was no one around to pull me back into line. The guys I was working beside and associating with now were all big users, and it was only a matter of time before my addictive gene kicked in, greedy for that high that only class A and B drugs can achieve . . .
‘The rocket powder was everywhere, and the quality was wicked, the very best. It gave me such a high and so much energy that I tore into my work like a bat out of hell.’
Speed suited his bachelor’s lifestyle: work, pub, party, work. Speed made him feel ‘bullet-proof . . . I had so much energy and confidence’. And he wasn’t alone in the early-90s Gold Coast. ‘I began hanging out with other users—and they were everywhere. The place was crazy, people racing around off their dials, insane pedestrian traffic. There was a methamphetamine epidemic . . .’
In 1995, Bennett had ‘my first taste of the pure form, known as “pure” or crystal meth. It could cost from $200–$1000 upward per gram, depending on who you knew, and the quality and quantity involved.’
With hardcore and experienced drug users like Bennett and his mates, the difference between crystal meth and old-fashioned speed was noticed and analysed.
‘The crystallised rocket fuel was capable of giving you a turbo-rush that was more deadly than shooting up, blasting you from Cher to blur within seconds, and nuking your brains . . . The meth user stayed up there, and the pupils dilated hugely. Sometimes, depending on how long they’d been up, the entire iris was pitch-black like a possum. The lights were out, but someone was home, someone with a wicked, scary-wired look that warned, “Don’t fuck with me”.’
