by Malcolm Knox
Australia, however, had remained largely insulated. In November 1991, Frank Kelly, the Comptroller-General of Australian Customs, warned of ice’s popularity in south-east Asia. The 1991 Asian and Pacific Heads of National Drug Law Enforcement Agencies conference, at which Kelly spoke, issued a statement saying that criminal motorcycle gangs continued to control the manufacture and distribution of amphetamines in Australia. It said the Japanese crime syndicate, the Yakuza, was behind the increased use of ice in Japan, and that South American cocaine cartels were building networks with the Yakuza. Now Australia was believed to be in their sights. Law enforcement officials tasked themselves with monitoring and stopping any link between the Yakuza, other east Asian syndicates, and Australian bikie groups.
Yet Kelly, noting that this link was so far speculative rather than based on hard evidence, also voiced confidence that Australia could stop ice from coming in, relying on the same effective combination of education and law enforcement that had kept the country for the most part free of the crack cocaine epidemic. Law enforcement officials had stopped Latin American cartels from trafficking huge quantities of cocaine across the Pacific, and the same could be done to stop Asian organised crime syndicates from exporting ice or its precursors.
Australia had been largely untouched by cocaine and crack; but as a stimulant-drug problem, says Nicolas Rasmussen, it was a zero-sum game. ‘Amphetamine use in the US dropped by about half in the 1970s, and 1980s,’ he says, ‘largely due to the abundance of cocaine. But in Australia, where there wasn’t much cocaine, the use of illicit amphetamines didn’t drop by anywhere near as much. It probably explains why now we’re second in the world (after Thailand) for amphetamine use.’
Police busts of ice importation into Australia were still small-time and sporadic. A 29-year-old Filipino immigrant, Luisito Javillonar, was arrested by Australian Federal Police officers in July 1992 when some jars of face cream containing 12 grams of crystal meth were imported from Manila to his flat above a pet shop in Marrickville, in Sydney’s inner west. Javillonar, who had been under surveillance, appeared only to want the drug for his personal use and was released on $2000 bail. He obtained a false passport and fled the country, to return some years later.
Busts were mainly of this trivial magnitude. But their numbers increased stealthily through the nineties. In 1998–99, Australian Customs captured a total of 971 grams of methamphetamine in 22 separate interceptions at the borders.
Yet word was beginning to filter out that ice was on the streets, even if much of it was still conjectural. More and more drug researchers were getting reports of shabu among injecting drug users, and local police in Sydney were making their first arrests of suspects in an unusually heightened, proto-psychotic state.
The evidence about a coming wave of ice was far from uncontested. NSW Premier Bob Carr became the first politician to raise the spectre of ice in February 1998, when he wrote to the Prime Minister, John Howard, saying that police had told him ice was on the streets of Sydney and was a potential national menace. But Paul Dillon, the information officer for NDARC, aware that only a handful of informants had mentioned ice in NDARC’s studies, said it was ‘incredibly irresponsible’ of Carr to overreact to a marginal drug that was, in any case, possibly not even ice.
‘A lot of the time users say they’ve taken ice or shabu, when really it’s just speed,’ Dillon said. At the time he was right, going by the research. But the police were telling a different story.
In Victoria, the head of the drug squad, Detective Chief Inspector John McKoy, sounded the first alarms about ice in July 1998.
Informants in universities and TAFE colleges were telling police that pills being sold as ecstasy were in fact a mixture of other ingredients, including methamphetamine. For users expecting an ecstasy trip, the difference was quite stark. Whereas ecstasy produces a quasi-hallucinogenic, ‘warm’ high, enriching sensory perceptions, an amphetamine or methamphetamine high is more ‘edgy’, prompting the user to talk in a vigorous rush, act extremely energetically and, finally, endure a prolonged, anxious and depressed comedown.
A month after his initial warnings, Chief Inspector McKoy announced that Victorian police had charged four students from Holmesglen TAFE with possessing 200 grams of methamphetamine after a raid on a house in Glenferrie Road, near the Hawthorn Football Club’s famous ground in eastern Melbourne. The students, Indonesian nationals, had been trying to sell the meth to undercover police officers. As no manufacturing equipment was found, the police assumed that the drug was imported from Asia.
This wasn’t just another drug bust. Chief Inspector McKoy became one of the first law enforcement officials to warn of ice’s uniquely dangerous properties.
‘The experts tell us users really do turn to violence when under the influence of ice and that is one of the great concerns that we have,’ he told reporters. ‘It even scares some experienced junkies . . . it makes them feel like they are going to explode.
‘One of the side effects is that users tend to continue using to avoid the withdrawal off it, because once they start to withdraw it gives them the worst feeling possible, over and above every type of other illicit drug.’
The Victorian drug squad chief was onto something, pushing the ice issue from another drug story of manufacture/ trafficking/law enforcement towards a recognition of what ice did from the user’s point of view. As every drug taker knows, substances have their own personalities. Australians were about to discover more about the personality of crystal methamphetamine. But it was going to take a human tragedy to open their eyes.
The first Australian to die as a direct result of methamphetamine (as opposed to amphetamine) abuse might not have been Darri Denis Haynes, but he was the first to come to public attention. Haynes, 37 years old in September 1999, took stimulants for one of the oldest and most common reasons: he was a long-distance truck driver. Since the Second World War, the most prevalent use of amphetamine wasn’t to treat asthma or ADD or even to facilitate a good time at a party; it was to keep workers awake and alert. And while Japanese fighter pilots and other combat soldiers, munitions workers and world leaders were the first occupational guinea pigs, in the decades since the biggest professional amphetamine users around the world were drivers like Haynes.
In the week leading up to 1 September 1999, Haynes had driven his articulated semitrailer a total of 5468 kilometres for a company called Jim Hitchcock Haulage. On 30 and 31 August, Haynes drove approximately 1300 kilometres from Brisbane to Nowra, on the south coast of New South Wales, to transport a load of bricks; he washed his truck, returned to Brisbane, and was then taking a load of crates from Coca-Cola back down to Sydney, another 1000 kilometres. During those two days he had five hours’ sleep.
Twice a day he talked over the phone to a longstanding friend and fellow truckie, Leonard Duncan Mackellar. His last call to Mackellar came on 1 September from a cafe in Ballina. Mackellar, who also took amphetamines to stay awake for as long as seven days running for transcontinental drives to Perth and back, later said that Haynes was clearly overtired. During the call from Ballina, Haynes complained about hearing voices in his head.
‘I’m even talking to them,’ Haynes said.
Mackellar replied light-heartedly, ‘That’s okay, as long as they don’t answer back.’
Later that day, Haynes collided with another semitrailer south of Tyndale, near Grafton. He died when his cabin burst into flames.
The aftermath of Haynes’s death involved a long-running legal dispute over the responsibility of Hitchcock Haulage for pushing its drivers too hard. One of the thrusts of Hitchcock’s defence was that it was Haynes’s methamphetamine intake, not the demands of the company, that broke the driver’s concentration.
In the broader context of methamphetamine use, however, the most interesting statements came from a NSW Police consultant pharmacologist, Dr Judith Perl, who had found traces of meth in Haynes’s liver. She described vividly what she had heard from meth users who
drove trucks: ‘From my personal experience, one reported seeing a jogger . . . next to the truck all the way from Sydney to Melbourne. One thought he saw an elephant. Generally, they perceive other vehicles trying to run them off the road, or bizarre types of imaginings where, when the police have just stopped them, they think it’s some sort of secret agent or the CIA.’
Dr Perl was pointing to the paranoia and delusions brought on by sustained methamphetamine use, phenomena that were still in the process of being studied and understood. It would be these symptoms which would bring on ice-related fatalities that were far more peculiar and stomach-turning than a truckie losing control at the wheel.
Dudley Aslett was released from Lithgow Correctional Centre in 1998. He’d survived his suicide attempt, but had developed a new and uncontrollable taste for heroin. When he got out, it was same-old, same-old. He stole more cars, skirmished with police, and racked up his first drug conviction, for possession. He went back inside, serving another eight months.
Up to 1999, there was still scepticism about the term ‘ice’. Many in law enforcement, health and academic research believed ice was a meaningless new dealers’ brand name for speed. Since the rise of ecstasy, speed was an unfashionable drug; ecstasy users would complain if the pills they bought were too ‘speedy’. There was every motive for speed dealers to try to reinvent speed under a glamorous new name.
But it wasn’t so. Ice was, in fact, new. A profound drug revolution was taking place—a revolution in composition, manufacture, the economics of supply, and usage—a true cultural revolution.
As we have seen, amphetamines had been around in Australia for a long time, and the lifetime-usage rate—people in the population who had ever tried speed—had hovered around 4 per cent since the 1970s. Beneath the surface, though, a bigger change was afoot in the manufacture of amphetamine-type substances. With hindsight, it is easier to see what was happening.
Once again, we have to look overseas for the beginnings of this revolution. In the United States as in Australia, illegal amphetamines were mostly manufactured by bikie gangs and their associates. The annual number of clandestine laboratories discovered by police in the United States hovered below 200 until 1985, when they suddenly went up to 500. The next year 600 were found, and by 1989 the number was 800—a fourfold increase in four years. The difference was almost entirely due to uncovered clandestine methamphetamine labs, which went from 180 to 652 in that period.
The rise was driven by changes in the chemicals used.
Until the 1980s, manufacturers of speed synthesised P2P, methylamine, hydrochloric acid, mercury and aluminium metal in an alcohol solution. When P2P was controlled as a Schedule II substance in the early 1980s, manufacturers switched to ephedrine as the precursor chemical, and synthesised it with pyridine, hydrogen iodide and red phosphorus. This was a cleaner process that produced a more pure methamphetamine.
Ephedrine, manufactured at plants in India and China, was imported in bulk into the United States for incorporation into legitimate over-the-counter cough and cold medications. In 1988, the US Chemical Diversion and Trafficking Act was written to require importers of ephedrine to report to regulators all movements of ephedrine-containing products. Lobbying from pharmaceutical companies, however, allowed an exception for ephedrine that was already in pills and capsules when it arrived.
If anything, this made it easier for methamphetamine manufacturers to obtain what they needed. Mail-order services allowed buyers to purchase hundreds of bottles of ephedrine tablets at a time. The US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) estimated that 48 000 25-milligram tablets of cold medicine were needed to extract one kilogram of pure ephedrine. This kilo could then multiply many times in the hands of a street cook.
In 1993 the US Congress passed the Domestic Chemical Diversion Control Act, which regulated ephedrine. It also allowed prosecutors to build a case against people who were buying large amounts of ephedrine without having to prove that there was criminal intent. Simply having the ephedrine in sufficient quantities could be enough to establish guilt.
But the 1993 Act, while shutting down or at least restricting access to ephedrine, did not cover pseudoephedrine. Again, this was the work of the drug companies, who knew that pseudo-ephedrine was the newer, cheaper, more widespread active ingredient in medications like Sudafed and Sinutab.
Meth users, if they’d known at the time, would have rejoiced. Pseudoephedrine produces a more potent ‘right-handed molecule’, d-methamphetamine, rather than l-methamphetamine produced from ephedrine (for the difference, see page 85). As a result of the 1993 Act, the quality, availability and ease of production of meth actually increased.
The Methamphetamine Control Act of 1996 was the US Congress’s first attempt to focus on the specific drug. It brought pseudoephedrine under its umbrella. In a compromise on packaging, the drug companies would now sell pseudo-ephedrine-containing tablets in ‘blister packs’. The logic was that the labour of popping pills out of blisters, rather than pouring them straight from the bottle, would discourage meth cooks. Nice logic, it failed to take account of the kinds of mindless repetition beloved of meth users; across America, users involved in production would happily sit for hours popping Sudafeds out of blister packs, as if Congress had sent them a gift.
However inventive law-makers and law enforcers are, they are always playing catch-up. When the trafficking of metham-phetamine across borders became illegal, American organised crime groups would load up Mexican immigrants with pseudo-ephedrine-containing tablets and bring them across the border with the legal precursor, rather than the illegal finished product. The pills would then be converted into methamphetamine in Californian and Texan labs. The profits were extraordinary. According to the DEA in the early 1990s, a $500 purchase of pseudoephedrine pills could yield $20 000 worth of crystal meth. Mexican cartels, already well established in the cocaine, heroin and cannabis trade, widened their business to crystal meth. When American law enforcement officials were able to interdict the traffic of cold medicines across the border in 1995–96, the cost of street meth went up, purity went down, and the number of presentations of meth psychosis and other health and criminal effects declined. But in the next few years, when the Mexican cartels got hold of greater quantities of powdered pseudoephedrine directly from the factories in India that were making it, usage flared again. In 1998–99, when these supplies were shut down, meth use dropped off. An investigation by the Oregonian newspaper in 2004 was able to correlate, with astonishing precision, peaks in the supply of the precursor chemicals with peaks in crime and health problems in the American west. By 2004, when the Oregonian published its report, the problem was raging again. ‘Authorities in Portland, Spokane, San Diego and Phoenix report that 25 percent to 38 percent of men arrested for any crime have methamphetamine in their bloodstream,’ the newspaper reported.
Given the waxing and waning availability of the precursor chemicals, the knowledge of how to cook methamphetamine had to remain alive and responsive to changes. Since the 1960s, knowledge about cooking speed was commonly learnt and passed around in jail, or as a kind of ‘samizdat’ among bikie gangs. Indeed, the first common moniker for meth, ‘crank’, derived from bikies carrying around the lab equipment and the product in their crankcases.
Until the 1990s, the spread of knowledge was limited by the physical delivery method—word of mouth and recipes scrawled on the backs of coasters—and by the networks in which manufacturers moved. But with the advent of the internet in the mid-1990s, the genie escaped from the bottle and the recipes became available to anyone, from teenage chemistry students to middle-aged farmers. And they were just as keen to spread it onwards: one American expert estimated that each year, the average meth maker would teach another ten people to make the drug.
Today, it takes seconds to find a recipe for crystal methamphetamine on the internet. The following one, by an author known as ‘MethodMan’, is arguably the most widely propagated. It appears on hundreds, if not thousands, of
websites and chat rooms. On its original site it carries a preamble that reads: No lies here, folks, this recipe will manufacture methamphetamine this will get you into trouble if you do this BE CAREFUL!
As with any recipe, it begins with a list of ingredients. The brand names are American, but Australian equivalents are all available. In the recipe reproduced here, however, I have omitted several key ingredients and steps in the process so as not ‘to get you into trouble’. In Australia, possession of a recipe for the manufacture of a drug is a criminal offence so I have edited the recipe to ensure that it will not work to manufacture methamphetamine, but will still demonstrate the approximate level of skill required.
• Mason Jars (Used for canning)
• Contact 12 hour time released tablets
• Heet
• Surgical tubing
• Rubbing Alchohol
• Muriatic Acid (Used for cleaning concrete)
• Coleman’s Fuel
• Aceton
• Coffee Filters
• Electric Skillet
• Iodine Tincture 2%
• Hydrogen peroxide
• Coke Bottles (Plastic type)(with Lids/caps)
• Red Devils Lye
• Sharp scissors
• Book Matches
• Baking dish
• Execto razor blades single sided
