Scattered

by Malcolm Knox

  • Digital scale that reads grams

  • Distilled water

  • Aluminum foil tape

  Then comes the method:

  First things first—the Iodine Crystals. Take a Coke Bottle and pour tincture into it.

  Add Hydrogen Peroxide to this . . . After this you know, the jug that the Muriatic acid comes in take the cap off and fill this cap level with the acid. Add the acid to the coke bottle . . .

  While the Iodine crystals are being made we are going to extract the Pseudo from the Contacts. You are going to need a towel for this so go get one. Take the pills out of one box, add it to one of the mason jars fill with rubbing alchohol just enough to cover the pills let set . . . Remove pills and take the towel and wipe the top coating off the pills this will remove the wax. Do the same with the other box of Contacts as well, after this add those wiped off pills only 10 to a clean mason jar. On top of this add Heat do the same for the other box of Contact. Let theese two mason jars with pills, heat stand . . . Then shake the jars till pills are completly broke down then let the jars sit again . . . Once clear syphon the heat off (Not the powder stuff at the Bottom you don’t want this it will fuck your dope up).

  Well anyway syphon the heat off with a piece of the sergical tubing syphon this into a pyrodex baking dish place in microwave . . . Take out of microwave. Now plug up your electric plate set the pyrodex dish on this . . . continue evaporating till you get a white powder on the pyrodex . . . after you get it dried take a razor blade and scrape this powder up (put this aside for later use).

  Now we are going to get the red phosphorus from the book matches take a pair of scissors and cut along the edge of the phosphorus . . . then take a coffee cup will work to this coffee cup add Acetone dip the match book strike pads into the acetone . . . this will loosen the phosphorus so it will be easier to scrape with the razor blades. (put the phosphorus in an empty match book box to let dry. Now it’s time to get the iodine crystals get a clean mason jar on top of this place coffee filter and pour the contents of the iodine +muriatic+Hydrogen Peroxide into the filter (do it slowly don’t over pour) well once you get though with the filtering on top of the coffee filter will be a black substance (This is iodine crystals) dry them by wraping in more coffee filters till you get a pretty good thick pile around the original filter place on ground and step on it to get the rest of the liquids off save this for the cook.

  Next take your digital scales weigh your pills . . . then weigh out an equal amount of iodine crystals then for the phosphorus devide the total weight of pills . . . Now its time to make the cook jars you will need 2 clean mason jars with lids . . . surgical tubing poke a hole in both jar lids place one end of the tubing into each jar lid and seal with foil tape (buy this at walmart for about $ 1.60 well anyway seal off the tubes as well as you can so you should have 2 mason jars with lids that have surgical tubing foiled taped and sealed . . . add distilled water . . . now get you hotplate hot first . . . when the plate get hot then its time to add the Iodine+pill powder to the other mason jar not the one with water in it once you get both Iodine and pill powder to the jar add . . . water to this place it on the hotplate now add the phosphorus once you put this in the jar there is going to be a imediatereaction place the other lid with hose onto the jar screw on tightly then turn your hotplate up . . . the best way to tell when it is done is when the contents of the cook jar doesn’t boil anymore once this has happened turn the hotplate off and let the jar cool so you can touch it now its time to see if we have dope once it has cooled open the lid and you should smell rotten egg like smell if it has this smell congrads you have dope now we have to remove the dope from the black goey substance . . .

  Next take another clean mason jar and place a coffee filter and filter the cook jars contents . . . place lid on the jar and shake the hell out of it then sit the jar somewhere . . . Now we are going to pull the dope out of the coleman fuel . . . fallow what i say exactly . . .

  It’s not quite boiling an egg, but anyone who can follow a Neil Perry recipe can probably do it. And this is how it played out across America through the 1990s. Mobile methamphetamine labs mushroomed in homes, garages, motels, storage units and even in cars. Police busts of clandestine meth kitchens rose into the thousands.

  As the home-cooking craze spread, so did the number of incidents showing what a dangerous practice it was. Internet sites spreading the recipe were not especially responsible on warning of the hazards in dealing with chemicals that are toxic, corrosive and flammable, and which could be absorbed by inhalation and via the skin. Once the manufacture of meth democratised, away from the experienced bikie gang specialists and into the home hobbyist cohort, accidents became commonplace. According to one study, 30 per cent of the drug laboratories found by police in the state of Oregon attracted attention because there had been a mysterious explosion or fire.

  The more cooks there were, the more amateurs were having a go. Fewer and fewer meth cooks knew the correct proportions of ingredients or had the skill to synthesise them properly. They produced methamphetamine of variable quality, both in terms of its potency and its purity. Where lead acetate was used in production via the P2P method, users suffered lead poisoning when they smoked or injected the product. In the late 1980s a cluster of injecting meth users presented at Oregon hospitals with acute lead poisoning. One Oregon test of a seized meth sample found that it was 60 per cent lead.

  Chemical spills released solvents and cyanide into the air. Many cooks lacked adequate knowledge of how to ventilate their labs and control the temperature. On the contrary, meth cooks were typically so paranoid about being detected, they would double-seal all windows and doors so that no smells would get out—thus elevating the risk of poisoning to those inside. Meth cooks in Oregon were reported to experience skin, eye, nose, throat and lung irritations, coughing and chest pain, nausea, headache and lethargy. Extreme effects included kidney and liver damage, and fainting.

  Hazardous waste was poured into sewers and septic systems and contaminated ground water and run-off into lakes and oceans. Where motel rooms were used, a toxic and flammable mess was often left behind, or at the very least traces of chemicals were left permeating carpets, furniture and curtains. Phenylacetic acid, leaving a ‘cat’s piss’ smell, would be a telltale after-odour once a meth lab had been dismantled and moved away. Decontamination of premises was in some cases too costly to carry out; American police allocated funds seized during busts to covering the cost of making spaces habitable again.

  But if the cooking of methamphetamine was that hard, and that dangerous, and that poisonous, and that unreliable in its production of a reasonably pure and effective drug, then nobody would have been doing it. While explosions, injuries and busts were well publicised by American law enforcement officials, meth cooks were responding by developing less combustible, odour-free, more mobile labs. Nobody knows how many labs are busted each year as a proportion of those that exist. Nobody can even estimate it. (Incidentally, the US DEA has estimated that of all labs busted, 80 per cent produced crystal methamphetamine.) One thing is sure, however, which is that for all the dangers the process posed, it didn’t stop millions of grams of crystal meth being produced and sold across America each year. Seizures of amphetamine-type stimulants by US Customs went from 750 000 doses in 1998 to 3 million in 1999 and 6 million by the turn of the century. Much of the Pacific coast and some of the rural western states were, by 2000, in the grip of a true crystal meth epidemic. Within four years, 12.4 million Americans said they had used methamphetamine at least once in their lives.

  Even though setting up a home methamphetamine lab might have tempted thousands of users, more than three-quarters of America’s meth was by the end of the century produced in ‘superlabs’ controlled by organised crime groups. The superlab method goes as follows.

  First, the pseudoephedrine tablets are poured into a blender and ground up. Then they are mixed, in a pot, with a solvent which separates the pseudoephedrine (or ephedrine)
from the other chemicals that bind the tablets together. The mixture is poured through a filter, and then simmered on low heat to take the solvent away. What remains is the pure pseudoephedrine, in a gluggy paste form.

  Again on low heat, the pseudoephedrine is mixed with red phosphorus and acid. The gas output is vented out through a pipe attached to the bubbling mixture.

  At this stage the chemist has pure methamphetamine, but the remaining acidic component in the mix is still too powerful, so the red phosphorus residue is filtered out by pouring the liquid through a hessian sheet and then caustic soda is added to the methamphetamine in barrels with ice packed around them to keep the heat under control.

  Next, freon is added to the methamphetamine base and decanted out of the barrel to be mixed with hydrogen chloride. What the hydrogen chloride does is draw the acidic hydrogen atoms away from the methamphetamine, leaving the drug as a wet precipitate, or ‘salt’.

  Finally, the methamphetamine is dried on a filter cloth, measured out, probably cut with additives to enhance the weight of the product, and packaged up for sale.

  In Australia, events moved slowly, lagging behind the United States, but in the same direction. Australia lagged because there was not the same historical saturation in stimulants as there had been in the United States. Australia was remote from the efficient Latin American trafficking businesses. And, it could be speculated, Australian bikies didn’t have the same degree of competitive enterprise as their American cousins.

  Up to the mid-1990s, only one major Australian police bust for ice manufacture had made it through the courts to result in convictions, when a syndicate led by chemicals importer John Barrie Oldfield, from Winston Hills in western Sydney, was broken open back in 1989. Over three years, beginning in 1986, Oldfield and a group of associates including ‘master cook’ and police informant John Michael Gazzard had manufactured 76 kilograms of ice in five different locations from Sydney to northern Queensland, with Oldfield supplying the active ingredient, pseudoephedrine, and Gazzard using his knowledge of chemistry to make the methamphetamine—though he wasn’t expert enough to avoid harm. In Gazzard’s own version, one ten-day cook-up in Como, in southern Sydney, produced fumes so strong that his eyes puffed up as if he’d ‘gone 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali’.

  They sold the ice to the Black Ulans bikie gang before being caught by Gosford police. The syndicate had done very nicely, Gazzard admitting that he’d spent $684 000 of his income from the drug deals on jewellery, entertainment, bribes to police, travel (including a $70 000 round-the-world trip), an apartment in Oxford Street and a property at Swansea, near Newcastle.

  Nevertheless, ice figured so meagrely in the public consciousness that the Oldfield/Gazzard bust attracted more attention for subsequent charges of police receiving bribes than it did for the fact of ice being made.

  In 1996, Australian police broke open 58 clandestine amphetamine labs across the country. Few were producing crystal meth, which accounted for only 100 grams in seizures. The vast majority were making old-fashioned amphetamine sulphate.

  The unleashing of the ice genie in Australia happened in a disconcertingly similar manner to the American experience. Again, it was inadvertently caused by legislators.

  In the last year of the Keating Labor government, the federal health minister Graham Richardson announced that a concerted federal and state police crackdown on the supply of amphetamine’s precursor chemicals would end the amphetamine problem. For about a year, it promised to do so. In 1996, NDARC researchers had noted a decline in the purity of street amphetamine. While its price remained stable at around $100 a gram, users were saying amphetamine was growing weaker and weaker, cut more and more with caffeine and other dilutants. Traditional amphetamine was on the way out.

  But like the American drug crackdowns, this one only motivated the ingenuity of manufacturers and drove them to more potent and easily concocted variants. In 1997, injecting drug users told Rebecca McKetin at NDARC that some Queensland manufacturers had found a way of cooking speed in smaller labs—the size of a box rather than a room—which would do the job faster and produce a higher yield. They were using pseudoephedrine, from common flu and sinus tablets like Sudafed and Sinutab, as the vital precursor chemical. To obtain the large quantities of the tablets needed, manufacturers paid ‘pseud runners’ to drive up and down the east coast picking up a few packets at a time from pharmacies until they had big commercial loads. The output of the pseudoephedrine lab wasn’t old-style amphetamine—it was methamphetamine. And this revolution in manufacture in the late 1990s was the single most important catalyst to what was tagged, after the turn of the century, as the new ‘ice age’.

  The difference, both chemically and subjectively, between methamphetamine and amphetamine sulphate is small yet significant. Methamphetamine is what it sounds like— amphetamine with a methyl molecule added on. Some researchers believe the methyl molecule slightly enhances the amphetamine’s crossover from the blood to the brain. Some users have reported a slightly smoother, faster high. But this probably owes more to the purity and the rapidity of ingestion, both of which rose when smokable meth came onto the market. Chemically, methamphetamine and amphetamine are essentially the same stimulant.

  Among users, the key difference in promoting ice as fashionable, as opposed to nasty old speed, was twofold. First was the purity. Second was the method of administering it.

  Speed had always come in three forms: powder, tablet and liquid. For decades it was taken in pill form, or injected. Then, from the 1980s, novice users might snort it, an experience that was somewhat less efficient than injection and often quite painful, due to the impurities cut into the street drug. Less efficient still was sprinkling it onto a marijuana cone—a ‘snow cone’. But snow cones (which might also involve cocaine or heroin) were more socially acceptable for the casual user than injecting. Thousands of drug users who will put anything into their body, every day for years and years, refuse steadfastly to use a needle. There is the fear of blood-borne infections and the queasiness about penetrating the skin, which many people simply find impossible to do. There is also a superstitious, semi-mystical revulsion about, in Neil Young’s lyric, ‘the needle and the damage done’. Injecting, the most efficient pathway to a high, has always been a marginal practice.

  The crossover in manufacture from amphetamine to methamphetamine introduced a ritual of taking the drug that was more acceptable than injecting yet almost as efficient. ‘There are lots of young drug users who think they’re not going to put a needle in their arm but, if someone is handing round a glass pipe with a bit of crystal in it and all [their] friends are smoking it, that doesn’t seem so scary,’ Rebecca McKetin says.

  Crystalline methamphetamine is not actually ‘smoked’, in the way tobacco and marijuana combust in a flame. In an ‘ice’ pipe, the crystals are placed in a chamber, usually glass, and heated by an external flame. The flame doesn’t oxidise the crystals, but causes them to vaporise. By drawing back on the stem of the pipe, the user is inhaling not smoke but methamphetamine vapour.

  In Australia, ice pipes were emerging alongside methamphetamine around 1997. Compared with amphetamine, meth seizures were gradually creeping up. In 1997, the Australian Federal Police reported that for every 100 seizures of amphetamine, there were 79 of meth. In 1998 that rose to 83. In 1999 it rose to 89. The next year meth overtook amphetamine, and it has never looked back.

  As for purity, probably a more significant factor in the marketplace, meth was easily outstripping amphetamine sulphate. When police seized amphetamine, they tested its purity. In the late 1990s it was always less than 10 per cent pure. But when they seized methamphetamine, the purity ranged from 15 to 32 per cent. For the user, that was the essential difference. It has been said that ice is just speed in a new guise. The basic truth in this statement ignores the impact of changes in purity and the way it was used. Higher purity, and a more efficient method of ingestion, created a whole new drug experience.

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bsp; In the 1999 NDARC survey, after many years in which users had said amphetamine purity was low and declining, they began saying the opposite. The new variant, meth, was purer and getting better—or, for some, worse.

  On the loose again in 1999, Dudley Aslett committed a robbery and was locked up for two years. Soon after his release, he assaulted a policeman, stole a car, and was caught with knives and drug paraphernalia. He was imprisoned until the end of 2002, the longest continuous sentence of his life. It would be his second-last jail term. His heroin habit continued unabated.

  In 2000, Mohammed Kerbatieh was released from jail in Queensland after serving four and a half years of his six-year sentence, paroled early on the basis of a prison record showing an adequate standard of behaviour. Upon his release, feeling that he had too many ghosts haunting him in Queensland, and too many relatives likely to ask too many questions, he decided to move south, to Victoria. There he found a new drug.

  PART TWO

  THE HIGH

  2001–2003

  The turn of the century wasn’t the best of times for a sixteen-year-old in Canberra named Matthew Gagalowicz.

  Born on 26 February 1984, Gagalowicz had enjoyed a happy childhood in country Victoria until his family moved to Canberra when he was eight. From there, a chain of events upended his stability. His best friend slipped while climbing on the roof of a house and fell to the ground, breaking his neck. He later died, and Gagalowicz didn’t recover easily. He struggled to make new friends, became withdrawn and started losing weight. Often he fell asleep in class. His mother took him to hospital, so worried about his behaviour that she was almost hoping it had a medical explanation. And it did. Matthew had developed diabetes, which was to require four insulin injections a day.

  Gagalowicz was particularly close to his grandmother, but she fell sick during these years and was diagnosed with brain cancer. Her suffering was protracted, and she died when Gagalowicz was thirteen. Shortly afterwards, his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer; it was successfully treated with chemotherapy, but then another tumour was discovered in her other breast. The atmosphere around the home became defined by medications, tests and doctor’s appointments.