by Malcolm Knox
To take just one example of an ice user’s frenetic industry, here is a log of 23-year-old Sydney ice user Ersen Cicekdag’s actions, on 4 and 5 September 2005:
Afternoon, 4 September: Came into possession of credit cards, mobile phones, laptop computer and personal papers stolen from a house that afternoon.
11.05 pm: Used stolen credit card in a brothel to pay for sexual services costing $132.
11.59 pm: With stolen credit card, bought groceries for $72.85 at a service station.
12 midnight: Bought more groceries, costing $128.17.
5 September, 12.08 am: Bought food and drink costing $12.10 from McDonald’s.
12.41 am: Bought goods costing $207.94 at a service station.
12.42 am: Bought goods costing $115.30 at the same service station.
Daytime: Came into possession of stolen car keys, and used them to drive away a Toyota motor vehicle.
Afternoon: Led police on a high-speed chase, crashed into another car, ran away from police, was eventually arrested in possession of 0.4 grams, or four ‘points’, of ice.
Compared with other drug users, crystal meth users are extremely active when they are high, pursuing their obsessive tasks or pleasures for days on end. For Wodak, the consequences in the potential spread of blood-borne infections were both obvious and ominous.
Wodak was already a controversial figure in the public health world. When the federal government set up a Senate committee to investigate illicit drugs in 2006, the committee chair, Senator Bronwyn Bishop, went on a crusade to discredit Wodak. In this she was aided by many charity workers and members of various organisations who came before the committee to advocate a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to illegal drugs. Wodak, as a promoter of ‘harm reduction’, was held up as public enemy number one.
It’s worth a digression to see how he had developed his views. Wodak started working at St Vincent’s on 1 July 1982. Exactly one year earlier, the US Centers for Disease Control identified Auto-Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS. At that point nobody had much idea whether AIDS was caused by a virus or bacteria, what kind of syndrome it was or how it was spread, let alone how to combat it. Over the next 24 months the evidence, worldwide, was pieced together: gay men having unprotected sex and injecting drug users sharing dirty needles were the two groups most at risk.
‘All of this was happening during my first year in this room,’ says Wodak in his cramped office in Victoria Street, on the fringe of Sydney’s red light district. ‘We knew quickly that this was a major epidemic. It was starting with gay men, of whom 35 per cent were HIV-infected already. Then some of those men who used needles were spreading it to heterosexual injecting drug users. Then they were spreading it by having sex with heterosexual non-drug users. From there it was out into the community in an orderly sequence.’
Wodak, whose family had fled the plague of Nazism in Czechoslovakia forty years earlier to settle first in Singapore and then Australia, became ‘obsessed with doing what I could to stop’ an epidemic that was ‘the worst since the Black Death in Europe in the fourteenth century’.
The immediacy of the problem pressed itself upon him.
‘The largest population of HIV-infected gay men were walking the same streets as the largest population of injecting drug users, and these were the streets around this hospital, the same streets I was walking every day.’
Wodak’s mission was to instil a culture of clean needle use. Programs were already in place in the Netherlands and the UK (where it had been promoted, incidentally, by the conservative wing of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party). Over the next few years Wodak wrote thirteen separate submissions to the federal health department laying out the case for funding a syringe exchange program, and was rebuffed each time. Wodak’s encounters with authority ‘led me to wonder what on earth was going on. We had a chance to do something about this epidemic, but people [meaning politicians and bureaucrats] wouldn’t let us.’ By 1986 he was ready to press ahead regardless of government support. He was threatened with legal penalties and interviewed by police, but the syringe program got underway and in the next twenty years would save countless lives. Whether stimulant or opiate consumers, injecting drug users now understood the consequences of sharing needles, and while they may make many questionable decisions with their lives, the shift to clean needles in two decades represented a remarkable cultural change.
Wodak read the literature of drug policy in different countries, and discovered ‘that it’s always an arbitrary and capricious process. There’s a deep belief that piling on drug law enforcement will bring trafficking to an end, when the evidence shows it has the opposite effect, including corrupting police.’
By the mid-1990s, Wodak had become aware of a new threat on the horizon. Although he’d been burnt with the needle exchange experience, he was prepared to go through the same process of applying for government funding for what he saw as an urgent public health menace.
‘We began hearing more and more about amphetamines,’ he says. ‘Compared with heroin, amphetamines were under-researched. We understood heroin and had some effective treatments, even if they were underfunded. But there was already global evidence of a trend from plant-based to synthetic substances. When you cook the substance inside a room, you’re not subject to the aerial and satellite surveillance you get if you’re growing a plantation of cannabis or opium poppies.’
In 1996, Wodak went to a conference in Italy where one of the participants talked about a urine test that could distinguish between prescribed amphetamine (mostly dexamphetamine) and street amphetamine.
‘We need that test,’ was his first thought, he says now. ‘I could see the amphetamine problem coming, and this looked like it could be an effective treatment.’
The idea was that dexamphetamine could become for speed addicts what methadone was for smackies: a safe, clean substitute for the drug that could be prescribed and used medicinally to help the addict through withdrawal symptoms, and remove the risk of overdosing or catching a blood-borne infection.
As he had a decade earlier, Wodak wrote to the federal government repeatedly, requesting grants for a pilot project to see how such a test would go. Again and again he was rejected— not on scientific but political grounds. Michael Wooldridge eventually consented, but Wodak then met obstruction after obstruction in the bureaucracy. A senior health department official told him that ‘you are throwing me into a swimming pool with lead boots on. The same thing will happen to me as happened to my predecessor.’ That is, he would be sacked for supporting one of Wodak’s controversial programs.
What followed was one of those minor scandals that have hampered many drug treatment projects in Australia. Wodak’s application to the National Health and Medical Research Council received an outstanding mark of 88 per cent, easily enough to get the grant, but was still rejected. Another organisation received $500 000 to explore non-pharmacological treatments of amphetamine addiction. ‘It eventually found, to no one’s surprise, that such treatments, on their own, had little effect,’ Wodak says.
At that point, methamphetamine use was still relatively low in Australia. But then came the heroin drought.
‘The amphetamine market changed dramatically,’ Wodak recalls. ‘Heroin purity went down and the price went up. Meanwhile amphetamine purity went up, the way it was absorbed became easy as crystal methamphetamine came onto the market, and consumption skyrocketed with a spectacular increase in adverse consequences.’
To what extent can this be attributed to the heroin drought? Hugely, says Wodak, quoting a paper from 1976, written by American psychiatrist Joseph Westermeyer. That document, called ‘The Pro-Heroin Effects of Anti-Opium Laws in Asia’, traced the consequences of opium crackdowns in Hong Kong (1945), Thailand (1959) and Laos (1972). In each case, cutting off opium traffic led to devastating rises in heroin use. ‘Opium smoking among elderly men was replaced by heroin injecting among young men,’ Wodak says. Heroin was manufactured underground, was more con
centrated and was easily transportable. Injection, as a method of administration, was more efficient and less likely to be sniffed out by police than opium smoked in a pipe.
‘This fits in with all prohibitions,’ Wodak says. ‘In the 1920s, the prohibition of beer led to more production and consumption of spirits. The crackdown on cannabis in Hawaii (in the 1980s and 90s) led to an explosion of methamphetamine use. Cracking down on opium in Burma led to amphetamine use.’
The same, he says, happened in Australia with the heroin drought. Criminal syndicates found something that was less risky to make and more profitable to sell. Users found something that was cheaper and lasted longer. Police and hospitals found themselves unprepared for a crisis.
Wodak’s analysis was backed up by a study conducted by Andrew Macintosh for the Australia Institute in 2006. The paper, ‘Drug Law Reform: Beyond Prohibition’, said four out of every five dollars spent by state and federal governments on illegal drug programs went to law enforcement rather than treatment.
Macintosh suggested that authorities were compounding the problem by prosecuting users at the end of the supply chain. Eighty per cent of those charged with drug offences in 2003–04 were caught for using, most often cannabis.
The study linked the heroin drought causally to the methamphetamine outbreak, saying organised crime gangs had made ‘marketing and production decisions’, particularly ‘a decision to switch from producing and trafficking heroin to methamphetamines’.
So should police have done nothing, and tolerated heroin rather than risk the effects of a drought? To anyone who asks if clamping down on heroin trafficking was a bad idea, Wodak also cites Westermeyer. Neither would advocate anything like turning a blind eye to heroin. But Westermeyer concluded that before authorities crack down on one drug, they should lay the ground for its aftermath, by ‘(1) changing society’s attitude toward the traditional drug from ambivalence to opposition; (2) mobilizing resources to treat and rehabilitate all addicts within a short period of time; (3) developing the social will to incarcerate all “recidivist” addicts for a prolonged period; and (4) preventing narcotic production or importation.’ Lay the ground first; the crackdown comes last. Needless to say, in Australia none of these preventative actions was taken, or nowhere near to the extent that was needed. As a result, another act of prohibition led to another outbreak of a more dangerous and socially damaging drug.
In 2001, Novica Jakimov separated from his wife. It came as a surprise to some of their family and friends in Melbourne, who knew Jakimov as a successful sportsman and reliable bricklayer from a good family.
Born in 1968 in what was then Yugoslavia, Jakimov had come to Australia with his parents as a three-year-old in 1971. At school he was popular with his peers and talented at sports, particularly cricket, football and water polo. When he left school after year twelve in 1986, he worked steadily as a brickie and in other building trades.
In 1998 he married, but by then he was a fairly frequent recreational user of drugs, including cannabis and amphetamines. He was never physically violent towards his wife, but would suffer eruptions of temper, screaming and threatening her. After three years she had had enough.
Alone, Novica Jakimov decided it was time to be a full-on bachelor again. He was getting high on something or other every few days. And someone introduced him to crystal meth.
He still wanted to rekindle his relationship with his wife, and contacted her regularly to sound her out about a reconciliation.
As well as the easier importation of meth and its precursor chemicals, the essential economic difference between ice and heroin was that ice only required the importation of knowledge. You didn’t need poppy growers to produce for you in Asia and make risky shipments by sea or air. All the ingredients for making methamphetamine were already here. And the internet was providing a handy platform for anyone interested in becoming a home cook.
If crystal methamphetamine were an imported drug that relied on shipping or other freight routes, its spread could be charted from the eastern capital cities into the rest of Australia. But due to the near-simultaneous importation of knowledge, and the ready availability of pseudoephedrine in Australian pharmacies, meth bloomed everywhere at once.
By January 2001, Adelaide police said the street scene was fully penetrated by ice. Dr Rachel Humeniuk, a senior researcher with the Drug and Alcohol Services Council, said ice was more popular in South Australia, relative to opiates, cocaine and hallucinogens, than in the eastern states. She noted that the purity was increasing and the price was falling faster in South Australia than elsewhere. Later that year, statistics showed that hospital admissions for amphetamine psychoses had risen in South Australia from 10 to 25 a month. Busts of methamphetamine laboratories shot up from one every two weeks to one every five days, with police predicting further increases.
Meanwhile, Queensland would soon be staking its claim as the nation’s ‘ice capital’ (a declaration that would actually be made by the Courier-Mail newspaper in 2005). As early as 1995, a Gympie man had been arrested after finding a way to accelerate the amphetamine-making process fourfold, using methyl alcohol or acetone and other solvents, including hydrochloric and other acids, iodine and mineral spirits. Dale Francis Drake was one of the first Australian cooks to show how easily the process could be replicated. Queensland Health forensic chemist Peter Vallely (now an adviser to the UN’s International Narcotics Board) would say that Dale Francis Drake revolutionised the economics of local methamphetamine production: ‘Before that, criminal elements used cooks and they were looked after as a bit of a prize, but then they were suddenly growing like money trees.’
Drake’s laboratory was one of only twelve to be uncovered by police in 1995. Since then, busts of clandestine laboratories, or ‘clan labs’ as police called them, had surged in the Sunshine State. By 1998–99, there were 83 lab busts. In 1999–2000 there were 70, and in 2000–2001 there were 138.
In Queensland, though, compared with the other states, the many lab busts were yielding low weights of methamphetamine. That is, Queensland might not really have been the meth capital of the country, but it was certainly the capital of the mini-lab. Cook-ups occurred in boats, motel rooms and car boots. Police couldn’t explain why Queensland had this particular characteristic. But it had been around for a while. Back in 1996, Paul Bennett had seen an explosion in the number of small labs, very possibly as a flow-on from Dale Francis Drake.
‘Master cooks were soon in demand because they knew how to extract the maximum amount of pure methamphetamine from these medicines, and were “persuaded” by organised crime groups to cook for them alone.
‘I know a guy who did a runner into the Glass House Mountains north of Brisbane. Some of these bunny backyard cooks had as much know-how and compassion for mankind as Iraq’s Chemical Ali, and got it majorly wrong. Not only did they make some toxic shit by using the incorrect ingredients and recipes, but also blew themselves up in the process. When going through certain stages of the cooking or methamphetamine process, buffer substances need to be removed to get the ephedrine. This process involves adding toxic chemicals such as acetone, methanol, ether, different acids, cleaning agents, iodine, red phosphorus, etc. Because some of these cooks had inadequate skills or ingredients or exhaust systems, gases would mix, or envelop a spark, and then KA-BOOM!’
Bennett says that through some ‘working girl’ friends of his, he found his ‘own cook. It was someone you’d really want to hang onto.’
One of the reasons for trusting ‘your’ cook, he says, was the variation in the products that came out from unknown labs.
‘For a few months there was a batch of pure going around that had many of the big users hallucinating. I was used to seeing opaque-coloured crystals, but now some pinkish and aqua-coloured crystals were rocking up. This batch I’m talking about was a dark orange-red in colour, thick and gooey like tar. (I now know it hadn’t been washed properly, a greed for money buzz.) It was best kept under refrigera
tion . . . because it would start melting, especially in the high temperatures of a Gold Coast summer. Users imagined bugs crawling all over and inside their bodies, inflicting a burning itch. Some of them scratched big sores in themselves. Some tried to burn the bugs off using cigarette lighters. One guy who was off his face poured lighter fluid over himself, then his mate, also under the influence, set him alight . . .’
Dr Michael Dawson, used regularly as an expert witness in methamphetamine court cases, says the biggest downfall for ‘master-cooks’ is not incompetence but ego.
‘I was involved in a case which seemed to be going well for the defence until the alleged cook’s ego got the better of him,’ Dr Dawson says. ‘He was denying it, but then he had to show me, as a chemist, how good he was. It turned out he was so proud of his work, he’d kept records of how he’d made it. Why would you keep records of illegal activity? Only if you’re a complete smart-arse.’
Whatever the reason for Queensland’s reputation as a cook-up capital, the consequences were extreme. In 2002 the Queensland Premier, Peter Beattie, said that recreational drug users, particularly young men on amphetamines, had contributed to a 400 per cent increase in the number of people avoiding trial due to mental illness. Bob Aldred, the chief executive of the Queensland Alcohol and Drug Foundation, would say in 2005 that: ‘If I had to make the awful choice I would prefer my son or daughter to be on heroin rather than amphetamines. Although heroin has the chance of mortality, you can usually keep them alive until you get them off the heroin. With amphetamines your psychosis can become a chronic psychosis. Then you have a lifetime illness and that person is going to be a major problem for the rest of their lives.’
Aldred said some parents would score the drug for their child rather than let them wander the streets. ‘You see a lot in this game but when a parent phones I just go to water,’ he said.
At the same time, Jane Fischer, a researcher from the Queensland Alcohol and Drug Research and Education Centre at Queensland University, said an unprecedented 28 per cent of ecstasy users were smoking ice as well, even when they didn’t name ice as their drug of first choice.
