by Malcolm Knox
Could ice be held responsible for the murders of Akai and Frost? Not in the legal sense: Peters pleaded guilty to murder, and courts concluded that he was never so impaired by his drug use that he could use the defence of intoxication. Nor could Akai’s infecting him with HIV, or Frost’s cruel sexual demands, amount to provocation that could bring the charges down to manslaughter. Legally, Peters was a double murderer, and was sentenced to stay in jail until at least 2014.
But in the psychiatric sense, ice was fingered as the straw that broke the camel’s back. The distinguished psychiatrist Dr Yvonne Skinner, a former president of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, examined Peters. Dr Skinner looked at his unhappy childhood, his history of drug abuse, and his adjustment to learning that he had HIV. All of these factors, she said, had been part of Peters’s make-up for a long time. None could be said to have tipped him over the edge. She found that he had no psychiatric disorder, cognitive defect, or immature personality structure. He knew what he was doing, and he knew the difference between right and wrong. The major emotion he was feeling at the time of the murders was depression. Dr Skinner summed up her report categorically: Peters’s depression ‘did not arise from an underlying condition, but from the transitory effect of the drug “Ice” amphetamine’.
Just a couple of years after the inner-city drug users first reported the influx of this new, purified stimulant, the country had its first bizarre and horrific crime that could be put down, in no small part, to the influence of ice. It would be far from the last.
Having risen sharply, many aspects of ice use were stable across Australia between 2000 and 2001. The price had settled at $30 to $50 per point, purity was generally around 22 per cent—though it could range as low as 5 per cent and as high as 85 per cent— and availability was described by injecting drug users in NDARC studies as ‘easy’. The mode of scoring wasn’t changing much, with only 10 per cent of users buying from street dealers, the vast majority getting it through friends or at a dealer’s house.
But due to the drop-off in heroin availability, one statistic— the most ominous of all indicators—had skyrocketed. By 2001, 58 per cent of NSW speed users were taking ice; 66 per cent in Victoria; 72 per cent in South Australia; 79 per cent in Queensland; 92 per cent in Western Australia; 66 per cent in Tasmania; 34 per cent in the Northern Territory; and 87 per cent in the ACT. In other words, while methamphetamine had gradually crept up on amphetamine and overtaken it during the years 1995–2000, between 2000 and 2001 there was a prodigious shift from snorting powder to smoking or injecting the potent crystalline form. It was as if a nation of beer drinkers had suddenly switched wholesale to overproof rum. The basic intoxicant was the same, but the purity and the form of consumption had undergone a quantum leap within the space of a year.
The essential consequence of this was not a chemical one, but a social one. As crystal meth had broken free of the stigma of injection, and was now a smokable drug in a novel new ice pipe, it was attracting a younger and more diverse range of users. Damien Peters was not the typical ice user. On the decline, as a portion of all users, was the emaciated junkie; more representative now was the ‘social’ or ‘recreational’ smoker of the occasional ice pipe: employed, in a stable relationship, better able to absorb the impact of the drug on their lives.
The 2002 NDARC Australian Drug Trends report also underscored how drug habits were conditioned by what was available. Injecting drug users preferred heroin—if they were given the choice—in every state except South Australia, where they preferred meth. But only in New South Wales was heroin the drug they had most recently injected. Everywhere else, even though they preferred heroin, they used methamphetamine more.
It was only a matter of time before habit started to influence preference. This is the way addictive drugs work. You may love heroin most of all, and inject ice because it’s the only thing you can score. Soon, if there is only ice around and no heroin, you may say you still prefer heroin, but your body has developed a craving for the amphetamine. Before long, users in all states except New South Wales would nominate meth as their drug of choice. (NSW users’ continued preference for heroin reflected the difference that proximity to ports can make. The supply of heroin, a plant-based drug originating in Asia, depended on successful importation into a big port like Sydney. Methamphetamine, which could be made anywhere, was not so geography-dependent. The purest meth in Australia, judging from police seizures, was now being made in Queensland.)
Researchers and authorities never know with precision how much of a drug is being used around the country. So they rely on analogous indicators. The 2002 Australian Drug Trends report showed a rise in all those key analogous indicators for ice use. Nationwide police busts on clandestine labs were up by 20 per cent, from 201 to 240. Of the drugs being intercepted at the borders, customs seizures of all methamphetamines in 2000–2001 went up past 400 kilograms, when in the previous year they had risen from a then-worrying 10 to 90 kilograms. Among those, the amount of crystal meth seized had gone from 8.8 kilograms, to 82.1 kilograms, to 154.3 kilograms in those three years. Which begs the question: How much were they missing? Were customs and police choking off supply and, as with heroin, causing a meth drought? And if so, what drug would come next?
The answer was that they were barely scraping off the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. If law enforcement interceptions had constricted supply into the market, the price would have gone up, the purity gone down, and the availability decreased. Even though seizures went up by such large amounts, none of that happened: the price was stable, the purity rose, and the drug became more available in every state. The law enforcement figures were sending out a mixed message. Yes, customs and the federal police were intercepting more of the drug. But rather than staunching the flow, all these interceptions were doing was providing another indicator of how that flow had broken the levees.
Crystal use, as a proportion of all methamphetamine use, was by now highest in Western Australia and South Australia. Up to this point, there had been conjecture over whether ice was more addictive than other forms of methamphetamine. By 2002, the picture was clarifying. In Western Australia, where 74 per cent of injecting drug users reported that they had recently taken ice, the average frequency of meth use—every three days—was also the highest in the country. Where ice use was next highest, in South Australia, frequency was next highest. And so on all the way down the line. By 2002 there was an almost perfect correlation between this one form of methamphetamine and how habit-forming it was.
As alarming as these figures might have been, the ice age in Australia still had some way to travel before reaching its peak.
Crime, or the fear of crime, has such a hold over the public imagination because of its sheer randomness. Victims are often simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. This sense of chance feeds an instability that is reflected, ultimately, in the persuasiveness of law and order agendas when elected officials come asking for votes. The politics of the late 1990s and early 2000s both responded to and exacerbated that fear. Whether it was federal politicians talking about hordes of terrorists, state politicians talking about more police on the beat, or local politicians talking about making the mall a hoon-free zone, the connective tissue of the time was fear.
Crystal meth only aggravated that sense of randomness, because of the Brownian motion of dangerous users. ‘Tweakers’ or ‘freaks’, as ice users came to be known, could turn up anywhere, at any time, covering dozens of kilometres, sometimes with an obscure purpose, in the space of one binge. And when they get there—wherever ‘there’ turns out to be—they could do anything.
In the early hours of 19 October 2002, Andrew Hennessey and John Pestana were driving the 904 kilometres south from the banana and fishing town of Carnarvon to Perth. The North West Coastal Highway is a numbing desert road, with 481 kilometres between Carnarvon and the next town, Geraldton. They had left in the middle of the night in a Mitsubishi Colt se
dan owned by their friend Robert Robson, with Hennessey driving. But the weariness of the late start overcame him, and after about 200 kilometres he told Pestana he was too tired to go any further. Pestana was also too tired to drive, so Hennessey pulled into a parking bay on the side of the road 10 kilometres north of the Overlander Roadhouse, near the southern edge of Shark Bay.
As they went to sleep, the pair had no idea they were about to be swept up in the tidal wave of West Australian ice use in the person of Dimitrios ‘Jim’ Kyriakidis.
Kyriakidis, aged 28, was on the type of high that would have just about killed a person who wasn’t already habituated to hard drugs. A year earlier, on 2 July 2001, his father had died from a heart attack. Kyriakidis, already an occasional methamphetamine user, was very close to his father and devastated when he lost him. Having lost the steadying ballast in his life, Kyriakidis stepped up his meth use. Within months, he was smoking an eight-ball, or 3.5 grams, of ice through the course of each week. Soon he started injecting it, shooting up a gram a day in four or five different sessions. He also took industrial quantities of ecstasy—very often amounting to fifteen to twenty tablets a week.
By the first anniversary of his father’s death, Kyriakidis was out of control. During the previous year, as well as building a solid drug habit, he had gambled away $35 000 of his inheritance.
In that first week of July 2002, he stayed up on crystal for twelve days straight, also popping 22 ‘blue sky’ ecstasy tablets.
James Gates was the first unfortunate soul to randomly cross the path of an amped-up Kyriakidis. On 2 July Gates was driving home from work along the Kingsway, a main road in the northern suburbs of Perth, when a bus pulled into the centre lane in front of him. To get clear of the bus, Gates swerved into the right-hand lane. In that lane was another car, driven by Jim Kyriakidis, who raced forward to squeeze ahead of Gates.
It was just a regular everyday episode of clumsily merging traffic. But Kyriakidis wasn’t a regular everyday driver doing his normal business; he was doing mountains of crystal methamphetamine. That day, worked up into a lather by the cycle of ice highs and crashes, he had burgled a workmate who he felt had wronged him. He was intensely paranoid and on a hair-trigger. Now, enraged by Gates’s driving, he stopped in front of Gates at the next intersection, a red traffic light at Wanneroo Road. Kyriakidis got out of his car and started marching back towards Gates, who could not believe his eyes. The man had a tomahawk in his hand.
It was all over so quickly, Gates hardly knew what had hit him. Kyriakidis strode up and thrust the tomahawk through the driver’s side window, cutting Gates between his nose and upper lip. Then Kyriakidis got back into his car and drove off.
After Kyriakidis had been to court over the incident, his lawyer advised him to get psychiatric help. He saw one of the state’s most eminent psychiatrists, Professor Peter Burvill at the University of Western Australia, but did not tell the professor about his drug use. He told him about his depression, paranoia, insomnia and anxiety, and he told him about his father’s death, but he didn’t tell him he was taking as much ice as he could lay his hands on. He was prescribed an antidepressant and went on his way.
His way, at this point, meant a steady diet of crystal meth with his girlfriend, Melissa Caldwell. Caldwell was just seventeen years old and very much under the influence of a boyfriend eleven years her senior. She had just fallen pregnant to him, although in October 2002, when they set off for a camping and fishing trip to Karratha in northern Western Australia, it is unlikely that the pregnancy was known to either of them.
What happened in the early morning of 19 October was, in the words of one judge, ‘bizarre’. Another judge called it a ‘senseless, unbelievable act of violence’.
Around dawn on the nineteenth, Kyriakidis and Caldwell were driving up the North West Coastal Highway. They had been camping, but packed up early to continue their journey. Just north of the Overlander Roadhouse, they saw a Mitsubishi Colt in the parking bay of a rest stop.
Kyriakidis pulled over and told Caldwell to videotape what he was about to do. She held the camera and Kyriakidis got out and walked towards the Colt. Wearing dark clothing, gloves, a hat and sunglasses, he had a crowbar in one hand and a can of pepper spray in the other.
He turned back to Caldwell’s camera and said: ‘Jim’s World dot com—Episode One. Madness.’
Andrew Hennessey was woken by a crowbar smashing through his driver’s side window. A dark figure outside reached in and, before Hennessey knew what was happening, his face was burning from a burst of pepper spray.
John Pestana piled out of the passenger’s side but fell over. Kyriakidis ran around the front of the Colt and pounced on him, smashing Pestana’s head and body with the crowbar.
Hennessey, while handicapped by the burst of pepper spray in his eyes, launched himself at Kyriakidis with a piece of wood. Caldwell, seeing Hennessey, warned her boyfriend and then threatened Hennessey with a knife.
Having been dealt a series of wounds that would require 60 stitches, Pestana managed to fight back and wrest the crowbar off the maddened Kyriakidis. At this point Kyriakidis made strange motions and noises as if he was the one being attacked. It was, literally, madness. He was squealing and yelping like a caricature of a bashing victim.
But then, disarmed of his crowbar, Kyriakidis switched roles again. He took a Glock pistol from his pocket. He pointed it at Pestana who, now that things looked a lot more serious, cowered by the car. Kyriakidis moved around, grunting and gesticulating like Bruce Lee in a kung-fu movie. Then he walked towards Hennessey and fired a shot into the air.
As the two victims huddled near the ground, fearing for their lives, Kyriakidis took the keys from the Colt’s ignition while Caldwell kept videotaping. He strode off towards his own car, then, remembering his crowbar, turned around and demanded it back from Pestana, who gave it to him.
Kyriakidis and Caldwell drove off. She had videotaped the entire attack. As they drove away, Kyriakidis smirked at the camera and said, ‘They’ll be there for days.’
They weren’t. They flagged down a truck that day and were taken to a hospital. Two days later, Kyriakidis’s car was tracked down in Carnarvon. Kyriakidis and Caldwell were arrested. Initially they denied any involvement in the assault of the two men, but the incriminating videotape was found in a sock secreted in the car’s air filter. Police also found the Glock pistol. Kyriakidis’s explanation for the attack? He wanted to start an internet site called ‘Jim’s World’ and all he was doing was performing stunts, ‘pretend assaults’, and turning them into a digital video that he could show on the website.
Of all the crimes committed under the influence of ice, the Kyriakidis outback attacks are a clear-cut instance of how the drug can intermesh with, and exacerbate, serious mental disorders. Several psychiatric evaluations were made of Kyriakidis after his arrest. One, from Dr James Fellows-Smith, said:
[Kyriakidis’s] anxiety is understandable based on the psychopathology that he was experiencing in the days preceding this offence. Furthermore, although it is likely that his use of amphetamines greatly exacerbated his condition[,] his symptoms, in particular his ‘fear of being attacked by people on the road’, were part of a recognisable psychiatric condition, temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) that Mr Kyriakidis has had since early childhood.
Kyriakidis told another psychiatrist, Dr Raymond Wu, that he had been in ‘a dream state’ after snorting crystal meth that morning and the subsequent events were ‘a blur’. He said he had been ‘hearing voices’ and ‘seeing spirits’ since the age of fourteen; under the influence of crystal meth he could ‘foretell the future’ and ‘sense things’. Television shows often spoke to him directly, sometimes telling him how to do his job and at other times delivering him messages from his dead father. He told Dr Fellows-Smith that he received signs from the spirit world and suffered seizures that gave an effect of deja vu and time distortion. Sometimes he hallucinated that he could smell vinegar strongly, or hear lou
d techno music in his head. He said he could only clear these sensations in two ways. One was by banging his head against a wall. The other was by using crystal methamphetamine, which seemed to clarify the world around him, sharpening his perception and steadying his concentration. But when the drug was wearing off, and indeed even when he was high after he had become a habitual user, he felt that people were watching him, that messages were coming at him through digital clocks and car registration numbers, and he felt that he had to ‘fix the wrongs of the world’.
Kyriakidis pleaded guilty to a number of charges. He was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison, which was later reduced by almost half on appeal.
In jail, once he was off crystal meth and taking antipsychotic medication, Kyriakidis resumed his lapsed school studies, repeatedly expressed remorse for his crimes, and became as good a father as he could to his and Caldwell’s baby daughter. If he could resist the pull of ice, examining psychiatrists expressed hope that he could start a productive life once he was released.
Through 2002 and into 2003, ice percolated steadily through Australian society. One steady, if imprecise, measure of this was the number of occasions law enforcement officials were coming across the drug. They were now fighting on two fronts: customs were trying to stop the importation of the drug across the borders, and police officers were battling the clandestine labs.
Stories emerged from both fronts. In February 2002, an unaccompanied parcel arrived at Sydney Airport on a flight from Hong Kong. Its documentation said it was a computer part, but customs officers found it weighed more than it should have. They cracked it open and found 1.67 kilos of crystal meth. Its addressee was a man living in Lennox Head, the noted surf spot near Byron Bay in northern New South Wales. He was located, arrested and convicted.
