by Malcolm Knox
There were many examples, in 2003 and 2004, of violent crimes occurring within weeks of the offender starting to use ice. Aslett was far from alone. At the time his August spree was taking place, in another part of Sydney a seventeen-year-old cannabis smoker and petty criminal—codenamed ‘SB’ in the courts—smoked ice for the first time. SB quickly became a daily user, and within four weeks he and a friend went to the Orchard Tavern in Chatswood, on Sydney’s north shore, and robbed the place, bailing up five staff members and ten customers with a gun. After his imprisonment and off crystal meth, SB’s behaviour was exemplary. SB was no angel, but he was a violent robber only during the month he was smoking ice every day.
Shane Martin, 26, was an ice user of a few months’ duration when in January 2004 he broke into a drug dealer’s house intending to steal some cannabis he knew was kept there. But, high on ice and the thrill of capturing the dealer and his wife and daughter, Martin grew sexually aroused and raped the two women in front of the man. Martin pleaded guilty and was given 25 years in jail to think about his moment of madness.
It’s extremely likely that, given his lifetime compulsion to steal, Dudley Aslett would have committed more robberies whatever happened. Robbery was his profession. Yet these small-time criminalities spiralled out of control when he and his little gang were overaroused, both sexually and in the violence they were prepared to enact. Without the stimulant of crystal meth, would they have been amped-up into a state of such libidinous excitement that they raped two young women? Without the jumbled mental state and excitability brought on by ice, would Aslett have fired the gun at Emad Youssef? Without the paranoia, would he even have thought it necessary to steal the gun in the first place?
Responsibility rests with the perpetrators of the crime. But it is fair to say that a pattern was emerging among criminals who used ice. The drug threw fuel onto highly combustible personalities. It didn’t change the intent or the clear-headedness of the perpetrators, but it did affect the degree of their actions. Under the influence of ice, simple violence became complicated. Small confrontations escalated. If Aslett hadn’t been unhinged by crystal meth, he wouldn’t have suddenly led a straight and law-abiding life, but Emad Youssef might still be alive and the two young women might be able to live free of those wounds they will bear for the rest of their lives.
The relationship between methamphetamine—particularly in its crystalline form—and violence is at the same time blindingly obvious and unproven. On the one hand, anyone who has experienced or seen an episode of the popularly termed ‘ice psychosis’ will know that violent behaviour can follow ice use as naturally as a hangover follows a drinking bout. Any reasonably perceptive person who has even taken ice will sense the potential that lies inside such a nervy, excitable state. And the Dudley Asletts, Mohammed Kerbatiehs and Dimitrios Kyriakidises of the world give a fair indication of what happens when this chemical unlatches the impulse-control mechanism inside certain vulnerable brains.
And yet, both scientifically and legally, proof is a much trickier matter. If ice triggers violent actions in some users, why not in others? If ice turned Aslett into a rapist one day, why not the day before, or the day after? Can ice be isolated as a violence-causing substance when most violent users are also taking other drugs and alcohol as well? If ice led automatically to violence, why can’t we trace a clear correlation between known ice use and acts of violent crime? And how much of ice-related violence is actually the turf-war criminality of rival drug gangs, such as the unfortunate shooting death of a man in Merrylands in December 2003, when passing gunmen were aiming at his ice-dealing son but shot the father by mistake?
Anecdotally, the causal link between ice and violence has long been acknowledged. In 2006, Robert Mittiga, the program director of South Australia’s Gambling and Addiction Treatment Service, put it neatly when he said meth users hurt far more people than themselves: ‘What concerns me is the consequences—violent crimes, serious domestic violence, road rage and violent brawls. These people are not normally aggressive but they can become total animals.’ A Melbourne youth worker, Les Twentyman, said at the same time, after eleven knife attacks in a week, that an estimate that 60 per cent of street crime was ice-related would be ‘very conservative’.
Yet the population-based measures of the ice–violence nexus have always been suggestive at best. One concerted effort to study the matter beyond the the realm of anecdote is the Drug Use Monitoring in Australia (DUMA) project, established in 1999 and modelled on the United States-originated International Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring program (I-ADAM). Under DUMA, people who have been arrested and taken into police custody are asked to give urine samples for drug testing. DUMA claims that 70 per cent of arrestees agree to the anonymous tests, from which the project compiles drug analysis.
DUMA tests all participating arrestees, whether they are in custody for violent or non-violent crimes (and, as they are arrestees rather than convicted criminals, it must be allowed that many of them have done nothing at all). But the studies do break down arrestees by the type of crime over which they have been charged, and in relation to methamphetamine, DUMA has found over the decade that ice is commonly but far from automatically connected with crimes of violence.
Over its eight-year lifespan, DUMA has been able to track drug use in one consistent cohort of male detainees in four sites around the country. The taking of any drug before an arrest is remarkably stable, between 70 and 78 per cent. Cannabis, the most frequently appearing drug, is also consistent in the 50–60 percentile. Methamphetamine was in the urine of 10 per cent of arrestees in 1999, rising to a peak of 31 per cent in 2001. From there it stabilised in the mid-twenties until 2005. In the 2006 survey, the most recent at the time of writing, DUMA found that the number of arrestees for violent crimes who tested positive to methamphetamine had fallen from 22 per cent to 18 per cent.
Peeling back the bulk numbers, however, shows something interesting. Users in 2006 were asked how the use of a particular drug affected their performance of a criminal act. The five drugs in the study were alcohol, cannabis, heroin, benzodiazepines and methamphetamine. The questions were:
Did you use the drug purposely to help you commit the crime? When using the drug at the time of offending, did the drug help you to:
Be more confident or have more courage?
Be more effective or more capable?
Get a rush of excitement or adrenalin?
Become erratic or unpredictable?
Have fun while committing the crime?
Feel less worried about your chances of being caught?
Feel less guilty about your offending?
To each of those questions, methamphetamine came out at or near the top. On making the offender more effective or capable, methamphetamine (72 per cent) gave double the positive response of other drugs. On giving the criminal a rush of excitement or adrenalin, methamphetamine (65 per cent) was the only one to register more than 33 per cent positive. On feelings of confidence, 76 per cent of methamphetamine users said yes. So while methamphetamine was not anywhere near as present in violent criminal activity as were alcohol and cannabis, meth seemed to have become accepted as a drug that specifically rewards and abets the kind of moods that surround violent crime. And among the meth users, 67 per cent said the form they had used before their arrest was crystal. Only 17 per cent named the next most prominent, the drug in its powder form—more indication that ice was having effects that were qualitatively different from old-style speed.
After eight years of DUMA, however, no self-respecting scientist would say that the urine sampling has shown a causal relationship between methamphetamine and violence.
Yet there is science and there is science. It must be remembered that science has yet to prove, irrefutably, that smoking causes lung cancer. Similarly, although no ‘proof’ has been established of a causal chain leading from ice use to violent acts, the association has been well known for decades.
As far back as 1971,
an eminent American psychiatrist named Everett H. Ellinwood studied the pattern of amphetamine use and violence among thirteen convicted murderers. Of course, such a small sample cannot be taken as being in any way definitive. The possibilities for extrapolation are limited. But what Ellinwood, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Duke University, was doing was to ‘distinguish as clearly as possible the specific types of drugs associated with aggression and violence’.
Ellinwood had observed in the late 1960s something very similar to what was observed in Australia after 2000: ‘stories in the news media have linked the use of drugs with a series of bizarre murders’. First Ellinwood accounted for the low coincidence of opiates and sedatives with violent crime. Then he looked at ‘four persons who committed murder after taking large doses of amphetamines’.
His first case was a 27-year-old truck driver who ‘shot his boss in the back of the head because he thought the boss was trying to release poison gas into the back seat of the car in which he was riding’. In the previous twenty hours, the murderer, Mr A, had ingested 180 milligrams of amphetamines while doing a long-haul drive. He became suspicious that someone had planted drugs in his truck, and even called the police, who took him into a local jail cell for his safety. In the cell, Mr A thought he was being watched from across the street, and then that someone was gassing him. His boss came to pick him up, and showed no sympathy for Mr A’s ideas that he was being watched. Mr A then decided that his boss was in on it, and shot him on the way home. Even eighteen months later, Mr A still believed in his paranoid ideas.
Ellinwood’s second case was a 26-year-old daily amphetamine user who shot his neighbour after not sleeping for three days and becoming convinced that the neighbour was helping the FBI spy on him.
Mrs C, 32, the third case, had been prescribed amphetamines for weight loss. She found herself growing euphoric on the drug, and took more; then the paranoid delusions set in. She bought a gun because she thought someone would come to kidnap her or her children. Her husband was serving in Vietnam, and while he was away she had an affair. She became more and more suspicious of her lover, and anxious about her husband’s impending return. Then, on an amphetamine binge lasting four days, she calmly shot her lover in the stomach as he got out of his car. She followed him and said, ‘You wanted to die; I showed you.’ After shooting him two more times, she asked a bystander to ‘Turn him over and take a picture of his pretty face’. When she was arrested, she put her feet up on the back seat of the police patrol car and tickled the sheriff on the ear, asking him if it felt good. At her subsequent interrogation at police headquarters, Mrs C stood up and said, ‘Well, I’ve got to go, I’ve got a hair appointment.’
And so it went through Ellinwood’s thirteen killers. Most had some kind of personality disposition to violence, and some, though not all, were taking other drugs as well. A small few were involved in the drug trade. Five were diagnosed schizophrenic. Most lived isolated lives, where their delusions were able to flourish.
But Ellinwood was less concerned with sifting through the causes for a ‘silver bullet’, which he knew was not possible. His attention fell on describing a common pattern of behaviour in the lead-up to the murders. What he found was a three-step evolution:
1) chronic amphetamine abuse;
2) an acute change in the individual’s state of emotional arousal;
3) a situation that triggers the specific events leading to the act of violence.
The chronic abuse phase, Ellinwood wrote, ‘sets the stage’. The user gradually becomes more paranoid, and obtains a gun (easier in America but possible, as we have seen, in Australia) for self-protection.
The sudden change in emotional arousal can arise from a change in the user’s circumstances and an increase in amphetamine dosage. It usually culminates in a binge of wakefulness and a misinterpretation of ‘signals’ coming from the environment. The user develops an alternative reality in which he or she is being threatened.
Any minor incident can be the final trigger. ‘Often,’ Ellinwood wrote, ‘the threatening incident is half real and half misinterpreted.’ Mrs C, for instance, was clear-sighted about the impending threat of her husband coming home and discovering that she had a lover, but completely addled on the question of what threat the lover posed to her.
With his analysis of a three-phase pattern, Ellinwood provided a framework for differentiating between a chronic meth user who stopped short of violence, and one who took the extra step. It would always, he argued, be largely down to luck and circumstance. But in the chronic amphetamine user, the potential for step one to turn to step two, and thence to step three, was ever-present.
Three and a half decades later, Ellinwood’s study was read by Rebecca McKetin at NDARC. She had been commissioned to conduct another attempt to relate separate population figures on ice and violent crime, this time for the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR). Her study compared ‘methamphetamine arrests’ with arrests for assaults between 1995 and 2005. This report, when published, attracted a lot of media attention for its refusal to link ice directly with crime. The reason for this caution lay in the study’s methodology.
‘Methamphetamine arrests’, defined as arrests for possession, supply, trafficking, importation and so on of the drug, had risen threefold between 1997 and 2001, dropped by a quarter in 2002, then stabilised at a rate of a little more than double where they had been at the beginning of the decade. Assaults, meanwhile, had risen incrementally before stabilising around 2003. In other words, as McKetin wrote, ‘there is currently insufficient empirical data to estimate whether, or to what extent, metham-phetamine use has increased assaults in NSW. Existing evidence suggests that methamphetamine use is likely to have a relatively minor impact on the assault rate in NSW in comparison with other factors’.
The study, however, defined ‘methamphetamine arrests’ very narrowly. When Dudley Aslett and his accomplices were arrested, these were not ‘methamphetamine arrests’—they were arrests for murder, rape and robbery. Likewise, many of the worst methamphetamine-related crimes in the spate of 2003–04 would not have made any statistical register as being connected with the drug, because the accused often did not reveal that they had been taking ice; or if they did, they waited until a court hearing to reveal this information, in the hope of mitigation. The most common ice-related crimes—common assault, break and enter, domestic violence, armed robbery— were never recorded as ice-related. (Ellinwood, by the way, had noted the same information deficit in 1971: ‘We have no data showing the number of assaults and homicides committed by people under the influence of amphetamines or other drugs.’)
As the director of BOCSAR, Don Weatherburn, says, until such information was routinely gathered, attempts such as the BOCSAR study to examine a link between methamphetamine and violence are ‘a blunt instrument’, frustrating in their imprecision.
By 2003, with the girls at school and preschool, Vicki Wolf and Mark Thomas were well out of the child-rearing woods. They’d briefly considered having a third child, but had decided against it. Life was too good to go backwards.
Vicki was now an associate partner with her law firm. Mark had left his firm to work as an in-house lawyer with a multinational food concern. They worked long hours, but each was pulling down more than $200 000 a year and they’d been able to move into a spacious home in Waverley in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. In 2003, they were renovating it, adding a second storey which would have views to the Pacific Ocean.
Since that party in 2001 when they had taken crystal, they’d smoked the drug on average about once every two or three months. They still enjoyed the sex, which followed crystal-smoking, in Mark’s words, ‘as a shit follows a morning coffee’. And they still didn’t suffer any noticeable hangover or comedown. If they were sick the day after, they attributed it to the skinful of alcohol they’d drunk while they were ‘getting on it’.
They had nothing to worry about with the drug. They had long experience with various i
llicit substances, and drew careful boundaries around their ‘crystal nights’. They used it only when the children were staying over at a cousin’s house, and only on Friday nights, not Saturdays, so they had a two-day ‘clear-air’ period following it. Although there was no detectable hangover yet, they didn’t want it to cross over into their work lives, and that meant being strong and sober on Monday mornings. If anyone had warned them about crystal methamphetamine, or ‘ice’ as it was beginning to become known (although nobody Vicki and Mark knew called it ‘ice’), they had the answer. Scare campaigns against drugs had been a part of their landscape since adolescence. ‘Remember when one line of cocaine was enough to get you addicted, or one acid trip sent you crazy? Drug campaigns are a joke,’ Mark says. ‘Nobody took them seriously, and we knew we weren’t the type of people who were going to get into trouble. Nobody we knew who used crystal had anything remotely approaching a problem. They were all people like us.’
Mark and Vicki were parents, successful professionals with close links to their families in Melbourne—too strong a safety net to fall through. But they weren’t falling. They were rising. They each had the sense, in 2002 and 2003, of rising fast, not only in the material world, but in their journey through life: ‘We were in prime time,’ Mark says.
They found ways to loosen the hold parenthood had on their lifestyle; they had a teenage babysitter who lived with them on weekends and, if the party was at their house, as started to happen, they’d even invite her to get into the swing of things after the children had gone to bed. Vicki and Mark told themselves that after the responsibility of bringing two children through infancy, they had ‘earned the right’ to cut loose a little, let off a bit of steam. It was a phase.
The only cloud—and it has to be said that this is a cloud identified in retrospect, not at the time—was something about the sex Mark and Vicki were having on crystal.
