by Malcolm Knox
ACON became a focus for the debate when it set a policy of warning about crystal meth but stopping short of a ‘just say no’ campaign. It had plenty of supporters, such as Don Baxter, director of the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations (AFAO): ‘Crystal use is associated with increased HIV infection but it hasn’t been demonstrated as a causal thing [and] listening to claims that ACON should be saying “stop using crystal” is not good public health because you are alienating the people who are not going to stop.’
A former ACON board member, lawyer David Buchanan SC, said: ‘Ice users . . . are risk-takers . . . ACON’s (nuanced) approach . . . is eminently more sensible than alienating ice users and other risk-takers by telling them they’re all going to go to hell.’
One incident that threw the intricate politics of the gay community into relief was when a gay sauna and sex club decided to import American posters from anti-crystal campaigns, displaying slogans such as Meth=Death and Buy crystal, get HIV free.
ACON described the posters as ‘not terribly useful’. Explaining ACON’s stance, its director, Stevie Clayton, said: ‘What happens is people who don’t use crystal start thinking that crystal is the problem which is causing HIV transmission, and therefore if they don’t use it they’re not at risk, and people start thinking people who do use crystal are bad and are the people who are transmitting HIV.’
In other words, ACON felt, in a similar way to health professionals around the country addressing analogous issues, that focusing too intently on crystal meth would confuse the more essential message about unhealthy behaviour. Clayton has repeatedly opposed the diversion of resources to crystal meth programs at the expense of other health priorities, while pointing out that the dominant reason for crystal use is that young gay people are already trying to cope with feelings of stigmatisation or victimisation and the resultant depression, which all augment the appeal of a drug that makes them feel strong and confident.
Other groups, such as the Sydney-based CAAMA (Community Action Against Meth Amphetamine) take a more hardline stance. CAAMA criticises AIDS organisations for soft-pedalling; it only supports ‘established’ harm-minimisation strategies such as needle exchange, instead backing a twelve-step AA-style program for addicts as well as graphic advertising campaigns.
On the other hand, individual gay people with a lifelong experience of recreational drug use are the most likely to be self-educated on the subject. The majority of the gay community (as in the community at large) who use ice do so on special occasions, smoking a small amount before going out and dancing all night and having an enhanced sexual experience. This is followed by a short-lived but relatively nasty crash, and a vow not to touch the stuff again for a little while. With this kind of knowledge, acquired by individuals and shared among the community, a Meth=Death message would be greeted by a dangerous kind of derision. Not only would that message be seen as overblown and ridiculous, but by inference it would weaken all other drug education.
The politics of the gay community aren’t the subject of this book. And there are many aspects of the ice problem that are quite specific to the gay community, and therefore not a microcosm of what takes place in the wider world. One of these is the lethalness of HIV, and another is the traditional tolerance and even encouragement of drug use among gay and lesbian people.
Yet in tracing the evolution of ice in Australia, the gay community can be seen as a canary down the mineshaft. Gay groups were the first to band together and form support networks and address crystal use as a health problem, rather than a policing problem. Gay groups were the first to produce public awareness campaigns, the more graphic of which became the models for campaigns launched by the federal government for the entire country. Gay groups were watching developments in America far earlier than the wider community. Gay groups were the first to debate the contrasting merits of harm-reduction and zero-tolerance policies. And gay groups were the first to recognise and come to grips with the tendency of an ice-using population to sort itself into two tiers—those who use the drug safely, and those who get into trouble.
Novica Jakimov wasn’t gay, but he was surely in trouble.
By February 2004, Jakimov, the Melbourne brickie with a taste for ice and prostitutes, had been on the run for four and a half months. Police had established a likelihood that Kelly Hodge, the 26-year-old prostitute who worked the streets of St Kilda, had died in Jakimov’s house in West Meadows. Jakimov, having let slip that he had taken Hodge home on the last night she was seen alive, was now the prime suspect.
And he knew it. In October and November 2003 he drove north from Melbourne and put all of his furniture and most of his possessions in a storage unit in Ballarat. Living in his utility, he tried to manufacture a new passport and identity. The passport was amateurish, but the identity was good enough to trick a fish-and-chip-shop owner in the upmarket coastal resort town of Lorne, south-west of Melbourne, into giving Jakimov a job.
It was in this takeaway shop that police caught up with Jakimov in February 2004. He said he’d moved to Lorne ‘for a change of scenery’.
After arresting Jakimov and finding details of the storage unit, police went to Ballarat and found, in the unit, a blue couch stained with blood. DNA matching techniques showed that the blood, like that on the carpet of Jakimov’s house, was Kelly Hodge’s.
From the outset Jakimov stuck to his story from 10 October. Yes, he’d picked Hodge up and taken her home. Yes, he’d had sex with her, but it was consensual. Now he added more. Yes, he’d had a fight with her, but she’d started it. He had only acted in self-defence. Yes, she had died during the argument, but her death had been an accident, and when it happened Jakimov had panicked and covered it up.
He admitted that he’d emptied out his home and fled to Lorne because he was worried about being pinned for murdering her. He swore that it had all been an accident, and the worst he had done was to try to stop it being discovered. He said he regretted doing that now.
There were many holes in Jakimov’s story, but one simple fact was right in front of the police investigators’ eyes. Jakimov, a fit bricklayer and former sportsman, weighed 78 kilos and was about 175 centimetres tall. Kelly Hodge, a heroin addict so wasted by the drug that she was by the time of her death injecting it into the flesh between her fingers, weighed only 50 kilos.
Jakimov had nearly a year in remand to think about his upcoming trial. By the time he testified, he told a story that was much closer to the truth than any of his previous versions.
What was beyond dispute was that, since separating from his wife, Jakimov had given himself wholeheartedly to the thrills of crystal methamphetamine. He would get high and horny; he would go and find a prostitute to use the drug and have sex with.
On the night of 18 August 2003, he’d injected some ice and gone out. He said he went to Crown Casino. He had a bit of luck on the tables and spied Kelly Hodge, a slim 26-year-old. When they got talking, he said he had some drugs at home they could share. Kelly told him she was a smackie. Jakimov said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got some.’
For a few hours, as a prospective source of heroin, he’d won her heart. They arrived at his home at West Meadows at around 3.30 am. He drank beer, but Kelly only wanted a glass of water.
‘Where’s the smack?’ said Kelly, flopping onto the blue couch in the living room.
‘I’ve got better,’ said Jakimov.
Kelly was disappointed that he had ice, rather than heroin, but shared it with him anyway. They proceeded to have sex in the living room. Afterwards, Kelly said she was having stomach cramps and needed to score some heroin. Again, Jakimov said he only had stimulants. In the junkie’s mind, this was not acceptable: what Kelly felt she needed was not to get more worked up, but to wind down. But it’s also the junkie’s curse to be unable to say no to drugs, any drugs, and when Jakimov began to beg her to stay—offering her $200 plus as much crystal meth and cocaine as she wanted if she’d only stay the night—she relented. They injected some more ice,
and Kelly performed oral sex on him.
It had only been two hours since the pair had come back to Jakimov’s home, but tensions were rising. Sex was just a brief interruption to the bickering: Kelly wanted heroin and accused him of tricking her into coming home with him. He talked her into using more ice with him. As its effects wore off, and her stomach cramps worsened, she resumed criticising him for not having the heroin he’d promised.
‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘It’s been a good night.’
‘A good night? You’re an arsehole, you didn’t have any smack, you prick, I’m going out to score. I shouldn’t have come here.’
‘Okay,’ he finally said, ‘if you want to go, then go.’
Kelly picked up her clothes and went to the bathroom for a shower. In the lounge room, Jakimov began to dress. Here his account, told to the courts, becomes less believable.
As he was putting his boots on, he said, he was hit from behind. He saw a ‘flash of yellow’ as something hit him in the right side of the head. As he fell to the floor, he said he saw his heavy builder’s spirit level lying on the carpet. He said that the prostitute picked it up and swung it at his head. Defending himself, he said, he picked up a vase and struck back with it.
‘It must have hit her,’ he said, as if he, a strong, ice-fuelled, well-built brickie was cowering from the attack of a 50-kilo junkie.
He said that she started looking through her handbag. He thought she was looking for a weapon. ‘I shit myself,’ he said, shortly before seeing a ‘flash of red’ and being hit on the head by a collapsible umbrella. They began wrestling, Jakimov trying to calm Kelly down, and he gained control of the umbrella. Somehow he hit her with it and she ‘dropped hard’, hitting the floor, facing upwards.
Jakimov said he then staggered to the kitchen and took some ice cubes out of the freezer for his sore hand, which he said had been struck by the spirit level. He said he passed out in his chair for some time. When he woke, he said, Kelly had rolled onto her front and had vomited and urinated. He checked her pulse: nothing.
‘I was just shattered,’ he said. Fearing shame and jail, sure that no one would believe his account of her death, he decided immediately to dispose of her body. He admitted undressing Kelly and wrapping her in the sheet and blanket, emptying the house of incriminating items, and driving them to a tip. He dumped the items there and Kelly’s body in the roadside ditch at Beveridge. He drove home and cleaned up some more.
In court, he admitted lying in his earlier police interviews to ‘get the spotlight off’ him. He also admitted moving to Lorne to avoid being connected with Kelly’s death. In fact, Jakimov admitted telling all the lies that he couldn’t now get away with. What he wouldn’t admit was what only he knew for certain: that he had murdered Kelly Hodge.
Having told his story of accidentally killing her in self-defence, Jakimov had the matter of Kelly’s shocking vaginal injuries presented to him. How had those happened? He said he was surprised, and had no idea how she’d sustained them. He said she’d been in no pain, and hadn’t bled, when they’d had sex. He said he should have locked himself in a room or run away while Kelly was attacking him, and he’d only acted to stop her hurting him.
He was lying. Carole and Nelson Ham, an elderly couple who were neighbours of Jakimov, had heard the fight from their flat. Both recalled hearing a woman’s voice cry out ‘Oh God, no!’ and ‘God, stop, no more!’
In May 2005, after a short period of deliberation, a jury convicted Novica Jakimov for the murder of Kelly Hodge. Some of her family, who were in the court for the verdict, gestured and cried out to Jakimov with the message that when he got out of jail he had better be looking out for them.
They will need to be patient. He was sentenced to nineteen years, ineligible for parole until 2019.
The years 2003 and 2004 saw a peak across Australia in police seizures of ice, admissions to hospital with amphetamine psychosis, and general usage. They were also the worst years for the criminal courts in terms of ice. But they were also the years when the fightback began. Pharmacists, hospitals and police developed strategies to combat the spread of ice—or if not its spread, to minimise the harmful consequences.
Tim Logan is an amiable and experienced chemist from Nambour, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. His pharmacy lies in the heart of the region of Australia most densely populated with small clandestine ice labs. He didn’t know that for a fact, back in the late 1990s, but he was growing suspicious that something was going on.
The pseud runners would park near Logan’s pharmacy in carloads of five. One by one they would come to the counter and ask for a packet of Sudafed, or Sinutab, or some other over-the-counter medication containing pseudoephedrine. Then they’d ask for a second packet, or a third.
‘It was always the same story,’ says Logan. ‘They’re going on a boat trip, or they’re going overseas, and they need to take a few boxes for their sinus problem. Then a few minutes later another one would come in with the same story.’
Police would later tell Logan that his pharmacy was situated on a ‘J-curve’ followed by pseud runners from Cairns down the east coast through Brisbane and Sydney to Melbourne, then up to Canberra. They had to spread their purchases over a wide geography, because a vigilant pharmacist might phone his colleagues in the local area to warn them against selling the pills to these particular people. They might even call the police.
‘They’d pick up a box here, a box there, until they had huge amounts,’ Logan says. ‘Sometimes they’d even recruit old ladies coming out of the RSL. They’d give them twenty dollars for coming across the road to buy a pack of cold and flu tablets.’
Pseudoephedrine, as we have seen, is the crucial precursor chemical for the manufacture of crystal methamphetamine. Pseud runners, many of them ice users, were paid by manufacturers, sometimes but not exclusively connected with bikie gangs, to drive immense distances gathering enough pseudoephedrine for a commercial-size ‘cook’. Police believed that ten packets of Sudafed would produce 10 grams of pseudo-ephedrine, which in turn could yield $20 000 worth of street methamphetamine.
Reports were trickling in from chemists around the country about these pseud runners. Some were worried that other chemists were turning a blind eye to what was surely an illicit-drug-manufacturing scam. Others argued that chemists had no legal right to refuse to sell cold tablets. The pharmaceutical companies argued, as they had in America, that it was only a tiny minority who were abusing Sudafed in this way, and a crackdown on the drug’s availability would penalise unduly the rest of the population, who needed simple pain relief from a cold or a flu.
‘Some reacted by going overboard and not stocking it, while others said they were not policemen and would not make value judgments about people, so they just went ahead and sold it,’ Logan says. ‘Pseudoephedrine is a useful drug for treating an annoying and very common symptom, so we didn’t want to have to ban it.’
By 2004, the momentum for change came from both the concerned pharmacists and police. Some pharmacies had been ‘ram-raided’ by pseud runners, who broke in to steal pseudo-ephedrine which was literally worth more than its weight in gold. Individual pharmacists had also been attacked.
‘We’d seen the effects on users—they were paranoid, violent, and a danger on the roads,’ Logan says. ‘And the pseud runners were coming in and harassing pharmacists with their insistent behaviour.
‘I was threatened once. I’d removed the tablets from the shelves, and told a guy I wasn’t able to just sell them to him like Panadol. He tried to get into the dispensary. I told him to leave. After creating some havoc, he ran outside and hid. When the police arrived, he hightailed it.’
Police could see the source of the problem when they’d break open a clandestine meth lab: thousands of blister packs of Sudafed or Codral Night and Day lying around. Also, it had been several years since pseudoephedrine had been identified and controlled in the United States. Australian authorities were able to ignore the cold and flu pills
for only as long as ice seemed to be an overseas problem.
By mid-2004, they could no longer allow pseudoephedrine to be sold so easily. Police held forums around the country to educate and persuade pharmacists.
Wagga Wagga Detective Senior Constable Deborah O’Reilly, who helped organise the early forums, pinpointed the pseud-runner problem: ‘They don’t want to come under notice so they are prepared to travel enormous distances. They are very organised and a group of them might start in Queensland and map out a path, stopping at every town and all going into the chemists they see to buy a packet of tablets.’
In the forums, police told chemists that they had the right to refuse service to anyone. They were also required to record the details of sales.
‘We hope chemists will keep a close watch for these runners and if they see someone acting suspicious, will call police or phone another chemist and check whether the person has been there,’ Detective O’Reilly said.
By 2005, the Pharmacy Guild of Australia had introduced voluntary guidelines. They were:
• Store these products out of reach and out of sight of the public.
• Refer suspicious sales to the pharmacist in charge. Report any details to police.
• Reduce stock of pseudoephedrine/antihistamine to a week’s supply.
• No more than two packets for each customer.
• Product manufacturers to stop incentives to pharmacists to buy big amounts.
In May 2005, four NSW pharmacists were charged with breaching the Poisons and Therapeutic Goods Regulation, which echoed and stiffened the Pharmacy Guild guidelines. The pharmacists, in Beecroft, Waterloo, Epping and Ryde, had been the subject of police surveillance since 2004 for selling up to ten packets of the tablets at a time. They pleaded guilty to the charges. They were the first pharmacists to face police sanctions and deregistration, but as Detective Inspector Paul Willingham of the NSW drug squad said, ‘We’ve got to the stage where we thought we really need to make an example of some of these pharmacists to spread a message across the industry.’
