by Malcolm Knox
An even clearer message was initiated by the Pharmacy Guild’s Queensland branch, of which Tim Logan became president. Project STOP was developed through 2005 by Shaun Singleton, the manager of innovation and development for the Queensland branch.
‘By 2005 there had been a lot of bad publicity about pseudoephedrine,’ Singleton says. ‘Pharmacists were contacting us about it being abused. We conducted an education program, doing seminars and putting out written information to pharmacists across the state about potential misuses of pseudoephedrine.
‘Pharmacists had been contacting police by fax or phone when someone suspicious came in asking for pseudoephedrine, but were becoming frustrated by the lack of response. Police would say they’d get back to them, but wouldn’t.
‘Then there’d be stories on A Current Affair or similar programs about pseudoephedrine, and they were blaming pharmacists for either being inattentive or having the wool pulled over their eyes.
‘So pharmacists were solving the problem by either not stocking pseudoephedrine medications at all—20 per cent were not stocking it, which was bad news for genuine sinus pain sufferers—or in other cases they were refusing to make value judgments about people coming into pharmacies. They thought it wasn’t fair to be judging people on their appearance to say whether or not this person was a pseud runner.’
The first version of Project STOP was launched in October 2005. It comprised an internet database that pharmacists could log into and share purchase information, with a search facility.
Queensland pharmacists would ask for the purchaser’s ID, then enter it into their database. Instantly, all other pharmacists in the state had access to that customer’s details and the time of purchase. Of course, the customer could get around this by presenting fake ID. But such are the economics of converting Sudafed to ice, the pseud runner would need dozens, or hundreds, of false IDs to avoid popping up on the pharmacists’ red-flag list.
Simultaneously, federal laws came in to tighten sales.
‘In 2005, packs of 60 to 90 tablets were moved to Schedule IV—prescription-only medicine,’ Tim Logan says. ‘In January 2006, pseudoephedrine packs of 12 tablets were changed from Schedule II (which can only be sold while a pharmacist is available, that is, not in supermarkets) to Schedule III (the pharmacist must be involved in the sale). You can’t put all pseudoephedrine onto Schedule IV—the symptoms are too common, and it would be too great a load on the federal government funding.’
Federal laws also threw new restrictions on the legal importation of pseudoephedrine-containing medications. Some, such as Dr Bill Kingswell, the head of the Queensland government’s Gold Coast mental health unit, said laws should go further and ban pseudoephedrine outright. ‘It’s still profitable for a person to drive from chemist to chemist buying pseudoephedrine,’ Dr Kingswell said in 2006. ‘There is a reasonable body of evidence that if you ban pseudoephedrine you decimate the methamphetamine market.’ By 2007, the federal parliamentary secretary for health, Christopher Pyne, echoed Kingswell’s call for a ban on all pseudoephedrine products. The idea was opposed by some unlikely bedfellows: the Pharmacy Guild and the NSW Business Chamber said a ban on pseudoephedrine would increase the number of days lost nationally to sickness, and Dr Alex Wodak criticised Pyne’s call as ‘gesture politics’ with ‘a huge economic cost’.
Project STOP, which was a world first, had immediate benefits for Queensland. According to the Australian Crime Commission, while clandestine lab seizures rose in all other states from 2005 to 2007, they dropped by 23 per cent in Queensland. Ram-raids of pharmacies virtually ceased.
The benefit for pharmacists was twofold—they could now sell what Singleton calls ‘the ultimate weapon against common sinus pain’ without having to guess whether the purchaser was going to misuse it, and they could avoid harassment.
‘It’s been tremendous in my pharmacy,’ Logan says. ‘It’s made our work environment much safer. In my experience, if pseud runners realise they can’t buy it, they just give up and go away.’
In mid-2007, the federal government funded a national rollout for Project STOP, and it was becoming the model for pseudoephedrine control in several US states.
The irony, says Tim Logan, is that Project STOP uses the same communications technology that gave crystal meth manufacturing its great leg-up a decade ago. ‘Ice really arrived with the start of the internet, by giving people access to recipes. Now, however, it’s the internet that is helping us to stop it spreading.’
No fightback against a problem of this scale can have instantaneous results, however. Project STOP arrived too late to save Banjo Band.
By early 2004, New Zealander Darren Jason Blackburn’s relationship with his older ‘mentor’ and drinking buddy, Graham ‘Banjo’ Band, had declined into its terminal phase. Blackburn had had a terrible life, as an unmedicated schizophrenic, an unemployable alcoholic, a failed husband and an ice user, yet Band was always there for him, ready to offer him accommodation or a meal. But primarily Band was there to drink with him.
Since 2001, Blackburn and his girlfriend, Lyn Henry, had been living on and off with Band. Sometimes they’d have a fight and the couple would move out. Band was mainly a drinker, while Blackburn was now dabbling in ecstasy, heroin, Rohypnol, Valium and crystal meth as well as his staples of cheap wine and cannabis.
According to accounts given by Blackburn and Henry at the subsequent trial, at one point they stayed with Band for a year, sleeping on the living room floor while Banjo occupied the single bedroom of his public housing flat at 127 Gordon Street, Footscray. Every night, Band and Blackburn would binge, with the younger man frequently passing out on the floor.
While they were all living in the flat, Henry fell pregnant. She and Blackburn went out to celebrate. As usual, Blackburn drank too much, and when they returned to the flat he fell unconscious on the couch. While Blackburn slept, Graham Band forced himself onto Henry and raped her. Upset and terrified, she didn’t tell Blackburn until two weeks later, after Band had tried to rape her again.
When she told Blackburn, he exploded, smashing Band, who was then 62 years old. There followed—born from desperation and the raging illogic of their lives—a kind of reconciliation, and the couple remained in Band’s flat until Henry was five months pregnant. Then the couple moved to Western Lodge, just up Gordon Street, for two and a half months. Shortly before Henry was due to deliver, she and Blackburn moved to a unit in Somerset Drive, Sunshine. It was there that Blackburn’s third child, Summa, was born.
Things were finally looking up for Darren Blackburn. He was out of Banjo’s flat. He now had a job as a sheet metal worker at an air-conditioning company. Maybe he could break out of the cycle that had had a grip on him since his childhood.
But he never slowed his drinking, and he was now fully into heroin, ice and other drugs. By early 2004 his relationship with Henry finally broke down. He was dangerous to Lyn and a poor father to Summa.
When he moved out, Blackburn went where he always went: back to his ‘uncle’, Banjo Band. He slept either on Band’s floor or in another flat in the same housing commission block, occupied by a tenant named David Armstrong. Band also had a nephew, Tasman ‘Taz’ O’Connor, who stayed with either Band or Armstrong. One of O’Connor’s most prized possessions was a replica samurai sword.
On 31 January, Blackburn was drinking with O’Connor. He told him about Band having raped Lyn Henry. They worked themselves up into a revenge fantasy and went to confront Band in his unit, where they gave him a solid thrashing. The 62-year-old ended up with bruises, lumps and cuts to the front and back of his head, and went to Western General Hospital for medical attention.
Whatever his other sins, Band was no squealer. In the hospital, he was interviewed by Victorian police constables Rooney and Gardiner.
After Band said he had been attacked from behind and hadn’t seen who hit him, Constable Rooney asked: ‘Are you telling us everything, Graham? Something seems to be missing.’
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bsp; ‘I’m telling you all I know,’ Band said.
Constable Gardiner said: ‘Graham, I think you might know who assaulted you. Is that the case?’
‘No.’
‘Did anyone else come out of the flats when it happened?’
‘No, I don’t squeal,’ Band said. ‘I’ve been hit heaps.’
‘Did you call out or yell when you got hit?’ Rooney asked.
‘No.’
‘Graham,’ Rooney said, ‘if you’re worried or someone is intimidating you, you can tell us, we can help you.’
‘I don’t know,’ Band rasped. ‘I told you.’
‘I think your nephew [O’Connor] did this to you,’ Rooney said. ‘Is that the case?’
‘You’re wrong, mate.’
Meanwhile, Blackburn had some more to drink in Armstrong’s flat that afternoon. Lyn Henry showed up, and Blackburn told her that he and Taz O’Connor had beaten up Band. Blackburn slept that night in Armstrong’s flat, and the next morning went to a nearby pub, the Albert Hotel, to start drinking. Late in the morning he bought three takeaway bottles of beer and carried them back to Gordon Street.
O’Connor, who had spent the night in Band’s flat, met Blackburn for another drink. It seemed that the two younger men weren’t satisfied with merely having bashed Band the day before. Around lunchtime, Blackburn and O’Connor went to Band’s flat, wishing to return to the matter of the rapes. All he wanted, Blackburn said, was for Band to go with him to Henry and apologise to her.
‘Fuck the bitch,’ Band said.
Those might have been Graham Band’s last coherent words. His defiance set off Blackburn, who started punching the old man, knocking him to the floor. Blackburn claims that O’Connor was also present, and also hit Band, but O’Connor denied this, saying he was outside the flat throughout the killing. Band was struck repeatedly with the samurai sword.
‘Then,’ Blackburn would later tell police, ‘he was just completely fucked and rooted. So I picked him up and threw him on his bed. He was choking on . . . on his blood and that, and gasping.’
In the mayhem that followed—blood pouring out of Band’s mouth as he gurgled for help—Blackburn, still enraged, said he was ‘sick of fucking listening to him . . . his choking and shit on his—whatever he’s choking on. His gasping was just—the noise was just unreal.’
Maddened by the sound, Blackburn picked up a pillow and put it over Band’s face. He said he had no intention of killing Band, ‘just shutting him up’. Band didn’t struggle, and passed out.
A short time later, O’Connor came into the bedroom and checked Band’s pulse. The old man was dead. O’Connor and Blackburn fled to Armstrong’s unit and called Lyn Henry in a panic, asking her to come over. Eventually someone called 000, but when the fire brigade and ambulance officers arrived, Band was beyond saving.
He had been killed by one of seven separate stab wounds penetrating his chest and heart. There was blood spattered throughout his flat, and a bloody mark on the ceiling from where the samurai sword had been dragged across it.
In the following two and a half years, Blackburn would plead guilty to murder, then withdraw that plea. He was kept in jail awaiting trial while Tasman O’Connor received a not guilty verdict. O’Connor denied having even been in the flat when Band was murdered. The Crown had relied on David Armstrong as a witness, but Armstrong proved less than reliable. Finally, in 2006, Blackburn pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
At his sentencing hearing, a battery of psychiatrists gave evidence on Darren Blackburn’s mental impairments. IQ tests placed him in the bottom 12 per cent of the population. His paranoid schizophrenia was real, and could be treated with medication. His consumption of drugs and alcohol contributed to his impairment, and his use of ice in particular took away his ability to control his impulses. He was profoundly depressed, telling a medical examiner that he did not like reality because ‘it’s depressing . . . I don’t want to be here, there’s nothing for me . . . the world seems fucked, there’s no reason I should be here.’ His response to depression had always been to do the thing that would make him feel better, then worse. By the time of Band’s death, that circular routine involved ice.
The judges of the Victorian Supreme Court took into account Blackburn’s state of mind, but decided that he was still able to tell the difference between right and wrong when he attacked Band. Moreover, the court regarded him as a danger to the community. It sentenced him to nine years in jail, with a non-parole period of six years.
For Beaver Hudson, the turning point came with a patient he saw at St Vincent’s in 2004. The ‘Incredible Hulks’ and other ‘meth freaks’, as they were now nicknamed, were flowing through the hospital at an ever-greater rate—meth-related admissions rising from 200 to 1600 per year between 1999 and 2004—and with ever-stranger stories.
‘A 24-year-old man had been using it for weeks on end, and he was hearing voices telling him his wife was having an affair. So he began using a webcam to spy on her,’ Hudson recalls.
St Vincent’s emergency care director Gordian Fulde was shocked, telling reporters at the time: ‘I have been emergency department director here for 25 years and nothing has scared me as much as these people. We see people who are totally disinhibited, totally violent and out of control.’
The problem was not isolated to inner-city Sydney hospitals like St Vincent’s. NDARC research published in the Medical Journal of Australia showed that national hospital databases recorded a fivefold upswing in drug-induced psychotic episodes between 1999 and 2004. Across the nation, 3190 meth users were taken to hospital for mental and behaviour disorders in the years 2003 and 2004. Demographically, the main driver of the increase was ice being injected by older users, in their thirties. A study released simultaneously, by Royal Perth Hospital’s registrar in emergency medicine, Suzanne Gray, found that 20 per cent of all amphetamine-related presentations at the hospital had required police assistance. ‘A third of patients required sedation, which correlated with a high pre-hospital, nursing, medical and security load to manage these patients safely,’ Dr Gray said. Gordian Fulde said: ‘The fact that Perth Hospital is having the same problem that we are in the east underscores that it really is a problem Australia-wide.’
At St Vincent’s, Beaver Hudson had been observing the change up close—‘The long-term users were very hard to differentiate from paranoid schizophrenics. The bad dental care, the terrible skin, the frightening ageing effects, are all similar’—but there was one patient who stood out.
‘There was a woman presenting here, totally manic. We thought she had a bipolar disorder. She was scattered. She was very concerned about her partner. She said she’d broken up with him because he was in a bikie gang. She’d heard a click on the phone when she was using it, and was sure it was bugged. She wouldn’t use her mobile. She got to the point where she was so scared she’d only make phone calls from a call box on the street corner. She said when she looked up from the call box, she saw someone in an apartment taking photographs of her.
‘I was thinking, “This poor woman, being menaced by a bikie gang” . . . She said she’d spent $25 000 having her apartment swept for bugs. I was sucked in.’
Then one day, Hudson asked her, ‘How much speed do you use?’
The patient said, ‘A little bit now and then.’
‘Do you inject?’
She said, ‘Not much. About two or three times a day.’
Hudson said the penny dropped. ‘I thought, Oh my god, she’s not bipolar, she’s having another form of speed psychosis I haven’t seen before. She was articulate, rational, credible. Her delusion was totally systematised. I was sucked in. But this was what it was doing to people.’
Health workers at St Vincent’s were not alone in making such observations. In the Victorian health system, patients asking to be treated for methamphetamine-related disorders doubled between 2001 and 2004. A psychiatrist at Royal Perth Hospital, Dr Nigel Armstrong, said his hospital’s emergency department had b
ecome a ‘de facto psychiatric clinic’, requiring extra psychiatric staff. This was on top of the police involvement noted at the same hospital by Suzanne Gray. ‘Clinically, we see a lot of people in [emergency] with drug-induced pathology and the ones that give us the most grief are those with amphetamine-induced psychoses because we have to find [secure] beds for them,’ Armstrong said.
North of Sydney, violent patients were putting hospital staff at risk. In four Hunter region hospitals in 2005, there were 94 aggressive incidents, including 50 assaults, 54 cases involving verbal aggression and fourteen bullying or intimidation. On 32 occasions, a staff member had needed to press an alarm signifying a ‘code black’ emergency, where help was needed to subdue a patient.
John Hunter Hospital clinical services and nursing director Chris Kewley said that staff had to deal with potentially aggressive patients on drugs such as ice on a daily basis.
‘There is absolutely no doubt that the violence we experience through the front door is related largely to the social issues, such as the high use of substances, ice and the other common drugs out there,’ he said.
At St Vincent’s, Hudson had long been concerned about violence against staff, and frustrated at the restrictions on staff either protecting themselves or otherwise improving the situation.
‘We couldn’t punch back,’ he says, almost ruefully. ‘And we can’t put up a Closed sign. But we could reject them from admission, or make them wait, or deny them pain relief. That turned out to be the way.’
St Vincent’s decided on a radical policy of zero tolerance.
‘Rather than medicalise that [violent] behaviour, we’d ask for the police to come,’ Hudson says. ‘If people were being violent, that was a police problem. It got around in the community that if you went to St Vincent’s and acted that way, you were handed to the police. People don’t like the men in blue. They want help, but if they realised they were going to be strong-armed out, they started to behave a bit better.’
