by Malcolm Knox
But she also knew she wasn’t well. Every morning, the craving—a kind of hollowed-out stomach, and a headache followed by an intense burst of sadness—was what woke her. When she got out of bed, she felt thirty years older, bent by sickness and suffering. By the end of 2005 she was having ‘a very light smoke’ each day before work, preparing a pipe for later, and living for that moment when she could spark up again. The afternoons were a horror show of irritability, paranoia and wild tantrums. Once she caught herself just short of spitting in a workmate’s face. She had been reported for abusive language and had lost concentration in meetings, forgetting what had been said and trying to bluff her way through, to the point where questions were being asked about her fitness for a job she’d been doing competently for nearly ten years. They were saying she was ‘burnt out’, but they didn’t know the half of it. With Peter one night, she suffered an episode of hyperthermia, growing so hot from dancing repetitively to their home karaoke machine that he was on the brink of taking her to hospital.
He cooled her down with ice packs, and she didn’t go to hospital. In fact, Vicki was invisible to the health and justice systems. She was never detected by any kind of research, because she never presented herself for care to a doctor and was never caught in a criminal act and taken to court. Neither Mark nor her parents were among the thousands of Australians who by 2005 were flooding family advice services such as Tony Trimingham’s NSW Family Drug Support Service or the Victorian Family Drug Help helpline asking for support in dealing with their son’s, daughter’s, wife’s or husband’s ice habit. These services recorded a trebling in ice-related calls in the two years up to 2004 and a fivefold increase up to 2007. Ice had become a family problem.
But Vicki Wolf never came out into the open. Her problem was hers alone.
Then, at the end of 2005, she took redundancy from the law firm. She saw it as a smart move, jumping before she was pushed. Not only had she dropped out of the reckoning for a partnership, she was worried she might be sacked. So redundancy came as a lucrative relief.
None of her problems were her fault, of course. Mark says that this has always been the way with Vicki, even when she’s well. Everything is everyone else’s fault. But when things were good for them, he—and she—made a joke of it.
In December 2005 it was no joke. She told her colleagues that she was leaving work to spend more time with her daughters, to repair her marriage, to live healthier. She had been undermined at work—everyone else was wrong about her, she was the only one who told the truth. There were just too many hassles anyway. Her reasons were a contradictory mishmash which nobody listened to or took seriously. If she’d gone to her farewell party, hastily organised at a city pub, she might have made a speech that embarrassed herself and the firm. But she didn’t. The farewell party slipped her mind. She’d vaguely heard about a party that night, but assumed it had nothing to do with her. When she found out later that she’d snubbed her own farewell, ‘I blamed my assistant for not making the purpose of the party clearer to me. She told me to fuck off. I guess she was glad not to be my assistant anymore. She looked like she’d been wanting to tell me to fuck off for quite a long while.’
If the passage of ice through Australian society could be traced like a barium meal going through the X-rayed human body, here’s what it would look like.
It would start with users in their twenties and thirties—not simply the sentinel group of urban injecting drug users, but white-collar middle-class people like Vicki Wolf and Mark Thomas, who first used ice with contacts from south-east Asia, and gay users in the inner cities. It also had a strong foundation in bikie culture. Ice was never simply a blue-collar or a white-collar drug, straight or gay, dance-clubbing or pub-going. It found favour with all socioeconomic and age groups, male and female, urban, suburban and rural, which over time would converge and blur until 70 000 Australians were using it regularly.
But when it was still being used by the first subcultures, in the late 1990s, the next people who knew about it were health workers and law enforcement officials. They in turn passed on their knowledge to researchers like Rebecca McKetin and the other teams at NDARC, who disseminated information in their academic papers.
Wider public awareness didn’t automatically follow. The courts became aware of it, families of ice users were affected by it, and the victims of crimes, general practitioners, lawyers, ambulance officers, and unwitting participants in the pseudoephedrine trade like pharmacists were caught up in its side effects.
The mass media awoke in its usual fitful way, alternately asleep at the wheel and running around in a panic like Henny Penny. Media tend to go to the extremes to make a story, and with ice there were two opposing marginal positions: one, that ice was not a big deal, just speed by a new name; and the other, that ice was the new demon drug, a scourge, an epidemic, a threat to children and the future itself.
Mentions of ice, methamphetamine and methylamphetamine in Australian print media can be measured. Here is how our media woke up:
At the time Dudley Aslett or Matthew Gagalowicz or most of the most serious offenders detailed in these pages were committing their crimes, it was quite possible, even likely, that the average Australian had never heard of crystal methamphetamine. Only in 2006—ironically, when ice use and police seizures had flattened out or might even have been in decline—can it be said that ice denoted more, in the average household, than frozen water.
Inevitably, once the media woke up, so did the politicians. There had been one or two, such as NSW Premier Bob Carr back in 1998, who had displayed some prescience. But the story of ice, politically, is a good case study of how political action follows rather than leads the headlines. Some state premiers, like Peter Beattie in Queensland (with a typically catchily named ‘Ice-Breaker’ strategy) and Steve Bracks in Victoria, were taking action from 2002 and 2003. In Western Australia, where ice hit hardest, it was not until 2005 that the state government stirred itself to effective action. New South Wales only announced a coordinated $400 000 ice strategy, targeting young people, truck drivers, Aboriginal people and the mentally ill, as well as providing clinical guidelines for doctors and emergency departments, in November 2005. Federally, it was 2006 before the then parliamentary secretary for health, Christopher Pyne, made ice his personal hobbyhorse, although in October 2006 his leader, John Howard, rejected calls for a national summit on ice. The following year there was more action on the federal front. The chairman of the peak advisory body, the Australian National Council on Drugs, former Howard government minister Dr John Herron, confessed that ‘we didn’t realise the real problem’, and was soon allocated $150 million to deal specifically with ice. (All up, the Howard government spent $1.3 billion on its drug strategy from 1997 to 2007.) Another federal project appropriated $5.5 million from seized proceeds of crime to be redirected into rehabilitation programs for ice users. Howard himself used a newspaper column in April 2007 to say that the ‘zero tolerance’ approach to heroin, which had ‘worked so well’ in causing the drought, was the template for his government’s approach to ice. Meanwhile, the federal parliament, in the form of Senator Bronwyn Bishop’s standing committee on illicit drugs, made a priority of investigating the crystal methamphetamine problem and attacked any opponents of ‘zero tolerance’ (such as Alex Wodak). Again, political action seemed to be a dollar short and a day late, and, with a federal election approaching, appeared to have been designed to claim credit for what had already been achieved or to stir up outrage against the already condemned.
In this spread of awareness into the living rooms of suburban Australia, however, there was one particular catalyst, which also says much about the way we learn about ourselves in the twenty-first century: this catalyst was the celebrity ice user.
The first Australian celebrity to be caught using ice was a horse. The Tin Man was a West Australian galloper who tested positive for methamphetamine (most likely injected or ingested orally, rather than smoked) after winning a race at A
scot on 28 October 2000. A long stewards’ inquiry ensued, after which The Tin Man’s trainer, Hec McLaren, was suspended.
Jokes aside, methamphetamine first came to prominence in the sporting world through the racing industry. American jockey Chris Antley held several riding records and won two Kentucky Derbies, but also endured long struggles with alcohol and illicit drugs. He became a crystal methamphetamine addict in the late 1990s and died in December 2000. More recently, one of New Zealand’s top jockeys, Lisa Cropp, who was also successful in Australia, tested positive to methamphetamine after a meeting at the Te Rapa course in May 2005.
One of the oldest uses of amphetamines, as we have seen, was as an appetite suppressant. The drug had long been taken by jockeys to help control their weight, so it was not surprising that there would be some realisation of the potential euphoric properties, and hence its use for recreational purposes. In 2005, after horses tested positive to cocaine, trainer Gai Waterhouse said there was a thriving culture in illicit stimulants at some levels of the racing industry.
Celebrity magazines and tabloid television thrive on a drug scandal; in America, crystal meth addiction has had different celebrity figureheads over time. Comedian Richard Pryor, Britney Spears, singer Stacy ‘Fergie’ Ferguson of the Black Eyed Peas, Nicole Ritchie, Lindsay Lohan, Tom Sizemore and musician Rufus Wainwright have been associated with the drug either by being caught or coming out and admitting a habit.
Australia’s first attempt to fill its celebrity-ice deficit was in January 2004, when a contestant on the reality television show The Block, Dani Bacha, was dumped after it emerged that he had been busted in a drug-manufacturing operation involving ecstasy and methamphetamine.
In the fishpond of celebrity, however, Bacha was algae-grade. A better-known ice victim was Jason Bulgarelli, a rugby league footballer with the Canberra Raiders. Bulgarelli’s rise was an unusual story, in that he had come down from Queensland, signed with the Raiders and been rookie of the year in 2003 at the age of 26. In football terms, he was closer to retirement than rookiedom.
While he shot to prominence for his bustling running and hard tackling, Bulgarelli had a dark history. He had been involved in cannabis cultivation in Queensland, and when he’d arrived at the Raiders in late 2002 a routine urine test had found traces of methamphetamine. The club kept this secret, hoping to give him a second chance. He rewarded them with strong seasons in 2003 and 2004, but at the end of 2004 a package arrived at Raiders headquarters addressed to ‘Jason Brow’, from ‘N. Brow’ in Queensland. Officials opened the package and found pills. Initially the police believed they were ecstasy, but when tested they were found to be methamphetamine. Bulgarelli came to the club asking for the package. He was questioned, then sacked. His claim for unfair dismissal came to nothing.
For news editors, celebrity is itself a kind of performance-enhancing substance, boosting otherwise mundane stories into the pages of a newspaper or website or onto the television bulletin. In 2005, a 33-year-old ice user who lit a gas cylinder and left it in an elevator in his apartment block, would have remained below the media radar except for the fact that he had formerly been a manager of the upscale Sydney restaurant Forty One. The man who said he had taken ice since being traumatised by the death of his father, had intended to blow up the Darlinghurst building in which he lived. He also used a hammer to threaten police when they came to arrest him, and told them he would set alight a second gas cylinder and a molotov cocktail if they came any closer.
As a link between celebrity and ice, however, it was a long bow. Likewise, some interest was generated by Anthony William Dow, the Qantas steward who was caught trafficking ice across the country, because he had acted in the television shows All Saints and Love is a Four-Letter Word. But as star factor, these characters were low-wattage. So desperate were Australian media to have a home-grown Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan that in 2006 the Daily Telegraph created its own celebrity ice user. Her name was Sally Brennan.
The Telegraph had been campaigning to bring ice to greater public notice. On 20 October 2006, it repeated a well-worn tactic:
In a terrifying dose of reality, the first dealer approached by The Daily Telegraph on a busy Kings Cross street yesterday offered a hit of the frightening, mind-bending drug for $50.
It was lunchtime in the city, with hundreds of people around, and in just 15 seconds the dealer had secured the drug with a mobile phone call.
He produced 0.1g of ice crystals, which would have delivered an intoxicating array of delusions and, at worst, psychosis, in a seedy alley.
The Daily Telegraph did not buy the drug but the exercise proved how easy it is to get ice in a city where school children are being admitted to hospital suffering from its effects.
It is also abundantly available in outer suburbs and can be delivered to youngsters’ doorsteps.
The dealer yesterday was not shy, announcing after his brief call, ‘I can get six matchstick-sized crystals for $50.’
The drug was presented in a bag with Playboy bunnies on it, which the dealer said was used to differentiate ‘brands of ice’.
But all stories are more effective when personalised, and twenty-year-old Sally Brennan gave the Telegraph’s campaign its needed human face.
In an ‘exclusive interview’ with the Telegraph, published on 20 October, Brennan said she had been ‘out of control’ since first using ice at the age of seventeen. She had been a heroin user, but switched when ice became more easily available.
‘I was smoking heroin with friends one day and I said “fuck it”. Everyone else around me was using it so I may as well see what it’s like,’ she said.
‘It makes you not worry—you don’t care. You don’t worry about your problems, they just get put to one side.’
She supported herself through shoplifting, and was banned from all Westfield shopping centres. Her six-week-old son Jaydan had died from sudden infant death syndrome while in her care and her other son, Jordan, was taken away from her. In October 2006, ‘hallucinating from two days of smoking ice’, Brennan dragged a 49-year-old woman from her car in Miranda in an attempt to steal it. Brennan said she thought she’d seen her son Jordan in a passing taxi and wanted to steal the woman’s car to chase after him. She failed because she couldn’t drive the manual vehicle.
The day the Telegraph interviewed her didn’t turn out well. During the morning, Brennan told the newspaper she dreamt of being ‘a superstar’ in the fashion industry and owning an apartment at Cronulla Beach. Accompanied by her father Brett, she was bailed from Sutherland Local Court over the carjacking charge, and promised to seek treatment. Brett took her to the Gorman House rehab clinic in Darlinghurst that afternoon, but within an hour she had run away, presumably to go and buy more drugs. She met up with her former boyfriend, the father of her children, and woke the next day to read about herself on the Telegraph’s front page. ‘She woke up, saw it and said, “Shit, I’m on the run”,’ said Brennan’s friend with whom she’d stayed the night. ‘I think she’d just been in a daze—the ice does that.’ Later that day Brennan was found at a Surry Hills pub, the Royal Exhibition Hotel, playing poker machines.
While the Telegraph decided Brennan was ‘the face of the ice addiction sweeping Australia’, she remained a marginal figure, her celebrity of the paper’s own making. Brennan typified many ice users, but as a ‘celebrity’ she was unsuitable. She was Aboriginal, from the fringes of society, had been abandoned by her mother as a child, and led a life of addiction and crime which many readers must have assumed was doomed already. To give its planned ‘wake-up call’ to middle-class parents, the media would need a middle-class celebrity ice user, a boy or girl next door.
Brendan Francis McMahon nearly achieved that kind of status.
McMahon was another whose relationship with celebrity was at one removed. When he first appeared in court in October 2005, McMahon was described as having run ‘a financial and mortgage broking company, Meares-McMahon Capital, with Jason Meares,
the brother of fashion designer Jodhi Meares, who was formerly married to James Packer’. It was another long stretch, but a Packer connection would suffice for newsworthiness until details of his crime emerged.
In mid-2005, police had received information that 40 to 50 dead rabbits had been found in a lane behind McMahon’s office in York Street, Sydney. A number of those rabbits had been interfered with sexually. Police traced McMahon through a corporate credit card with which he had bought the rabbits, and found on the card ‘excessive amounts of purchases from pet stores around Sydney’. They obtained a warrant and confronted McMahon, charging him with bestiality and the mutilation deaths of seventeen rabbits and a guinea pig. He had small scratches all over his face.
‘Since the time the investigation involving these offences commenced . . . it has become evident that the injuries to each animal has escalated in violence and ferocity,’ the police fact sheet tendered in evidence said.
McMahon, 36, was also charged with possession of cannabis, but when he gave evidence in court he spoke of having become addicted to crystal methamphetamine. Having dabbled in biblical and Eastern mysticism, McMahon believed he was ‘a tool for the universe’ who had a special ability to communicate with animals. He said he had been tasked with ‘rescuing animals from pet stores’ and creating ‘safe havens’ that were ‘free of predators’. McMahon denied having had sex with any of the animals, and prosecutors dropped the bestiality charge when they were unable to prove that he had penetrated a rabbit with his penis.
The forensic psychiatrist Dr Stephen Allnutt examined McMahon, and found that the New Zealand-born financier was not mentally ill. Dr Allnutt’s report said that McMahon had used cannabis since his teens and had a ‘lifelong love for nature’, but his ‘interest in nature, bird-watching and mysticism became distorted by the amphetamine use’ after McMahon began using ice to give him a ‘mental push’ at work and confidence in tense business negotiations. McMahon had ‘delusional’ beliefs that ‘were further complicated by his interest in mysticism, hence the development of his idea that he could communicate with animals through a third eye’, Dr Allnutt said. ‘At the time he really believed that he had been communicating with the rabbits, and that this interaction with the rabbits was of value to nature. He said that when this happened he would feel a “joy” in his heart.’
