by Malcolm Knox
McMahon had told Dr Allnutt about three ‘significant’ experiences during the year or so when he had been smoking ice. Twice, in the outback, birds had followed his truck and communicated with him, and once he’d seen a cloud shaped like a wedgetail eagle.
‘During the period that he had these experiences he had also become contemplative about contributing more to nature,’ Dr Allnutt said.
McMahon, Dr Allnutt believed, had become ‘floridly psychotic’ during his ice use. He had asked Dr Allnutt: ‘I wonder if I made a mistake, because I never actually asked the rabbits if I could kill them.’
Dr Allnutt told the court:
I believe he was doing it in a deluded mental state in the belief that what he was doing was right.
He felt justified in doing something that he saw as morally right because he was delusional.
That was the degree of distortion of his capacity to reason about rightful and wrongful, significantly compromised by his delusional belief that he was placed on the earth for a special purpose and that purpose was to free the animals.
The Crown argued that McMahon’s mental state was self-induced, and the court agreed, sentencing him to sixteen months in jail with a twelve-month non-parole period. Magistrate Ian Barnett said: ‘There is community outrage at this matter and someone should not be allowed to commit such offences of aggravated cruelty upon animals and then say, “Well, I was using ice at the time. I have been taking cannabis for most of my life”.’
McMahon, however, believed he would not have committed his crimes without the influence of ice, and later his conviction was overturned by the District Court on technical grounds.
Outside the District Court, McMahon set himself up as a spokesman warning the public of the perils of ice: ‘If you use ice you’ll end up either in a mental institution, or in jail or dead,’ he said.
‘Anybody who hands someone an ice pipe and offers them the drug is not a friend of the person.
‘It always surprised me that you could get ice pipes in tobacconists and the state government collects GST on that . . . Ice is a problem that the government can fix.
‘Once you start playing around with the endocrine system there’s no turning back. When you’re addicted to it, it’s like the little entity in your brain saying, you know: “Smoke me, smoke me.”’
McMahon, who by his release in 2006 was drug-free and had no pets other than a family dog, could not remember the details of what he had done.
‘The weird thing is to look back and ask yourself why. There really are no valid reasons . . . I think I was burnt out and self-medicating. ‘When you experience psychosis and then you come out of psychosis you don’t really remember very much at all. It’s like it never happened or it happened to another person.’
(Following outrage over the McMahon case, New South Wales introduced tougher laws against animal cruelty. The first person convicted under them was also an ice user. Stephen John Clancy, of Blackett in western Sydney, had smoked ice before becoming angry with his pet kitten, Puddy, when she defecated in his house. Clancy, 45, had rubbed Puddy’s face in her faeces, thrown her out the back door, and kicked her before throwing her into a bin. He pleaded guilty to animal cruelty, and was banned from owning a pet again.)
Brendan McMahon had achieved what Dudley Aslett, Damien Peters, Mohammed Kerbatieh and the other offenders mentioned in these pages had failed to do: he had brought ice onto the front pages. This was due to a number of factors, not least of which was the strange horror of his crimes. But the undeniable currency, in media terms, of Brendan McMahon was that he was a well-paid financier with connections to the Packer family. He was middle class and prosperous. And ice had brought him undone. But it wasn’t until early 2007 that the Australian media, at least, had the celebrity factor it had been craving.
Ben Cousins, the Australian Rules footballer from Perth, is mentioned in connection with ice more than any other Australian. Cousins, who was suspended from the West Coast Eagles and later sacked because of drug use, was a hero to children and therefore a poster boy for the evils of drugs. He was friends with bikies and criminal underworld figures, and his career went off the rails when he could not control his drug habit. His friend, former Eagles star Chris Mainwaring, died in late 2007 from the toxicity of a number of legal and illegal drugs. Later, Cousins was reported to suffer an episode of severe cocaine intoxication while on holidays in Los Angeles.
Yet Cousins did not speak publicly about ice, or even admit that it was the drug with which he had his greatest problems. Indeed, Cousins didn’t admit to much at all. It was through ‘sources’ that Cousins was connected to ice, at a time when the drug was at the front of the public mind. Cousins’s drug use appears to be a complex of ice, cocaine, alcohol and other substances, but until more is known about his use patterns, he remains a symbolic rather than instructive example of the perils of ice. Because of his fame, Cousins levered open a long-running public debate about ice. That is what fame does, and what the media had been looking for to refresh a story that had been bubbling along at a lower level of interest. It is largely thanks to Cousins that the number of times ice was mentioned in the media tripled in 2007.
But due to the player’s lack of candour, the Cousins–ice story is incomplete. A more useful, and revealing, story of a prominent person falling for the drug was told by Phil Jamieson.
Jamieson’s ice problem first received a public airing on 17 February 2007, when the Daily Telegraph revealed that he had been in an Odyssey House detoxification unit in Sydney. Jamieson, the frontman and songwriter for the band Grinspoon, had admitted himself for treatment. He entered a six-week rehab program at a time when his wife Julie Fitzgerald was eight months pregnant with their second child.
Grinspoon had never hidden their liking for drugs. They were named after the Harvard Medical School professor and marijuana supporter Dr Lester Grinspoon, and their songs included a paean to drugs called ‘Chemical Heart’. More revealing was the name of the album they were recording when Jamieson went into treatment: Alibis and Other Lies.
By the middle of 2007, when his daughter Evita had been born and the album was ready for release, Jamieson was giving interviews about his experience with ice. He was most candid with Andrew Denton on ABC-TV’s Enough Rope.
Jamieson told Denton how he’d grown up in Hornsby, north of Sydney, singing in a travelling Christian rock band called Good Grief with his Baptist parents. They moved to Bourke, where Jamieson’s father built a mud-brick house, and joined the charismatic Cornerstone Church. Banned from watching films by his strict parents, Jamieson built a make-believe video shop out of pieces of wood, ‘renting out’ his ‘videos’ to his siblings.
His parents were also teetotallers. Jamieson’s first taste of alcohol was from a half-case of warm VB beer, an unwanted gift that his father had shoved in the laundry. Soon, he said, he was trying all kinds of liquor surreptitiously. The family moved to Lismore and Jamieson first tried marijuana at fifteen: ‘That was really, really fun for about ten years.
‘Unbeknownst to me all the popular sport/surfing kids at school were all smoking pot, like it was part of the thing. So once I became able to smoke pot then I was kind of a little bit more accepted . . .’
Jamieson formed Grinspoon with some Lismore friends, and they won the Triple J Unearthed contest in 1995 after hocking his guitar to pay for their demo tape. They had been playing together for about two months. After winning Unearthed, they toured regional Australia for the best part of two years. Jamieson was nineteen when they started; his bandmates were mostly older.
‘It’s really hard to remember exactly how full-on it got, but we had a lot of fun. It wasn’t necessarily all bad, and we still delivered in playing good shows. So um . . . I don’t know, lots of drugs really. Lots of beer; lots of alcohol. ’Cos you get paid in alcohol.’
For Jamieson, drugs and alcohol weren’t necessarily a way of switching off. He saw the potential for using an altered state as inspiration.<
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‘Whenever I’d indulge or do anything like that, I’d always want to get a song out of it. I was quite particular about this. So I’d get kind of really bent or whatever, and then go, “Oh, I’ve got to do something with this x-amount of dollars we spent on this, ’cos otherwise what’s the point of doing it?” It was kind of the way I’d always thought about things, ’cos a lot of my heroes in the past had written under certain substances and I was just like, let’s use this for its advantages or try to, at least, explore what we can make out of this.’
The band toured America, where Jamieson disgraced himself more than once under the influence of alcohol and drugs, then came back to Australia to write their album Easy, mostly in a marijuana haze.
Drug users, as has been pointed out, settle over time on their favourites. Jamieson liked marijuana, but among harder drugs he preferred stimulants. During the late 1990s he developed a distaste for ecstasy, and a clear predilection for cocaine.
‘Cocaine gave me self-confidence; gave me the ability to write a tune and have a bit of a safety net so I could write and think it’s great, whether it was crap or not, and just think, “Well, if I wake up in the morning and it is bad, then I was high so it doesn’t matter.” So the coke gave me an ability to [do that] and also it’s a party drug, so it’s very social and a lot of people were using it at the time, so it was a social thing as well.’
He met Julie in 2002, by which time Grinspoon were travelling well, with a solid Australian audience. By 2004 Julie was pregnant with their first daughter, and Jamieson tried ice while staying in Melbourne. It was the same year, as we have seen, that thousands of other Australians were also trying it for the first time.
‘I’d moved to Melbourne and around that time someone offered me some crystal and it was pretty good.’
His friend called it ‘pookey’, and Jamieson found that it dovetailed perfectly with his ‘Protestant drug ethic’ of getting high and writing songs.
Jamieson found that pookey was Melbourne’s substitute for cocaine.
‘Melbourne was different in its drug-taking culture to Sydney, I found. There was very little cocaine there, and if it was, it was horribly overpriced and pretty bad but they had more kind of amphetamine-style drugs.’
Crystal made him ‘go fast’, heightening his concentration levels. He wrote in a frenzy, up to four songs a night. Within two years, he was taking crystal every day and needed it, he said, to ‘feel normal’. Yet it wasn’t accepted among many of his social circle when he moved back to Sydney, so he retreated into doing it on his own, isolating himself from his partner and band. His routine was to stay awake for four days working in his home studio, then crash for two, before starting again. He lied to Julie and covered up after himself—becoming, in her words, ‘somebody I just didn’t know anymore’.
Jamieson said he had become a ‘monster’ of obsession: ‘I’d just be obsessed with writing, just trying to write better songs, and then I figured that I was just using the songs as an excuse to take more drugs.’
He became morbidly paranoid: ‘I’d be paranoid about walking, being in public, going to the bank, going to buy food, going to the corner shop, driving. Everything . . . I’d become a junkie. It was horrible. It’d actually beaten me. I’d used up all my chips.’
Jamieson had an affair, and also withdrew from his non-ice-using bandmates, thinking ‘I was a lot better than them’.
‘Rock bottom’, Jamieson said, was stealing from the band and then having to tell them.
‘I don’t think any of my family or even Julie realised how bad it had gotten . . . I was good at lying, really good at lying, so I hocked a guitar and got rid of stuff and stole money from other people’s accounts and yeah, it was all pretty dodgy.’
Julie left him and went to live with her parents in Queensland; his habit worsened, until he confessed everything to her. She returned and in December 2006 they began to talk about counselling—marriage, not drug, counselling.
Jamieson recalled a meeting they had with the counsellor, when he revealed his drug problem.
‘I don’t know anything about this,’ the counsellor said. ‘Are you high now?’
‘Yep.’
‘What do you want me to do about this? I think you need rehab.’
‘OK,’ Jamieson replied. ‘How do I do that?’
‘I don’t know.’
For five days in February 2007, Jamieson detoxed at Odyssey House in Minto. But then came the Daily Telegraph story and the hellfire of public exposure. ‘On the news that night, when I’m in rehab and I really don’t know many people there, there’s two TVs. One TV in the big room, a little TV in the little recreation room. Channel 7 had “From Chemical Heart to Chemical Dependency”. You know, big story, and MySpace stuff and how I was leaving disturbing messages and I couldn’t believe it was actually me . . . Yeah, it was pretty strange.’
The rehab routine was a numbing grind of group therapy and household chores. ‘Like Big Brother but with really ugly people,’ Jamieson joked. Later, when he left rehab, he was at the supermarket with his daughter and people would ask, ‘How’s the ice going?’ Paranoia set in again, almost as bad as when he was on the drug, and tempted him to relapse. On top of that, he believed the media wanted him to relapse.
In the second half of 2007, Grinspoon went touring again. Jamieson, beset by anxiety and paranoia, fought off temptation but still struggled to write songs.
‘Immediately I’ll start a song and get maybe a minute and a half in [and think] that’s shit. I start again, and just can’t actually will myself to finish a song yet.’
Jamieson’s greatest fear, after fifteen years of taking drugs, was that he wouldn’t like himself straight and sober—wouldn’t find himself interesting. That recovery of self, by the end of 2007, was still a work in progress.
Paul Hogan once said that being rich and famous was all right, but being poor and famous was pure hell. Phil Jamieson was almost broke when he came out as a crystal meth addict, and he had the integrity not to sell his confession to a commercial enterprise. He didn’t have the material means to insulate himself from the public gaze, and so the bogey of paranoia would follow him around.
Yet although much of Jamieson’s addiction to crystal had a common tawdriness to it, in the eyes of the world celebrity lacquers a kind of protective gloss onto the individual. The narrative of Jamieson would have an uptilted ending, for the time being at least.
Yet just as ice was beginning to dominate the headlines, something was changing under the surface. In 2007, the researchers at NDARC discovered that the overall use of methamphetamines, and of ice in particular, among injecting drug users was declining for the first time since 1996. The number of daily users was down (6 per cent to 5 per cent), as was the number who had used it in the previous six months (57 per cent to 47 per cent). The percentage who nominated meth as their drug of first choice fell from 23 per cent to 21 per cent. This decline was consistent across all states. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, meanwhile, measuring the entire population, had methamphetamine use steady at around 4 per cent.
What, then, was the sentinel group trying to tell us? It was too soon to say. There were previous years (2002 and 2005) when a slight decline in ice use preceded a jump, the next year, to a new peak.
But we could say what the apparent decline was not telling us. The fall was not due to an interruption of supply. Availability, price and purity of crystal meth remained steady. There was no ‘ice drought’ pushing users away.
Ice use, among injectors, has always been best viewed in the context of the availability of other drugs. Even when recent ice use was up to 70 per cent among drug injectors, only 20 to 25 per cent said it was their favourite drug. They were blasting ice because their favourite—usually heroin—was not available. Interestingly, then, the 2007 NDARC Illicit Drug Reporting System bulletin indicated that heroin was again becoming more easily available, and junkies were gravitating back towards it. There was also
an uptick in the use of heroin alternatives like morphine and ‘homebake heroin’. Among injecting drug users, there can be a zero-sum game at play, and ice’s popularity or decline is only a counterweight to heroin’s.
Government officials, both state and federal, claimed some credit for the decline in ice use, pointing to graphic television and print advertising campaigns showing the dark side of crystal meth. Louisa Degenhardt, the NDARC lead researcher, said that without a drop in availability or purity or a rise in price, the best explanation of ice’s falling popularity would be its growing stigma as a dangerous drug.
A drug’s reputation, both good and bad, flows from many places. It defies belief that an advertising campaign can change attitudes. The year the frightening ice ads appeared, 2007, the federal government spent more than $100 million on promoting the virtues of WorkChoices. The results of the 2007 election suggest that the advertising made no impact.
I have argued throughout this book that the true source of a drug’s reputation is word of mouth. Drug users talk about other drug users. Matthew Gagalowicz had friends who heard about what he’d done, and who would consequently never touch ice with a bargepole. And they would tell others. All of the terrible crimes or personal collapses detailed in these pages are not stories that exist in isolation. Every victim has acquaintances, and every disaster ripples outwards. If there can be any benefit in an atrocity such as what CB and IM did to Garry Sansom, it would be that other ice users in the Newcastle area heard about it, and decided that if ice made you that ‘scattered’, then it was not the drug for them.
