by Malcolm Knox
‘There are lots of reasons for this,’ she says. ‘They’re reluctant to attend treatment programs that are geared for opiate users. They don’t see themselves as having that kind of hard-drug problem, and don’t want to be hanging around waiting rooms with heroin users. Also, they tend to want a response on the same day, immediately, and if we don’t give them that we lose them.’
The most effective treatment, when it happens, is a combination of cognitive behaviour therapy and drug Modafinil, which is still being trialled. Dr Lee says Modafinil is a drug to counter narcolepsy, a ‘wakefulness-promoting drug’; ‘It lifts the user’s mood during withdrawal,’ she says, ‘though we don’t know exactly how it works.’
Dr Lee thinks the time bomb on methamphetamine use is not psychosis but depression. ‘Only 10 percent of users experience psychosis, but 60 to 80 percent experience depression,’ she says. ‘It’s a quiet disorder, and the user often doesn’t link it to drug use, especially when they’ve stopped. But a debilitating depression can go on for years and years.’
In 2007, the Australian Federal Police devised a Drug Harm Index showing the economic impact of drugs on the country. The DHI measures, retrospectively, costs of violent and nonviolent crime, the drain on police resources and ambulance and hospital services, and the burden on courts and prisons.
Per kilogram produced, heroin is still the most expensive, costing the country $550 000. This has halved since 2003.
Methamphetamine costs Australia $284 000 per kilo, the DHI found. In 2003, its cost was $80 000 a kilo. (The effects of cannabis, incidentally, cost the public $13 000 a kilo.)
The AFP assistant commissioner Mike Phelan told a parliamentary committee that the DHI for methamphetamine had trebled because of ‘the increased number of interactions with the health system, people having to go to hospital, and it’s also the crime that goes with that—drug-taking, the burglaries, break-ins.’ There was also the cost of road accidents, lost work days and family break-ups.
The DHI is one attempt to quantify the unquantifiable but longest-lasting and truest cost of a drug. How do you assess the price that is paid by families when one member becomes an ice user? How do you measure the effect on the thousands of children growing up in houses where their parents are addicted to a drug? In 2007, according to a National Council on Drugs study, there were an estimated 14 000 children whose parents used crystal meth at least once a month. How can the impact ever be quantified?
There is, at the very least, a body count. Users who have committed serious crimes have had their lives depleted by years in jail. Damien Peters, Mohammed Kerbatieh, Dudley Aslett and his acolytes, Dimitrios Kyriakidis, Lindsay Hearn, Sally Brennan, Matthew Gagalowicz, Darren Blackburn, Novica Jakimov, Ersen Cicekdag, David Khuu, Justin De Gruchy, Canan Eken, Todd Bookham and the fatal young friends, IM and CB in Newcastle and B and C in Collie, have gone to jail after what they did on ice, some for the rest of their lives. There are too many to count, and they multiply when the imprisoned traffickers and manufacturers are added in.
Australia’s prisons bear a certain burden, as do the mental health facilities that have looked after the ‘innocent criminals’ such as Trent Jennings and Andrew Kastrappis.
Among their victims, life will never be the same, due to a purely random crossing of paths with ice. The Marlows of the Central Coast pharmacy, whom I interviewed in 2007, were still traumatised. Jennifer Marlow could not recall Dudley Aslett’s attack in detail, and her husband Paul said they had altered their routine of locking up the newsagency at night because of Jennifer’s ongoing fear. Peter Sutherland of the Tuggerah NAB, Constable Elizabeth Roth, Karen Fairbairn, Andrew Hennessey and John Pestana of the West Australian rest stop, unnamed and uncountable victims of sexual attacks—these people must live with their memories of terror springing out of nowhere. Emad Youssef, Giuseppe Vitale, Kelly Hodge, Andre Akai, Graham Band, Eliza Davis and many others didn’t survive the ice age. Garry Sansom, Ricky Smith and Gavin Atkin were involved in the drug trade, but nobody except their killers could ever conceive of the idea that they deserved to die or that their families deserved to go on living with such painful memories. Somewhere there is a memorial for the deceased victims of ice-related violence, and it is one that stretches out to the horizon and beyond.
When I visited Beaver Hudson at the St Vincent’s emergency department in June 2007, he talked about how the ice problem seemed to have plateaued, or even improved. Leading up to the Australian Amphetamines Conference in September 2006, the hospital had had a 36 per cent increase in meth presentations on the previous year, ‘but since then,’ he said, ‘it seems to be less.’
He was very hesitant, however, to form a conclusion that people were using less.
‘It could be that they’re still using but are not coming into hospital. Some might be realising what it does to them and stopping, but there are a lot of others, long-term users, who are staying at home and using, they’re too paranoid even to go outside. And there are others who are in jail or in psych units. You just don’t know.’
But if overall use is declining, Hudson is one of many experienced workers and researchers who say that the problems with long-term users are getting worse. He recalls a man who came to the emergency department in 2007, just a few weeks before our interview.
‘He was a big boy, very fit, about 25, solidly built, and incoherent, raving, hallucinating. He was scary. The police brought him in handcuffed. We put him on a trauma bed, but his hands were cuffed behind his back which made things difficult for sedating him. We gave him 40 milligrams of medazelam in four lots of 10 milligrams; 10 milligrams would put a normal person to sleep for six to seven hours. We gave him 40 milligrams, and still needed mechanical restraints and six or seven people holding him down. So we gave him 300 milligrams of IV Valium. We were scared that we were giving him so many sedatives we were going to kill him. He was still out of control. So we gave him Butrenorphine, an anti-psychotic. Ten milligrams would put me asleep for ten to twelve hours, and then I’d be very drowsy the next day. We gave him 60 milligrams. Then we gave him more anti-psychotic—Clopixol Acuphase—150 milligrams.
‘Then we moved him to the mental health unit. Ninety minutes later he climbed a seven-foot fence and ran away. The following day he was back in. He’d fallen asleep in a park and was suffering the effects of being out in the cold.’
The ‘Incredible Hulks’, it seems, just keep coming in. The build-up of harm inside the human brain due to methamphetamine use is still in the process of being understood. For someone like Hudson, on the frontline, that process is in daily flux.
Our interview was ultimately interrupted by the arrival of police officers with a patient who was guided into a PECC room: a twenty-year-old ice user who, believing he had aliens in his stomach, had just jumped out of the window of his second-floor flat and landed in the bushes below. He had been up on ice for more days than he could recall. This was just before midday on a Wednesday in the middle of winter.
Paul Bennett, the Maori surfer who fell into an ice addiction and pulled himself out of it by 1997, has been living in New Zealand for the past decade. He has devoted himself to naturopathic remedies, a healthy diet and the practice of ‘chi gong’, a regime of exercises similar to tai chi. He wrote and self-published a book about his experiences, Walking the Taniwha, and a New Zealand crew made a television documentary about him. He works educating young people about drugs, seeing himself as a living, breathing cautionary tale. He turned 50 in 2007. A doctor described him, considering the amount of illicit drugs he had taken, as a ‘medical miracle’.
Paul doesn’t believe ice is on the way out.
‘My connections tell me that it’s as much around as it ever was,’ he says. ‘It’s just gone underground. The guys who are known to take it have been banned from nightclubs, so they just stay in each other’s place and do ice. It’s still around, for sure. It’s not about to disappear.’
Vicki Wolf and Mark Thomas are back together, w
ith their daughters. After she returned from Queensland they moved home to Melbourne, where both their families live. Mark continues to be a house-husband, doing some part-time legal consulting. Vicki is working for a well-known commercial law firm. Her years of crystal meth use have not harmed her career irreparably. Nobody outside the law firm she left in Sydney has any suspicion of what she was up to, and even there they only thought she was burnt out by work stress and marital strain.
Eight months since she last smoked crystal, boredom, she says, is the big enemy. ‘I can cope with the guilt by trying to be a good mother, good daughter, good wife and all that,’ she says. ‘I can make my reparations to Mark, and he’s taken me back. I can work hard and be straight, and I can deal with the usual problems that were getting me hot and bothered before.
‘But I miss it, and I’m worried that I’ll miss it too much. I find myself a bit boring. That’s the scary thing. Mark’s happy with me, but I get bored with my own company. I sort of worry that I didn’t really let myself go that badly, didn’t have such a horrific rock-bottom experience that it’d teach me a lesson I’d never forget. The fact is, I got off lightly and I wasn’t scarred by it, or not enough to scare me off it for life.’
To which Mark says: ‘Actually, she is scarred by it: all you’re hearing is the depression speaking. There’s a long depression that follows this drug, and it took me a year to come out of it. She’s only just coming out of it. In six months, I promise, she’ll be her old self again.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of!’ she says with a worried kind of laugh.
They talk about a new government advertising campaign, released in 2007, called ‘Pick the Drug User’. It is a poster with one hundred diverse people who are all, apparently, drug users. They look like a completely random cross-section of youngish Australians. None of them fits the junkie stereotype.
‘That’s the thing,’ Vicki says. ‘There actually are recreational drug users and these can be recreational drugs, and you can do it without anyone in the world picking you for a drug user. The thing is, though, you can’t do it forever.’
She shakes her head as if in wonder. ‘Nobody would ever have picked me.’
ENDNOTES
‘On the first Saturday . . .’ The Channel [V] story was widely reported in newspapers; these quotes are from the report in the Daily Telegraph, Monday 8 October 2007.
‘The anonymous online survey . . .’ ‘Drugs and Driving in Australia: a survey of community attitudes, experience and understanding’ [PDF 660KB], J. Mallick, J. Johnston, N. Goren & V. Kennedy, Australian Drug Foundation, Melbourne, October 2007.
‘The leading fact-finders . . .’ A large number of NDARC reports are referenced in this book. These reports, such as the Illicit Drug Reporting System (IDRS), the annual Australian Drug Trends series and National Illicit Drug Indicators Project (NIDIP), are available online at
Vicki Wolf and Mark Thomas are pseudonyms of subjects interviewed by the author in May, June, July and November 2007 and January–February 2008.
The author interviewed Paul Bennett in June and November 2007. Bennett’s words are from these interviews and his self-published memoir Walking the Taniwha.
The author interviewed Rebecca McKetin in May–June 2007. Statistics from her reports are sourced from NDARC (see note to p. iv above).
‘Mohammed Kerbatieh . . .’ R v Kerbatieh [1997] QCA 30 (7 March 1997).
The information on Mark Dudley Aslett in this book is sourced mainly from the following legal proceedings: Aslett v R [2006] NSWCCA 49 (24 March 2006), Aslett v R [2006] NSWCCA 48 (24 March 2006), Aslett v R [2006] NSWCCA 360 (16 November 2006), Regina v Aslett [2004] NSWSC 1228 (15 December 2004) and Dudley Mark Aslett v R [2006] NSWCCA 86 (28 March 2006).
‘Brent Martin . . .’ The Sun-Herald, 17 September 1989.
‘Japan is where we must go . . .’ Material on the history of amphetamines used in this book is drawn from dozens of widely available public sources. In particular, the author acknowledges the books American Meth: A History of the Methamphetamine Epidemic in America by Sterling R. Braswell (iUniverse Inc, 2005) and “Meth” The Home-Cooked Menace by Dirk Johnson (Hazelden Foundation, 2005).
‘Dr Nicolas Rasmussen . . .’ The author interviewed Dr Rasmussen in February 2008.
The information on Damien Peters in this book is sourced mainly from R v Peters [2002] NSWSC 1234 (20 December 2002) and from media reports.
The information on Darren Jason Blackburn is sourced from R v Blackburn [2006] VSC 246 (7 July 2006).
‘Frank Kelly . . .’ Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 2 November 1991.
‘Luisito Javillonar . . .’ Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 11 July 1992.
‘NSW Premier Bob Carr . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald, February 1998.
‘John McKoy . . .’ Reported in the Herald-Sun, 12 July 1998.
‘Darri Denis Haynes . . .’ Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, September 1999; also sourced from Inspector Campbell v James Gordon Hitchcock [2004] NSWIRComm 87 (21 October 2004).
‘The Oregonian newspaper . . .’
See note to p. 36.
‘John Barrie Oldfield . . .’ Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 11 November 1999.
‘Australian police broke . . .’ Information in this book on seizures of clandestine methamphetamine labs, arrests, and other federal and state police actions is sourced from reports by the Australian Crime Commission—
The information on Matthew Gagalowicz in this book is sourced mainly from R v Gagalowicz [2005] NSWCCA 452 (22 December 2005) and Regina v Gagalowicz [2005] NSWSC 675 (8 July 2005) as well as from media reports.
‘. . . an Australian statistical milestone . . .’ See note to p. 43.
‘The average price of heroin . . .’ See note to p. x.
‘As New South Wales usage rates . . .’ See note to p. x.
‘Dr Michael Dawson . . .’ The author interviewed Dr Dawson in February 2008.
‘So it proved with actual seizures . . .’ Customs reports used in this book are available at
‘. . . an unemployed seventeen-year-old youth . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph, 3 March 1999.
‘In April 2000 . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald, 21 April 2000.
‘In October 2000 . . .’ Reported in the Herald-Sun and the Age, 11 October 2000.
‘. . . police impounding 152 kilograms . . .’ Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 15 July 2001.
The author interviewed Dr Alex Wodak in June 2007.
Information on Ersen Cicekdag used here is sourced mainly from Cicekdag v Regina [2007] NSWCCA 218 (2 August 2007).
‘Joseph Westermeyer . . .’ Archives of General Psychiatry, 33 (1976) 1135–1139.
‘Andrew Macintosh . . .’ Australia Institute Newsletter, No. 47 June 2006.
Information on Novica Jakimov in this book is sourced from R v Jakimov; DPP v Jakimov [2007] VSCA 9 (8 February 2007) and R v Jakimov [2005] VSC 328 (18 August 2005).
‘Dr Rachel Humeniuk . . .’ Reported in the Advertiser, January 2001.
‘. . . a Gympie man . . .’ Reported in the Courier-Mail, February 2005.
‘Peter Vallely . . .’ Reported in the Sunday Mail, 7 October 2007.
‘Bob Aldred . . .’ Reported in the Courier-Mail, February 2005.
‘Paul de Jersey . . .’ Reported in the Courier-Mail, December 2001.
‘Justice Martin Moynihan . . .’ ibid.
‘Barry Hills . . .’ Author interviews are supplemented with reports from the Herald-Sun, 16 December 2001.
Information on the Mohammed Kerb
atieh case is sourced from R v Kerbatieh [2005] VSCA 194 (30 August 2005).
Information on the neurochemistry of methamphetamine is taken from author interviews and written material published by Chris Cruickshank of the University of Western Australia and Professor Iain Macgregor of the University of Sydney, as well as Braswell op cit.
See note to p. x.
‘In the early hours of 19 October 2002 . . .’ Information on the Dimitrios Kyriakidis case is sourced mainly from Kyriakidis v The Queen [2004] WASCA 33 (12 March 2004).
‘In February 2002 . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph, 6 February 2002.
‘. . . police in Brisbane raided a methamphetamine laboratory . . .’ Reported in the Courier-Mail, 14 February 2002.
Information on the Anna Zhang-Tony Tu case is sourced from R v Anna Zhang [2005] NSWCCA 437 (14 December 2005) and media reports.
‘Mick Fernandez . . .’ Reported in the Illawarra Mercury, 1 August 2001.
‘Allan James Wakeford . . .’ Reported in the Illawarra Mercury, 25 December 1999.
‘Jason Leslie Horne . . .’ Reported in the Illawarra Mercury, 2 August 2003.
‘John Anthony Hezemans . . .’ Reported in the Illawarra Mercury, 25 July 2003 and 2 April 2005.
‘Clinton Morgan . . .’ Reported in the Newcastle Herald, 30 June 2003.
‘Half the town is on it . . .’ Reported in the Sun-Herald, 20 September 2003.
‘. . . sent a journalist to Jindabyne . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph, 25 July 2003.
Graham Lomas was found not guilty of carjacking, due to being under the influence of a methamphetamine-related psychosis, in the NSW District Court (reported in the Australian, 19 December 2003).
‘On 13 August . . .’ The author interviewed Paul and Jennifer Marlow in June 2007.
‘. . . the unfortunate shooting death of a man in Merrylands . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph, 10 December 2003; also sourced from R v Aoun [2006] NSWSC 800 (7 August 2006).
