Scattered (24 page)

Legally, this was all-important. Justice David Kirby of the NSW Supreme Court explained the mental illness defence, known as the McNaghten rule:

The McNaghten rule has two limbs. The accused must demonstrate either that he was labouring under such a defect of reason, from a disease of the mind, that he did not know the nature and quality of his act or, alternatively, if he did know, then he did not know that what he was doing was wrong. The first limb, in lay terms, requires that the accused did not know what he was doing, whereas the second deals with his appreciation of the morality of what he was doing, that is, whether it was right or wrong.

One forensic psychiatrist, Dr Bruce Westmore, said Jennings fitted within the McNaghten rule:

I believe he was suffering from a defect of reason caused by a disease of the mind which totally deprived him of the capacity to know, again in a moral sense, that what he did was wrong.

He had a psychotic illness which was precipitated or aggravated by illicit drug use.

Another psychiatrist, Dr Michael Giuffrida, agreed:

Mr Jennings was suffering from a psychotic illness at the time of the offence which was characterised by florid auditory and visual hallucinations and the consequent delusional ideas that constituted a disease of mind giving rise to defect of reason such that Mr Jennings did not know that what he was doing was wrong.

Dr Stephen Allnutt, on the other hand, said that Jennings was suffering from a ‘drug-induced psychosis'. The difference, in relation to McNaghten, was that in Dr Allnutt's view Jennings would have realised that what he was doing was wrong, had he stopped and thought about it.

‘But how,' counsel asked, ‘can a man who's having acute delusional beliefs stop and think about them?'

‘Because as I said, they do it every day,' Dr Allnutt said. ‘They stop and think about all kinds of things.'

Medically, there is no clear line between the two positions. As Allnutt said, his view and the view of Westmore and Giuffrida were ‘all on the same patch', being different interpretations lying on the single spectrum of psychosis. Legally, however, the difference must be black and white: Jennings was either guilty or not guilty. As in so many cases where imprecise scientific evidence must submit to the binary logic of legal decision-making, the judge had to come down on one side or the other of what was, clearly, a very fine matter of interpretation.

He came down on the side of the accused.

‘I accept that it was probable that Mr Jennings, although understanding what he was doing, was so disabled by disease of the mind, that he did not know that what he was doing was wrong,' Justice Kirby said. ‘I therefore find Mr Jennings not guilty of murder by reason of mental illness.'

The decision resulted in Trent Jennings going to a mental hospital rather than jail, his time inside to be determined by the Mental Health Review Tribunal rather than the terms of a prison sentence. More importantly, it opened up a fresh avenue for defence teams representing future accused who were on ice at the time of their deadly acts. And in the next two years, there would be no shortage of those.

PART THREE
COMING DOWN
2004–2008

By the beginning of 2004, much new knowledge was being accumulated about how ice was used in Australia. While attention was drawn to bizarre and horrific crimes, attacks on paramedics, wild behaviour in hospital emergency rooms, and police busts of meth labs and importation rings, surveys were showing that the vast majority of Australians smoking ice were doing it occasionally, with the purpose of enhancing their weekend party experience.

The Victorian Youth Alcohol and Drug Survey 2003 found that 52 per cent of under-25s had used cannabis at some time in their life, 18.6 per cent had used ecstasy or designer drugs and 16 per cent had used methamphetamine. Meth use was increasing most dramatically, but it's likely that the figure was understated, as often young party-goers didn't know what they were taking. At the Enchanted Forest rave at Angaston, South Australia, in December 2003, three hundred people who bought what they thought was ecstasy consented to having their pills tested. A majority contained methamphetamine, and six people at the rave were taken to hospital suffering its effects.

The Australian Drug Foundation reported that 60 per cent of Melbourne clubbers said they had recently taken some kind of party drug. An NDARC study found that ‘party drug' users established a pattern of smoking the drug on Friday nights, staying up throughout Saturday, winding down on Sunday afternoons, and then crashing. These users didn't like Mondays, sometimes known as ‘eccie Monday' for the cause of the crash. And the NDARC report threw some more useful light on who the average ice user was. Contradicting the alarmist picture of a homeless junkie, the median clubbing user was 27 years old, male, employed, and with secondary qualifications.

Until he killed Giuseppe Vitale, Trent Jennings had been one of a large population of young adults who enjoyed dance parties and nightclubs with the help of ice and ecstasy. A British researcher, Gary Leigh, observed that ice was having an effect on dance-floor trends. He noted ‘darker, much more aggressive music' between the hours of 2 and 6 am, when ‘the crystal vibe sets in'.

Among specific party subcultures, urban gay communities were at the leading edge of using crystal meth, the first cohort to discover its consequences and the first to take action to combat it. The commander of the NSW drug squad, David Laidlaw, believes members of the Australian gay community had been smoking crystal as early as 1998, ‘but they have now become aware of its highly addictive nature and impact due to the increased risk-taking behaviour associated with the drug, including the likelihood of contracting blood-borne viruses such as HIV and hepatitis C'.

In a
Sydney Morning Herald
article published on 12 January 2004, Jock Cheetham wrote that gay men were combining crystal with Viagra to produce ‘hypersexual activity'. One of his subjects, ‘Ricardo', spoke of having been anally raped while on crystal meth. Meanwhile a central Sydney doctor, John Byrne, told me that his gay patients reported an overwhelming and sometimes out-of-character desire to be the ‘bottom' in a sex act while on ice. The health risks are obvious. Perry Halkitis, from New York University, told Cheetham that this same tendency in the United States had led to a ‘triple epidemic—a drug epidemic, an HIV epidemic, and a mental health epidemic'.

‘It's stressful enough being gay in this culture,' Halkitis said. ‘Couple that with an HIV epidemic and you've got something like post-traumatic stress disorder. People lose hope in a state like that. Meth allows you to feel high, beautiful and relaxed.'

Greg Fisher no doubt felt high, beautiful and relaxed when he smoked crystal, but Fisher was to become Sydney's highest-profile gay ice criminal. In the 1990s, Fisher had founded the ‘pink' media firm, the Satellite Group, which he floated publicly in 1999. He eventually fell foul of financial regulators over a number of indiscretions, including using $220 000 of company funds for his personal benefit. To paper over his failing fortunes he dealt drugs from a unit in the Rex Apartments in Macleay Street, Potts Point.

With a secret camera, police filmed Fisher dealing cocaine, GHB, ecstasy and crystal meth from the unit. He had been charged previously with nineteen drug offences, but they had been dropped for lack of evidence. His narrow escape didn't stop him dealing. His judgment was clearly clouded, as he was filmed smoking a white powder in a glass pipe during the surveillance operation.

But it was serious health problems, rather than jail, that posed the more immediate danger to gay crystal users. In 2004, the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research (NCHECR) found that ice use among urban gay men had gone from near zero to 21 per cent in five years. Sixteen per cent of gay men who had recently become HIV-positive reported having used ice at the event when they believed they contracted the virus. They ‘barebacked', or had sex without condoms, or wanted to risk ‘bugging' (spreading the virus). But on these occasions, ice was seldom used alone. Alcohol, Viagra, cocaine and other drugs were also usually taken. This made it impossible to say crystal taking led to HIV. Rather, it was ‘predictive' of sero-conversion. Other research further complicates the picture, indicating that men who tend to engage in risky sex will do so regardless of whether or not they are taking crystal or any other drug.

While a persuasive story can be told of how gay individuals, feeling bulletproof on crystal meth, will then go out and have unsafe sex and contract HIV, there was little corresponding statistical evidence. At the time that ice use rocketed in the gay community, HIV infection rates did not go up in any commensurate way.

The AIDS Council of New South Wales (ACON) held its first forum on crystal meth in September 2004 and heard that the feared ‘triple epidemic' hadn't yet transpired. When researchers from the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society presented a paper saying there was no ‘causal link' between crystal use and unsafe sex, community members responded with disbelief. Some said they had a number of friends who became HIV-positive after having unprotected sex while on crystal. While the ACON president, Adrian Lovney, said that ‘we shouldn't be driving our response by anecdote', a colourful community member and activist, Norrie May-Welby, responded: ‘Anecdotal evidence is a legitimate form of evidence . . . I say there's enough smoke coming from the hills for us to call the fire brigade, without us doing a research project just to check no one is sending smoke signals.'

While this encounter may on one level seem the normal run of discussion when the convincing anecdote collides with the sober caution of scientific research, in the gay community it had a unique edge. One of the researchers, Garrett Prestage, encapsulated the concerns about contradictory responses within the community: ‘There's a real reluctance to talk about recreational drugs in the community as a whole, because then what has to happen is you actually have to question your own usage,' he said.

This was the bind that many gay community figures found themselves in. Drug-taking is not just a feature of urban gay life, but some would say it is a sine qua non. It is like any bohemian community being asked to confront sexually transmitted infections, or lung cancer, or alcoholism. If your behaviour is driven by the need to rebel against bourgeois conventions, what do you do when that behaviour starts to kill you? Which is more important— the lifestyle, and the statements it makes about self and community, or public health?

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.