The Ice Age (10 page)

These were the kinds of events that led to meth becoming more or less illegal by the mid-1970s.
By this stage, politicians in both Australia and the United States were making more and more noise about the damage amphetamines were doing to society. After a number of drugged drivers were left unprosecuted, New South Wales health minister Harry Jago moved in 1965 to outlaw driving under the influence of Methedrine. Indeed, history should look kindly upon the Liberal member for Fuller who, four years later — and several years before a global, UN-led push to do the same — moved to restrict the illegal sale of amphetamines. Jago would eventually usher in new legislation requiring any person making or distributing amphetamines to maintain a register recording all drugs supplied or manufactured. While Jago was well-meaning and forward thinking, the problem of fraud remained an obvious blind spot for this legislation. As has been a constant theme in history, greater regulation did little to sway the growth of the amphetamine black market. In 1969 alone, there were 230 robberies of chemists and warehouses throughout Australia to obtain narcotics and amphetamines. In a letter published in
The
Medical Journal of Australia
in September 1967, prominent psychiatrist Cedric Swanton wrote that ‘the extent of the consumption of amphetamines by the community might be gleaned from the fact that quite recently one of the drug companies' premises was broken into and robbed of 130,000 “methedrine” tablets.'

Swanton's views were quickly becoming mainstream among global elites, and things were set to change. The US government stepped in to put a stop to it all by enacting the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, which all but entirely restricted the sale of meth. The United Nations followed with a major international treaty: the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances. Australia would soon follow America and the UN's lead by enacting the 1976 Psychotropic Substances Act, banning the sale of most meth and amphetamine products.

Meth production moved to the black market, and in particular biker gangs, which would later join up with Mexican cartels.

If I had my time again, on that night of self-loathing and pregnant pauses, when Beck announced her perverse ambition to become a drug addict, I would have told her that she had many, many talents. That she could easily be a scientist or a comedy writer. She, like her dad, was a natural caregiver; she could have been a magnificent social worker or community builder. It was only that she lacked the resilience, self-belief, and patience to work at her talents long enough for them to develop into skills. What needed to be said was that people become good at things through willpower and persistence, that she was a victim of her own self-fulfilling prophecy, and that she was young and had a lifetime to make good.

Ironically, at that stage I harboured ambitions of being a psychologist who lived in the mountains, wore tweed coats, had a big bookshelf, and lived by myself. It didn't occur to me that I lacked the ability to say the right thing at the right moment. Drugs vaguely interested me, but I was determined to become a stuffy intellectual — I never imagined I would have the social skills, or the nihilism, to last in drug culture. I had gotten rotten drunk at parties as an early teenager, and always regretted it — on a number of levels — the next day. I liked sitting at home alone, doing my own thing; at other times, I spent time with Mum and her friends.

I remember growing up feeling that I was someone special, and Mum was always telling me she thought I'd grow up to be somebody important. I remember the private drama, tennis, and singing lessons: the wild aspirations, and the triumphs and failures that followed. I remember Mum reading a book with me out loud, over and over again. The book was called
The
Little Engine That Could
.

I grew up in a semi-rural area with a golf course and patches of wet, rocky, fern-covered bush. My mind might be playing tricks on me, but I remember my childhood as a series of happy, shining moments connected by long walks through the bush with my Labrador, Daisy. She would always lead the way: we would find rabbits, foxes, echidnas, and wombats. (Apparently she thought these creatures were playmates rather than food, and whenever we found an echidna she would take one sniff and go running away.) I lived in a neighbourhood with half a dozen boys my age, who would often accompany us. We would build cubbies, get chased by bulls, and swing off a rope tied to a tree into a lake — which was once the town's source of water — that had its own waterfall, surrounded by tall tree-ferns and a little apple orchid. I remember summer evenings at dusk, playing tennis with Dad, netball matches with my sister in the backyard, endless one-on-one basketball tournaments with my next-door neighbour, extravagant Christmas mornings, and ‘going to war' with the other boys. During these games, allegiances were always changing, and they usually climaxed in an exhilarating punch-up. Of course, we all became friends again the following week, and then we'd turn again, or pick a new opponent when we got bored.

I was naughty in school; I got into trouble a lot. I wasn't allowed to backchat at home, so I did so at school. I always had trouble concentrating, I often felt bored, I made stupid mistakes, and I was usually desperate to fit in, and put on a show. I have never taken criticism or rejection well. I always wanted everybody to like me.

Meanwhile, Beck was making her way through the final acts of her teenage years, changing her costume from hippie to cowgirl to gangster chick along the way. Beck lived in Cockatoo, a bush town about ten minutes from my straight-laced hometown of Emerald, and about an hour-and-a-half's drive from Melbourne. Cockatoo, and many of its residents, had been burnt to a crisp during the Ash Wednesday fires. A series of extremely cheap houses, some actual housing commission homes, hippies, and criminals arose from the ashes — a group affectionately (and sometimes not-so-affectionately) known as the ‘Cockatoo Scum'. In Cockatoo, there were always bizarre crimes being committed and weird drugs being indulged in, strange ideas floating around, and people who looked like they had been born as the result of incest, or as if their mothers had taken thalidomide. Cockatoo was the place my mum told me to stay away from; Cockatoo was my kind of place.

Before I ever spoke to Beck, I knew her by reputation. She was commonly known as an easy root, an underachiever, and a sook; a bit clingy, but also a genuinely nice person who wouldn't hurt a fly. She was certainly a drifter, a magnet for virtual stray cats (and, later in life, actual stray cats), and her dress sense left some ambiguity as to whether she was a nonconformist by accident or design. At first, she was as fascinating as a car wreck. But as we became closer, she seemed to be the only person at our school who seemed interested in anything other than cars, football, and social hierarchies. Beck told me that people liked to scapegoat, exclude, and tease her for their own entertainment. She told me she was teased for being poor in primary school (or, more particularly, because her mother made her clothes), and in Year 7 her parents received a series of anonymous phone calls from giggling, boyish voices asking if they could speak with the ‘BI-LO bitch'. Occasionally this would bring her to tears, but more often she invented cutting private jokes about the perpetrators, and did excellent, abstract impersonations of them when in peak form.

I was sure she was going to prove them all wrong one day; she was one of the deepest people I had ever met.

The 1971 UN convention became a watershed moment in our global problem with meth abuse. During the 1980s, the US government restricted access to and increased penalties for possession of P2P — the key ingredient for making meth. But such is the plight of good intentions that this only resulted in bikie gangs discovering they could make meth from ephedrine, resulting in a more powerful formula that could be easily obtained from Mexican labs that professed to be making the substance purely for legal cold-and-flu tablets. As amphetamines came back into fashion, with ecstasy and MDMA pills spreading around nightclubs and raves around the world in the late 1980s, crystal meth gradually got a stranglehold on a small proportion of American's population. In a survey conducted in 2012, approximately 1.2 million Americans reported having used methamphetamine in the previous year, while 440,000 reported using the drug in the previous month. This was a smaller user percentage of the population than when the drug had been legally prescribed — but the legal Methedrine, Desoxyn, and Syndrox had been made from the powdered formula, whereas crystal meth was the substance that was dominating the American black market.

The rise of crystal meth in Australia would follow the same pattern, albeit a few decades later. Why so much later? Well, Australia's biggest drug problem from the 1960s right until the new millennium was heroin, due to the island nation's proximity to poppy fields across South-East Asia.

Like most people in the mid-1990s in Australia, Beck and I had never heard of or seen meth. In fact, the data shows that from the 1970s through to the 1980s, amphetamine use sat at around 4 per cent of the population — most of those were using amphetamine sulphate, and most had had it prescribed to them. It was a cheap, working-class drug, different in both its cultural identity and chemistry from cocaine. MDMA (ecstasy) would also make its way to Australian shores in the 1970s. MDMA, which is both an amphetamine and a psychedelic drug, appears to have been brought here from India by a religious group called ‘The Orange People', who used the drug as part of their mystic process, whereby they saw sex as a path to enlightenment. Some psychiatrists in Australia, as part of their treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, even used ecstasy on their patients, before the practice was made illegal by the Australian government in 1985. Speed, and in some cases meth, was made in clandestine labs here and there across the nation, but hardly any Australians used either drug throughout the 1980s. The first batches of powdered methamphetamine arrived on our shores in the early 1990s; a minor rise in use followed, but none of this, as far as we know, was crystal meth. Government research from that time showed past-year use of amphetamines was less than 1 per cent in 1993 and 1995; lifetime use was around 4–5 per cent. The use of amphetamines was largely restricted, it seemed, to nightclubbers, and people wanting to increase their work hours and output. In the 1980s, in ‘relaxed Australia', heroin remained king; some estimates suggest that there were as many 172,000 people injecting heroin in Australia in 1986 alone.

So, while the drug barely registered a ripple here, it was a different tale overseas. By the late 1980s, the recipes used by US biker gangs, and the many home-labs that followed, had made their way to parts of South-East Asia. Throughout the early 1990s, crystal meth was manufactured en masse in China, becoming the most widely abused drug in Burma and Japan, and the second most widely abused drug in the Philippines. When the US government then moved to restrict ephedrine, the bikers started using pseudoephedrine to make their meth, resulting in a more powerful formula again. More importantly, the formula was easy to make, and home labs began popping up all over the US.

A few years earlier, an unknown chemist in Hawaii had manufactured a smokeable form of crystal meth. This led to full-scale production on the US island, with the nearby nations of Taiwan and Korea soon learning the recipe and following suit. These trends alarmed many crime authorities here in Australia. In 1989, South Sydney drug detective Brent Martin told journalists he thought the Asian experience showed that meth might replace cocaine as Australia's choice stimulant. Come 1991, and Customs and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) followed suit, warning of the new threat of a drug called ‘ice', and lobbying the federal government to develop a campaign to stop its spread. Even so, the drug either continued to fly completely under the radar, or perhaps it didn't even make it to our shores for at least another four years — nobody quite knows. What we do know is that the increase in the supply and use of methamphetamine in Australia appears to have begun around the mid- to late 1990s, while the more potent forms of ‘base' and ‘ice' methamphetamine were first detected in 1999.

Also in 1991, the same year that the US government gave speed to its war pilots in the first Gulf War, two momentous events occurred sequentially in Smithy's life. He was eighteen, driving home one night on a near-empty Burwood Highway under orange lights through never-ending suburbia. He had just sold some pot and a bit of speed at a friend's house, and Led Zeppelin was blaring through his speakers as he bopped along to the rhythm of the road, sipping on a VB, the stale smell of cigarette smoke drifting around him. When he caught a reflection of himself in the rear-view mirror, he realised he was smiling like a Cheshire cat. But the next time he looked in the mirror, he saw blue lights flashing. Smithy was arrested, and charged with drug trafficking. The second event occurred after his mum contacted his father about the charges. After twelve years of complete silence, his father responded, paid for a lawyer, and told Smithy that everything would sort itself out. And it did: Smithy was put on a good-behaviour bond without a conviction.

A new pattern had been set: Smithy — quite a likeable person for the most part, I might add — would work at odd labouring jobs, where he'd do pot and speed all day, until he found the speed more interesting. He would then leave his job to become a small-time drug dealer. He never made a profit, but the trade meant he had a steady supply of drugs, and of people — including women — knocking on the door. When he ran out of drugs, his phone often fell silent, leading him to lie on the floor when he was coming down, staring at the wall and thinking,
They are not my real friends, they are not my real friends, they are not my real friends — nobody visits me when I've run out of drugs
. He would feel miserable, alone and unloved, until the next speed delivery, after which his house would once again be full of people and grog, and the rooms would be filled with the warm sounds of his deep, wheezy cackle.