The Ice Age (19 page)

‘Luke, if I saw you at a party, I would want to talk to you. You
are
interesting.'

‘Are you spinning me a line, Audrey? As in a standard psychology how-to-make-someone-feel-better line?'

‘I'm not that sort of counsellor, Luke. From what I've seen of you in class today, I like you a lot. You're a deep thinker, and I think you have a big heart. You have a tough facade to protect yourself, but I think you're very sensitive underneath.'

By our second session, I realised I struggled with group situations, and that my parents had mental-health problems, and so I over-achieved or recklessly under-achieved to get their attention. Audrey asked me to write a list of things I had achieved in life, and to ‘take full credit for them'. I have to admit, I started to feel better and more in control of my life after just a few days.

But even still, I was nervous, my thoughts were racing; I couldn't sleep, and all I wanted to do was sleep.

Come week three, and although many people had been listening and agreeing, a dissenter emerged in class. This dissenter was Max, who said, ‘Audrey, we keep hearing in class that drugs are the result of a lack of something else in our lives. But lots of people here are confident and seem happy. I just don't think I will ever find the same high I found on drugs anywhere else.'

Although Audrey was quick to disagree, telling Max that that kind of justification was ‘cognitive distortion' and that 90 per cent of people with addictions have a mental illness, the damage had been done. I was having a lot of trouble coping without drugs, and Max's line of reasoning made it worse.

I found myself walking around at night: pacing, wanting to leave, hating being there. I couldn't sleep, I was up all night, my mind racing and worrying. I wanted to leave; I felt like an idiot, it felt melodramatic to be there in rehab. I made small incisions with a pair of nail scissors on the inside of my thigh. Halfway through my next counselling session with Audrey, after pushing myself again and again to tell her what I did, I told her that I had cut myself.

She put her hand on my leg. She told me cutting didn't help. I told her I felt that it did. She told me I cut myself when I was anxious, and I needed to do breathing exercises instead. She told me that my thoughts caused my anxiety, and that my thoughts were things I could control. She told me there was no need for me to be anxious. She said I was funny, and attractive, and smart. She told me I was safe.

‘Anxiety comes in waves,' she said. ‘It peaks and then it goes. You need to identify when it is starting, and slow down your breathing. When you slow down your breathing, your body will relax, and you will feel better. You don't need to cut yourself to feel better.'

Audrey then took me into the director's office. Apparently, an episode of self-harm was considered a serious incident in rehab. The director was a tall, strong-looking woman with greying hair cut in a kind of flat-top.

‘Luke, self-harm is a maladaptive way of dealing with anxiety,' she said. ‘Your body is preparing itself to fight or to run when it senses danger. You are becoming aggressive when you feel anxious, but you are turning your aggression on yourself. It's not actually helping your situation to cut yourself. Do you understand what I mean?'

‘I think so,' I replied.

‘You feel scared or worried about something, you can't cope, so you lash out at yourself,' she said.

And suddenly I
did
understand; the concept of internalised aggression made perfect sense. It was what we called in rehab a ‘light-bulb moment', and the urge to self-harm started to dissipate thereafter.

But I still felt anxious, and I still had trouble sleeping. Audrey asked again and again whether I was comfortable with my sexuality, and I began to resent her for it.

More classes followed. We talked about boundaries, and the ways in which they can be violated: physically, sexually, socially, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually.

The vast majority of people relapse shortly after they leave rehab, whether they finish the program or not. Many people fail at rehab. One patient asked nearly everybody — including me and including all the staff — for sex. It was near constant, and he was eventually kicked out. The librarian was expelled a short time later for smuggling in anti-psychotics, and taking them in the morning, so she could sleep all day and avoid class. A few weeks later, a resident with schizophrenia left in the middle of the night, bought some heroin, found a syringe, injected it and died almost instantly — a reasonably common problem among addicts when they leave rehab, and, after having had a break from their drug, take a dose that is far too high for what their body is now used to.

But there are also people who graduate and stay clean. Holly, the psychologist, graduated the eight-week program. Her mother and daughter attended the graduation, beaming with smiles. Before she left, she thanked the girls in her villa for ‘making me feel beautiful again'.

And me? Well, I still couldn't sleep. And I was still annoyed at why Audrey kept asking me whether or not I was comfortable with my sexuality. One night, my annoyance with her turned into an extensive diary entry about high school — the first time I had written any of it down. When I had my next session with Audrey, she became the first person I told what had happened at high school.

She gently rubbed my back as I went through all the details; I sobbed, but by the time I'd finished, I had become angry.

‘You've got through the worst of it,' Audrey told me. ‘You have already survived it; it's time now to accept yourself and be kinder to yourself.'

I stayed awake all the next night, feeling tender and exposed; a soft spot had been uncovered.

I learnt a lot about soft spots during my time in rehab. That started when I saw a guy named Billy punching a boxing bag. He looked like Rocky; he had a boxer's nose, and was Italian or Greek, and he was really going at it. I knew he had just spent a fair bit of time in jail, but he was actually pretty friendly, and when he saw me walking past he called me over.

He said he used to be a competitive boxer, and asked if I had ever boxed before. I laughed nervously and said no. He got a pair of boxing gloves for me, and proceeded to show me the basics of how to throw a punch.

‘Turn your arm as you do it, so it's all knuckle,' he said. Self-consciously, I started hitting the bag again and again until I found a rhythm, and I ended up doing it for about half an hour.

We had a few more boxing sessions after that. And then, the day after my big day with Audrey, Max came up to me, announcing he had come up with a plan for me, inspired by a highly effeminate champion Thai kickboxer he once saw on TV.

‘I am going to turn you into society's worst nightmare,' he said.

‘What's that?'

‘A poof who can kill.'

‘No, Max,' I said. ‘I don't need to know that kind of thing, not anymore.'

‘C'mon,' he protested. ‘It will give you confidence.'

So he took me into the shed with the boxing bag.

His philosophy was simple — your hard bits thrown at full force to the other person's soft bits.

Elbows to eye sockets.

Knees to testicles.

Fists to windpipe.

Shin to stomach.

Legs to ribs.

Head to back of head.

And so on.

Even with all this activity, I couldn't sleep, so the rehab took me to the doctor. I was prescribed anti-psychotics, and woke up after weeks of not sleeping properly, light as a feather with a peace I had never known before: fear could be overcome, failure was simply a matter of perception, demons had been slayed, and there was a light shining out of my heart.

I wrote this note in my diary:

I go back to my room. I think about, for some strange reason, Easter, and I thought about boundaries. What is in my boundary? I thought. Me, self-love, me, good stuff, me, me, me. I start feeling a strange sensation in my chest. Perhaps it's some epithet of narcissism, but it feels like something else. It feels like I've tapped into some kind of divine energy. I feel a little white light or something glowing out of me. I feel connected with all the living things around me. I think about Jesus Christ. I never got the myth of Jesus, it never made any sense. Now it seems to have kind of clicked. It's like no matter what suffering and hatred we endure in life, we will always rise up because we will always have our essence. We can all rise again cos nothing ever kills our essence.

I am not saying I want to be a Christian, no way, but I understand the spiritual messages of Christianity now. But it feels right. And it feels like for the first time, maybe I have grasped what it means to have a soul.

I woke that day feeling light and lovely, feeling as if anything at all — including complete sobriety — was now within my reach.

Then suddenly my time was up. I gave a goodbye talk to the group, in which I revealed I had cried over things that happened to me fifteen years ago. I told them I'd recognised that my drug abuse was a form of poorly expressed, internalised rage. Everyone clapped, and I left. It felt life-changing, revelatory; nothing could stop me, anything could be achieved.

Meanwhile, methamphetamine use had continued on its downward fall, which began toward the end of 2005 and went through right until 2011.

In 2010, at 2.1 per cent across the population, use of methamphetamines had fallen to the lowest level seen since 1995. A similar trend was seen among young people, where students were less likely to have ever used the drug in 2011 (2.9 per cent) than in 2005 (5.3 per cent). Clandestine-lab detections had also dropped, as had meth imports and drug offences.

There was a sense — at least in drug circles, and by following what the media were saying — that meth had come and gone. However, others — and by others I mean here experts in the field — were less convinced. They tended to see the drop-off in meth use as either 1) too insignificant to be statistically meaningful or 2) simply part of what many see as the inherently cyclical nature of population drug epidemics.

‘Drugs, for a number of different reasons, come in and out of fashion all the time,' Geoff Munro, national policy manager with the Australian Drug and Alcohol Foundation, told me. ‘There will always be a population cohort of addicts who abuse the strongest drug they can find; drugs throughout history follow an often inexplicable cycle of being widely abused, and then use falls off again, before we get another spike a few years or a decade later.'

According to the cyclical perspective on community drug ‘epidemics', the dynamic nature of drug markets — both supply and demand — means that today's problem drug could well be replaced by a new problem drug tomorrow.

Another possible reason for the decrease in use was the tightening of restrictions governing the sale of pseudoephedrine-based cold-and-flu tablets in some states. Most meth being consumed in Australia in that decade (2000–10) was being made here, and intelligence suggested most manufacturers were sourcing their precursor material through ‘pseudoephedrine runners' who went from chemist to chemist all over the state, and sometimes interstate, to buy cold-and-flu tablets in bulk. Queensland, perhaps because of its vast geography and scattered populations, has always been Australia's meth-making capital. So in November 2005, the Queensland state government brought in Project Stop, an electronic tool and database that allowed for sales of pseudoephedrine to be tracked in real time using a Global Positioning System. This system aimed to prevent individuals from purchasing small quantities of pseudoephedrine from many different pharmacies. In the short term, the project seemed to work; the number of clandestine labs in Queensland dropped between 2005 and 2007 by 23 per cent. By 2006, nationally, all products containing pseudoephedrine had been rescheduled as either ‘Pharmacist Only Medicines' (Schedule 3) or ‘Prescription Only Medicines' (Schedule 4), depending on the amount of pseudoephedrine in the product. This means that prior to 2005, anybody could buy pseudoephedrine off the shelves without asking a pharmacist, or showing ID, let alone getting a prescription. Given that nearly all meth is made with either ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, it's not surprising that many people were taking advantage of this loophole. Jason Ferris, a senior research fellow at the University of Queensland, has extensively studied Project Stop, and told me that a national compulsory system would reduce the opportunities for addict-based manufacturers to make meth.

However, others, such as the ACC, have suggested that the tighter controls on pseudoephedrine simply resulted in the growth of the illicit-precursor importation market. Indeed, the US introduced the federal Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act in 2005, which increased restrictions on pseudoephedrine sales. Similarly to Australia, pharmacists and sellers of medications containing pseudoephedrine were required to place these medications behind the counter, and buyers were required to show a state-issued identification card and sign a log that could be used to track their purchases. Two researchers, Dobkin and Nicosia, studied the effect of this legislation, and concluded that this intervention substantially disrupted the supply of methamphetamine, but that the effect was only temporary.

All things considered, this legislation may have opened up a market for more sophisticated meth manufacturers overseas and here. Meth's minor drop-off at the end of last decade turned out to be the calm before the storm — from where we are now, we can see that Australia's meth story goes something like this: The first clouds of meth were detected in the syringes of Sydney's injecting drug users in the mid-1990s. Then came the thunder — crime bosses across Asia stopped producing heroin, and started making the profitable, easier-to-make methamphetamine in 1999. Local drug dealers and crime gangs got on board and starting making gear; as a result, it rained powdered meth in Australia from mid-2000 to mid-2004. Then things dried up. Years later, without any apparent warning and before we had a chance to notice the dark clouds, it started raining crystal hail.