The Ice Age (21 page)

This feeling of flying was becoming more common, for different reasons, around Australia.

From around 2011 onwards, we had what was basically a new drug on the market — crystallised meth, which was far stronger and far more addictive than the powdered meth that most of us knew only as speed. So it's not surprising that by the reporting period of 2012–13, every state and territory reported an increase in the median purity of methamphetamine. Victoria reported the highest annual median purity of 76.1 per cent in this reporting period, the highest median purity reported in the previous decade — a massive jump when you consider that in 2007 it had dipped to around 17 per cent in most states across the nation. As criminal networks and drug manufacturers got smarter, though, even the powdered meth on the market was of an exceptionally high purity.

On one level, the explanation is simple — more of the drug was getting into the country, and that's because more of it was being made all around the world from around 2011 onward. The cause of our current crystal-meth problem is that so much of the drug is coming through our border, while local production has also risen — as indicated through the detection of clandestine labs — but at a much smaller rate. A few years ago, it was thought that 90 per cent of the meth being used here was locally made; today, that figure is thought to be to around 60 per cent.

As Australians grew tired of powdered meth by the mid- 2000s, our local dealers seem to have fallen ‘victim' to the forces of globalisation — a higher-quality imported product, produced at a cheaper cost. Crystallised meth is now being made all over the world: in the jungles of Burma, in the densely populated slums of Manila, in the deserts of Nigeria, and, perhaps most importantly, in the shantytowns of China. Australia was seen as an easy market for these producers, and soon our hospital emergency rooms were awash with wide-eyed, psychotic meth users.

How exactly did this happen? We need to back up a few steps, and examine what took place in the sub-regions of East and South-East Asia in the first decade of the millennium. For an overview, we can start with these four points, taken from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) World Drug Reports from 2008 to 2010:

•While opium cultivation levels worldwide had also restored to and stabilised at pre-2000 levels, drug manufacturers and users were showing a preference for synthetic stimulants. Global seizures of amphetamines increased some threefold over the period 1998–2010, far more than the increases for plant-based drugs.

•In 2008, UNODC reported that methamphetamine use and production was starting to rise, and that 55 per cent of the world's 14 million amphetamine users were in Asia, most of those in the East and Southeast sub-region.

•In the same year, more and more industrial-scale meth labs were being discovered across South-East Asia, ‘run by large criminal organisations' according to the UN. By 2009, China accounted for the majority of reported methamphetamine laboratories seized in East and South-East Asia.

•The 2009 UNODC report concluded that Amphetamine-type stimulant (ATS) producers adapt to evade law enforcement. There are signs that criminal organisations are adapting their manufacturing operations to avoid control by: 1) utilising precursor chemicals not under international control; 2) moving manufacturing operations to more vulnerable locations; and 3) shifting precursor chemicals and drug trafficking routes to new locations to avoid detection.

By 2010, there were an increasing number of countries reporting methamphetamine seizures — by now, West African nations were well and truly on board as places to manufacture and distribute drugs, as well as to launder drug money. Iran, Syria, and Pakistan — all of which already had big markets for the legitimate use of crystal-meth precursor drugs — were also developing large black markets. Although the proportion of people requiring treatment for amphetamine abuse was just 5 per cent in Africa, 10 per cent in Europe, and 12 per cent in the Americas, UNODC would report that the number of people seeking treatment was ‘particularly high in Oceania (20 per cent) and Asia (21 per cent), reaching 36 per cent in East and South-East Asia with proportions exceeding 50 per cent in Japan, the Republic of Korea, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines, as well as in Saudi Arabia in the Near and Middle East' and that ‘Government experts have reported that methamphetamine ranks among the top three illicit drugs consumed in several countries in this region, including China, Japan, and Indonesia'.

Although the proportion of people treated for crystal-meth use in Indonesia was far lower, at around 25 per cent, this still signified an increase of almost 80 per cent from the previous year. Crystal-meth users also accounted for the second-largest share of newly admitted patients receiving drug treatment in 2013 at 31 per cent, after heroin users who accounted for a 36 per cent share. Moreover, in China, crystal-meth users accounted for 70 per cent of synthetic drug users receiving treatment in 2013, while methamphetamine tablet users accounted for about 16 per cent.

And it was Asian nations that would continue to drive production, distribution, and demand: and further, it was the growth of richer, younger, more urbanised populations in these nations that was a driving force behind the increase of meth use. These were societies where new opportunities were growing exponentially, and there was a perception that hard work — and having the ability to put in very long days with little sleep — would pay off.

‘It originated as a drug that was taken by poor people, traditionally workers. That migrated into youth culture over a decade ago,' Jeremy Douglas, UNODC regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, said in a press statement in 2014. ‘More recently, that has evolved into a growing prosperous youth culture … You have rising incomes occurring across the region. You have a large, large youth population. So you have natural growth of the market.'

As these, particularly Southeast Asian, nations became richer, and their populations skewed younger, consumer demand for strong amphetamines increased. Between 2008 and 2013, crystal-meth seizures in the entire Asian region almost doubled, while methamphetamine tablet seizures rose at an even more rapid rate, resulting in a seven-fold increase. In November 2013, an ACC report, ‘Patterns and Trends of Amphetamine-Type Stimulants (ATS) and Other Drugs — Challenges for Asia and the Pacific 2013', said that:

Seizures of methamphetamine in both pill and crystalline forms reached record highs [in Asia] in 2012, with 227 million methamphetamine pills seized — a 60 per cent increase from 2011 and a more-than seven-fold increase since 2008 — along with 11.6 metric tonnes of crystalline methamphetamine, a 12 per cent rise from 2011.

In its submission to the 2015 Australian federal parliamentary inquiry, UNODC would write that the ‘rapidly developing chemical and pharmaceutical industries' in Asia posed a serious threat:

There is evidence of domestic production in most of the countries of the region, but two countries have advantages that allow them to undercut local prices. The first is Myanmar, where political instability in Shan State and the Special Regions adjoining China has provided cover for large-scale drug manufacturing and trafficking. The second is China, where large quantities of precursor chemicals are produced domestically and industry scale of methamphetamine labs have been continuously dismantled. Myanmar, however, does not have a legitimate pharmaceutical industry, which means practically that precursor chemicals such as ephedrine and pseudoephedrine must be smuggled from outside Myanmar for the production of methamphetamine. Therefore, precursors have been smuggled from neighbouring countries with large pharmaceutical industries including India and China, whereas the finished methamphetamine products have been trafficked in the reverse direction.

Dr Alex Wodak, from the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, told me that drug manufacturing reflected not just an increasingly globalised and outsourced international capitalist economy, but also an economy that creates vast inequality in developing nations, with slick skyscrapers and shopping centres growing around slums, stalls, and beggars.

‘People are joining the drug trade to get a slice of this pie,' he said.

In a 2015 report, among the 95 countries and territories worldwide identified as destinations for the meth ATS seized between 2009 and 2013, three of the five most frequently mentioned ones were located in East and South-East Asia and Oceania: Australia, Japan, and Malaysia.

The ACC's CEO Chris Dawson explained to me that the way the world markets for methamphetamine and crystal methamphetamine work are similar to traditional markets — that is, they function according to supply and demand. The supply has increased significantly in recent years because there are more transnational organised crime groups in the market.

Crime groups with international links to the Middle East and Asia have also demonstrated the ability to manufacture and traffic methylamphetamine and its precursor chemicals into Australia. Australia has for several decades had a relatively high level of demand for illicit stimulants, and illicit drug users in this country pay a premium for illicit drugs compared to their overseas counterparts. This has made Australia an attractive market for transnational crime groups.

And somewhere along the line, probably around the southern summer of 2011–12, Beck and Smithy stopped taking powdered meth, and started taking crystal meth.

Come 2013, and Beck rang me to say she was well and truly over our fight, and she missed me. By now I felt exactly the same, and I told her that. She started visiting me again in my new pad in St Kilda. She told me she had moved into a nice new four-bedroom house in the Toomuc Valley — ‘new Pakenham … I've finally made it in life' — and that Smithy was also over it. He knew I wasn't very well at the time, and was busting for me to come down. But I stayed away, for whatever reason. While I
did
want to be friends with Smithy again, it just felt too awkward.

Not long after we started talking again, Beck rang me to say she was so sick of Smithy's weird, sleazy games, and his whinging, and his verbal abuse that she had tried to hit him with a toaster. He had gotten a restraining order against her. She moved into another house in the Toomuc Valley, on the cusp of the 100-metre stay-away mark, and, bit by bit, the two started spending time together again.

Chapter Seven

Ridgey didge

A FLOCK OF
white cockatoos screeched as they flew across the horizon; it seemed as if they had fallen from the last white clouds that remained in the sky's west. The sun was beginning to set, and the clouds surrounding it looked as if a toddler had spilled pink, yellow, and purple paint all over a perfectly blue canvas, which now threatened to drip to the ground. It would only be a few more moments before the night would wipe the sky clean. It was the autumn of 2014, and it was dusk in the Toomuc Valley. Deep in one of the suburb's terracotta-coloured houses, the blind was shut, the lights were off, but Beck was there in her lounge room — just around the corner from Smithy's — staring at the television. Crystal meth had well and truly taken hold of certain sub-sections within the community, Beck among them.

Gravity — or perhaps more specifically,
reality
— had been treating Beck rather harshly all day. In fact, Beck had only fallen from paradise — the crystal-meth high — a few hours earlier, and now the forbidden fruit which had gotten her there was rotting at her heart; she was tumbling, weakened, in freefall. In her own mind, she was a passive victim of this imminent crash — perhaps she was getting sick, perhaps something had infected her.

There was a sensation digging like a butter knife at the base of her skull, and the more she concentrated on it, the more it felt like two sharp screws in her temples, and now she noticed it was blurring her vision as if she were slightly drunk.

Not helping matters was the odour of cat shit coming from the other end of the house. It hit her nostrils only occasionally, and yet it was, to her, a definitive smell: the smell of waste, the smell of something which been kept inside all day. Beck was worried that she would need to put her poor old cat down soon — it had been going to the toilet inside almost every day. Probably, she'd concluded, because the old boy was starting to go senile.

She wished she could be bothered getting up to get her phone. Smithy might have been getting more gear tonight. Meth — make that crystal meth — would have been a spectacularly useful ‘pick me up', especially as she thought she was coming down with a flu, and the kids had made a mess of the house, and the stray cat she took in ten years ago was now shitting everywhere, and ‘I have to fucking cooking dinner tonight', and Smithy had probably given her less than he was supposed to the night before — like he always did, even though she put out, and did ‘all the dirty, disgusting things' he wanted her to — and, in fact, Smithy had probably given her share to Luke when she wasn't looking, that was why Luke ‘bloody well moved in there in the first place'.

And right at that moment, there was a knock at the door. It was Luke; in other words — me.

I had walked over from Smithy's — a walk which took no more than a few minutes — with something on my mind: a life-changing revelation that had been baking inside my head all day during my own slow drift down from a high. One particular idea was stuck in my head; I felt like a child who'd gotten on a Gravitron before realising I was going to get more than I'd bargained for. When I walked into Beck's house, the first thing I noticed was the aforementioned smell, and just as I came into the room, Beck picked up her iPad and started playing her favourite game —
Zombie Apocalypse
. Her forehead was deeply creased, like a plant that had not been watered for a long time; she had bags under her eyes, and lines on top of those bags. She also had a rather ominous-looking open sore, which had taken up one corner of her chin, and ran roughly half the length of her lips. It was weeping pus, and bleeding slightly. Her shoulders were slumped over. Her eyes seemed darker than normal, and bloodshot; they reminded me of a syringe when its water is mixed with blood.