The Ice Age (22 page)

‘Beck, mate, there is something I have to tell you.'

‘Mmmm?'

‘It's about Smithy,' and at the mention of his name, her face lit up a little. ‘I've been in a real panic; I think Smithy has been fucking me, y'know. He hasn't really been giving me meth; he's been giving me acid, and everyone has been laughing at me behind my back. He just took $700 off me; he knew I would say yes because I was on acid. Because I have been getting in all these vortexes, y'know, and wanking constantly, and I've never had meth which has done this before and I think it's because he's charging me for meth and just giving me acid trips and I think everyone is in on it.'

And on I went — and on and on — and Beck's expression didn't change much, but her ears pricked up each time I mentioned Smithy. Eventually she interjected with, ‘Smithy is a psychopath, Luke, he would have done that.'

‘Has he, Beck?'

‘I don't know, maybe. Stealing money is the kind of thing he would do. Ring him, Luke. Ring him and tell him what you think is going on.'

And so she handed me the phone, having already dialled the number, and said, ‘Ask him, ask him.'

‘Hello,' Smithy answered in his deep, gravelly voice.

‘Smithy, I gave you $100 last night,' I said. ‘And I didn't feel shit; it's nothing like the meth I had the other week, I feel like shit now.'

‘I fucking told you it was shit gear, you gave me the money anyway,' he said.

‘Here's my theory, Smithy — you took my portion, and then gave me acid instead,' and then I left a long silence, waiting for him to put his foot in it.

Emboldened, I took a deeper jab. ‘Go on Smithy, I'm listening,' I said.

‘How could you fucking say that about me, you are supposed to be my friend, fuck you, you are a fucking arsehole. I gave you acid the other day, remember, does it feel like this meth does?'

And I think honestly and deeply, and I guess it doesn't …

‘Well, does it?' he asked.

‘No,' I said, realising that this was yet another paranoid delusion that had built up, bit by bit, over the day.

‘And you didn't give me $100, you gave me $700 — and that was for rent and drugs in advance — remember?'

‘Oh,' I said, as my panic turned to relief and then to guilt. ‘I'm sorry, seems I got a bit paranoid. Can we perhaps just put this one behind us?'

Smithy started laughing and said, ‘I'll see you later on, we need to go and get more gear.'

My fear having been alleviated, all I could sense was the smell of shit, as Beck explained that her cat had gone senile. The odour was becoming unbearable; I got up and followed the smell to find a sloppy, mousse-like turd on the floor of the bathroom. There were a few blowflies buzzing around it. The cat ran up to me — poor old George, the ginger cat with the gimpy foot that Beck had taken in — and started meowing around my legs. I noticed all the doors were shut, so I opened one, and he immediately ran outside and started pissing like a hose.
George wasn't senile at all
, I thought. Beck hadn't been opening the door for him. More to the point, she didn't need to get him put down. Beck — in her state — was undoing all her good deeds.

I cleaned up after the cat, and went back into the lounge room, where I sat on the couch next to Beck. Tears fell down my cheeks. Beck saw this, and turned back to her iPad.

‘People were just so horrible to me, for no reason, no fucking reason. I had so many friends, Beck, everyone liked me — and then suddenly nobody would be my friend — nobody!' I said.

My sobbing turned into howling, and upon hearing this, Beck put down her iPad and picked up her book — a second-hand geology book about the structure and metamorphosis of rocks. Something seemed to have drained out of Beck; it seemed to have drained out of the ever-growing hole in her arm. She was so sick of giving a fuck. Nobody ever gave a fuck about her. Nobody ever stuck up for her, patted her on the back when she talked about the torment she had experienced. The same people who picked on her went on to have careers, mortgages, husbands, and twice as many Facebook friends.

She believed that all my paranoia was a symptom of my narcissism; that I wanted everything to revolve around me. Her facial expression had moved slowly over the hour from fatigued to embittered. She was still reading her book on rocks, which was now half covering her face. I had a feeling of clarity, as if I had been working on a maths problem all day, and had just had a ‘Eureka!' moment, where all the faulty reasoning and wrong turns seemed worth it to get to this point.

My anxiety lifted along with my psychotic fog. ‘You know what, Beck?' I said. ‘You haven't been very sympathetic.'

She peered over at me. ‘I'm sick,' she said.

This lit my fuse.

‘You're always sick, Beck — always. What's wrong this time?'

‘I've got sinus pain.'

‘So you can't comfort me because you've got a blocked nose?'

She gave me an evil look.

‘Ohhh, isn't that sad,' I continued. ‘Poor little Beck has got a blocked nose.'

Beck jolted, as if she'd received an electric shock, and shouted, ‘Perhaps I would have given you a bit more sympathy, Luke, if you haven't had sat there crying
like a fucking girl
.'

And then it was on.

Let me interject here for a second, and state what is probably obvious — I was in the beginnings of my crystal-meth binge. I had been using for about a month. I had become a little preoccupied myself, with maybes, and apparently probable — to me, at least — theories, and possible subterfuge. By this stage, my mission — to investigate crystal meth — had almost been forgotten. This was supposed to be my daring comeback into journalism, my chance to prove the haters wrong. I was here to cut through the spin and the hearsay reportage, and to find out precisely why meth had made a comeback of its own — into my life, and into the lives of many others — and was wreaking such havoc. Even if it wasn't the sort of havoc that made the news, and it was nothing like the havoc on the anti-meth adverts, it was havoc, nonetheless. The average drug-user — the one who used ecstasy and stayed away from heroin — was finding profound new highs in a substance that few of us had ever tried ever before, let alone understood. I, for one, was too involved in my elaborate paranoia to realise that what I was taking now was crystal meth, and that what I had been taking for the past few years had been powdered meth. This fact had been obscured to me by another fact: I had started injecting drugs again for the first time since my brief heroin foray in 2007.

When I first took the crystallised variety of meth at Smithy's in early 2015, I had no idea I was taking something different, and I wonder how many users were in the same boat. The fact that so many different substances are all referred to as ‘meth' only adds to the confusion. I thought the reason it felt so much stronger was that I was injecting it again, but it wasn't that simple.

The key to understanding how crystal meth came to supersede powdered meth in Australia is in, as explored in previous chapters, the growth of the production and consumption of the former in South-East Asia. Figures from the Australian Crime Commission show that while there was a 15 per cent increase in domestic lab detections between 2010–11 and 2011–12, and a steady increase over the past ten years, this figure did not compare to the enormous increase in international imports. And what was being imported was either crystal meth (which until very recently was almost certainly not being made here) or much more potent varieties of powdered meth.

The statistics on border detections tell a large part of Australia's crystal-meth story. The peak year for border detections of amphetamines between 2003 and 2011 was just under 600 detections in 2006–07 (years are counted in financial years), equalling about the same in kilograms. During many of the years throughout the 2000s, border amphetamine detections were at near negligible levels; for the year 2010–11, less than 100 kilograms were detected, and in 2011–12 there were about 300 kilograms discovered, relating to 1000 detections (then the highest number of detections on record).

Then, in 2012–13, the number rose to 1,999 detections. Yes, you did read that correctly, and it meant that the amount of meth being smuggled into our country increased by about 700 per cent, in terms of weight, from 2010 to 2013. The 2012–13 record high was eclipsed a year later, in 2013–14, by the new record of 2,367 detections.

As a result of the sharp increase in the amount of high-purity meth coming across the border, meth's purity in Australia saw a rise from an annual average of 21 per cent in 2009 to 64 per cent in 2013. In Victoria, the purity of meth rose from about 20 per cent in 2010–11 to more than 75 per cent in 2012–13. All in all, in the decade since 2004, the purity of methamphetamine (ice and speed) in Australia has generally increased, ranging between a median of 4.4 per cent and 76 per cent. The Victorian police — whose state records the highest purity — have labelled this a major factor in the meth problem: higher purity makes the drug more addictive.

And it wasn't just more pure; there was also more of it.

The reported use of powdered methamphetamine fell significantly between 2010 and 2013, but the reported use of crystal meth — what we by now knew as ice — more than doubled. People were also using ice more frequently, with many people using it daily or weekly. First, the
number of methamphetamine users
who prefer ice to other types of methamphetamine doubled from 27 per cent in 2007, and 22 per cent in 2010, to 50 per cent in 2013. The proportion of people using it at least weekly grew from 9.3 per cent in 2010 to 15.5 per cent in 2013. There was a corresponding increase in people seeking treatment at drug and alcohol clinics. The proportion of treatment ‘episodes' where methamphetamine was the principal drug of concern
doubled
from 7 per cent in 2009–10 to 14 per cent in 2012–13.

The 2013–14 Australian Customs and Border Protection Service Annual Report shows crystal-meth detections by kilogram at our border. And when I say border, I should explain that crystal meth is mainly found amid the letters and parcels coming in via international post. According to data from the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, 86 per cent of all crystal meth is coming via the parcel post, with another 9.5 per cent coming in via air cargo. According to data from the ACC, no fewer than 49 countries were identified as countries of origin over the 2012–13 period. However, to simplify things somewhat: three territories account for 88 per cent of the total detections (when measured by weight). They are Hong Kong (96 detections, weighing a total of 224.1 kilograms); Thailand (43 detections, weighing a total of 313.9 kilograms); and China (8 detections weighing a total of 1224.6 kilograms). Therefore, based on figures of what is actually intercepted (2000 detections totaling 2,138.5 kilograms during that period), more than half of the amphetamines that are imported here are coming from the world's biggest nation.

Yep, China: the world's most populous nation is third behind the US and Mexico on the global meth pie chart, and is where most of our meth is coming from (this doesn't mean it's all being
made
in China, but it is certainly the major transit point). Indeed, meth is big business in China: confiscations of meth pills went up 1,500 per cent across the nation in the four-year period from 2008 to 2012. There is mounting evidence that the nation is actually supplying the cartels with precursors — that is, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine — which isn't surprising when you consider that the country is filled with, and surrounded by, ephedra plants.

According to UNODC, the average street price per gram of methamphetamine in China is A$105, whereas in Australia it is $500. Wholesale prices in Australia have been recorded as ranging from A$90,000 to A$325,000 per kilogram.

And to be even more specific: thanks to United Nations data, we know that most of the meth coming to Australia from China originates in Guangdong, a province of over 100 million people on the South China Sea.

To give you an idea of where the meth so many Australians are taking is being made, and just how engaged some of these southern China communities are in meth production and distribution, let me take you to a little Guangdong village called Boshe. Boshe is isolated, right on the coastline. It has no more than 1,700 households, and the last official estimate put the village population at approximately 14,000. Boshe isn't much to look at — in fact, it's like the worst of the old and new worlds deliberately came together on the marshy, sandy flatlands of the Southern Chinese coast to highlight what happens when a society fails. Boshe resembles some kind of mythic dystopia, with a mix of rural despair, urban decay, a few trees, abandoned buildings, cramped living, and a Technicolor dream-coat of plastic rubbish enmeshed in the soil just about everywhere you step. Amid this ghetto-come-junkyard — though it's not quite bleak enough to be classified a slum — if you were to walk through the mud, the pollution, and the litter, you would most likely notice an acidic, cat-piss-like odour that hits your nose like a bunch of blunt needles. The closer you look at the piles of garbage dumped around vacant housing lots, the more you notice the used glass flasks and other lab equipment, surrounded by pools of sludge.