The Ice Age (38 page)

The report also said that many working on the frontline had a lack of expertise in the area of crystal-methamphetamine use, and that many frontline agencies reported feeling pessimistic about their ability to treat crystal-meth addicts. This isn't uncommon, though: professor of criminal justice at Illinois State University Ralph Weisheit writes in his book
Methamphetamine: its history, pharmacology, and treatment
that pessimism about treatments for a problem drug is often prevalent in the early and peak stages of a drug surge. His review of research showed that about 50 per cent of crystal-meth addicts remained clean for twelve months after completing a residential treatment — about the same rate as for other drugs.

Research by Rebecca McKetin compared 248 former crystal-meth users treated in a rehabilitation program, 112 in a detox program, and 101 meth users who weren't undergoing any treatment at the time, but were still attempting to give up the drug. Over a three-year period, McKetin and her researchers estimated that rehab resulted in 48 per cent of people remaining abstinent from the drug, compared to 15 per cent in the other groups. This tallies with research undertaken by health journalist and former alcoholic Anne Fletcher. In her spectacularly comprehensive book,
Inside Rehab: the surprising truth about addiction treatment and how to get help that works
, she details the high dropout rates of rehab, reporting that 40–60 per cent of those who complete a program end up relapsing. Alcoholic Anonymous' rates are even lower, she says, with some studies showing that just 10 per cent of people who go through the program stay clean.

One gets the sense that many of us, even the experts, are still very much learning about what works for all sorts of drug addictions. Perhaps this is because for so long, drug addiction was treated as a crime or a type of vagrancy (perhaps it still is in an indirect sense), and so medical treatment approaches don't have a particularly long history. And, given that they are medical approaches, they tend to focus on the individual rather than on the social or cultural factors surrounding them. One also gets the feeling that nobody really knows yet what the best approach to drug addiction is. Many people regard drug use as a simple choice, and drug addiction as a moral failing. On the other hand, drug use is also the domain of celebrities and artists — making it seem vaguely glamorous, and even an assertion of autonomy and identity in some circumstances.

And as crystal meth is a relatively recent drug, particularly in Australia, individual treatment solutions are still in their early stages. Along with a lack of rehab services (discussed in detail in Chapter 15) many professionals are unsure of the best way to treat crystal-meth addicts. As a result, many recovering addicts are writing their own scripts about how best to recover, with varying results.

I had been through rehab before and it helped, but ultimately it didn't work; one of the mistakes I made was believing that once the ‘problem drug' was gone, then most of my other problems would also disappear. I learnt the benefits of exercise, reading, helping others, and getting fully absorbed into doing something that I loved — but things still had this bitter taste, and there were ripple effects from my time in the house which seemed as if they would never still.

Then came my book deal, this wonderful book deal, and somehow it seemed that my struggles had managed to fulfil a purpose. Many people suddenly found me fascinating and insightful, and I was contacted by national media outlets from all over the country.

In the weeks after I moved to Bundaberg, I had hoped that Nathaniel and I might be able to rekindle our relationship. I sent him seven emails telling him how much I missed him, and that I was worried about him. After six weeks of not replying he sent an email asking, ‘Do you have any money I can have?'

Beck had not responded to any of my messages since I left the house, and was reportedly very angry I was writing this book. My mum initially seemed pleased, but soon took to Facebook, linking to my article in
The Saturday Paper
and sharing details of my life that I felt breached my privacy.

I was also fielding calls from Stacey, Beck's sister, in which she said, ‘I've seen what is going on Luke, and I know you've seen what is going on. I'm going to ring child protection and I think you should do the same.'

She told me that Beck had continued using crystal meth right through the winter and deep into the spring, as well as the never-ending iPad game-playing that went with it. The arguments between her and Smithy worsened as Beck became increasingly worried that he was seeing another woman, and that she might be missing out on her share of meth. One day, things boiled over — a stoush started when they were both coming down, and both at their worst. Things got physical, and Smithy hit Beck in the mouth right in front of Alice.

At one stage, Beck sat outside Smithy's house, screaming and tooting the horn for over an hour. She had a physical scuffle with one of his housemates out the front, and eventually the neighbours called the police and she was arrested; Smithy would then get an intervention order preventing her from going near him or the twins. Following this, Beck went to stay at her mum's, who became increasingly confused by her changing stories about people getting raped in their house or Smithy gang-banging her friends, or her outbursts about why it was wrong to feed wild birds just an hour after she had been doing it herself.

Stacey kept sending me Facebook messages urging me to go to child protection — but knowing that I was still angry with Beck and Smithy, I said I wanted to wait a bit longer before I made the call.

Amid all this, I decided that with my book advance, I would book a ticket overseas to anywhere — anywhere would be fine — so I picked a flight to Kuala Lumpur for February, the cheapest flight I could find.

I started going on long half-day hikes around town, through bushland, lakeside parks, sugar cane fields, and outlying suburbs of Bundaberg. I walked for hours at a time, counting birds, trying to work out which plants were native and which were introduced, day-dreaming. Every day I would find a new route, or, at least, a new street; one day, when I was walking along the great Burnett River, I took a slight detour and came across a set of buildings in 1970s yellow brick. There must have been seven or eight of them, resembling a small hospital or prison.

There was a sign out of the front: ‘Bridges, Drug and Alcohol Centre, Dual Diagnosis Clinic'.

I walked in to see a woman with dark eyes and blonde hair, who asked for my details as ‘What a girl wants, what a girl needs' played in the background. She took me into a small room where I told her my story, and she booked me an appointment. Three days later, I was back at the clinic — to my surprise, my appointment was with the same woman who had been at reception the day I first walked in.

When we sat down, in a much larger interview room, my back to the window, and its view of palm trees, bamboo, and sugar cane, I detected a delightful mix of rattiness and sensitivity about her. She told me her name was Jay, and that she would be looking at the ‘underlying issues' that led to my addictive behaviour, and that her therapeutic approach was based largely on CBT — the same therapy that I had undergone during my stay in residential rehab in 2008, and which was designed to help someone identify their ‘unhelpful thoughts and behaviours', and to learn or relearn ‘healthier skills and habits'.

I relayed what had happened over the past three months, which became a rapid overview of my life: the bullying at high school — how it cost me three years, how I didn't think I would ever heal from it, how my parents failed to protect me — and the failed demo at triple j, which had effectively cost me my first career.

She observed me with concentration as I told the story, and at the end she said: ‘I don't want to sound clichéd, Luke, and I do understand some of the things you are talking about. I came from an abusive background and I am a perfectionist — I often just let go altogether when things go wrong — but the one thing that I have learnt, the thing that gets me through, is the ability to take everything bad I have been through, and use it to find my strengths. I've found that if I talk about my strengths, think about my strengths, and if I concentrate on them, I feel better about myself, and my life gets better.'

She went to say that my negative experiences has also had positive effects: that they had made me more compassionate, and that the person I was had been formed by my negative experiences. Although this made sense to me, I was also cynical of anything that might seem like a ‘lightning bolt' or epiphany, not only because I was distrusting my own brain, but also because I had been through rehab before, and had all these big ‘realisations' only to then became a drug abuser again.

One mistake I was determined
not
to repeat from my last rehab was to be overly optimistic about life when I stopped using the drug. After rehab in 2008, I felt as if the world was glowing with goodness by the time I got out. I believed everything depended on me only, that self-responsibility was virtually omnipotent. Then once I got out, I had the same job at the ABC with limited opportunities to work anywhere else; the same nepotism and celebration of mediocrity which drove me to madness; the same lack of affordable housing; 90 per cent of people still frustrated me, and the only people I liked were other drug users. The idea that your life is purely the result of willpower is quite simply at odds with reality. The notion of addiction is, in part, a modern, liberal idea: individual freedom is thought to be potentially limitless, but opportunity and experience will also be limited by economics, talent, practicability, other people, the body, and life in general.

I wanted my beliefs to be
realistic
not convenient. I can't make myself believe in a higher power, fatalism, or the essential goodness of things purely because it might be more psychologically healthy and spiritually fulfilling to do so. Fatalism can leave one dangerously passive. A belief in a higher power can lead to an abrogation of responsibility — and besides, when everything is said and done, I'm just not sure I see the world that way. During my recovery, I often wondered if my addiction would have still been seen as such a problem if I had endless amounts of money, didn't bother anybody, worked a lot, still looked okay, and didn't need anywhere to live.

My adult life has been filled with drug use, and the five years in which I wasn't using weren't especially joy-filled or exciting. My friends of ten, fifteen, twenty years are all drug takers, and many of my friendships have been formed around taking drugs. I have had trouble forming relationships outside of this, finding excitement outside of drugs, and escaping pits of despair even when I'm clean. One possible solution I have considered is to use occasionally, but with that said — that's what I did last time I left rehab, and I believe now that I sold myself short with this approach. I stopped looking forward to things, I stopped pushing myself, I stopped achieving things, I stopped living life to the fullest because I knew I could disappear into a drug world.

In my friendless state in the aftermath of my addiction, the drug seemed to have created an abyss of strange, new needs; it seemed that the crystal palace would never be destroyed, even when its spell was broken. Sociologist Emilé Durkheim says human desire is a bottomless and insatiable pit, and that the world we live in is full of never-ending wants; this leads to ‘anomie', which is the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community, and which creates a sense of purposelessness.

Stacey kept on emailing me to ask if I was going to ring child protection, and eventually I decided it was probably the right thing to do — it would, at the very least, force Beck and Smithy to get their act together. When I rang, I was transferred to a woman with a thick Indian accent, and I told her pretty much everything you have read about in this book, including my involvement in it. Beck already — for reasons I'm not aware of — had a case manager at the Child Protection Unit (CPU). This case manager kept on pressing me on whether I had colluded with other people who had been to the house to report Beck and Smithy. I told her that I had spoken with Stacey, and that neither of us had any contact with anybody else who had been to the house. As it turned out, three other regular visitors to the house had also reported them to the department. Eventually, a formal investigation was initiated, and both were asked to take drug tests, or risk losing their children.

Not long after the CPU investigation started, Beck stopped taking drugs, and, by all reports, enjoyed the novelty of her sobriety. Smithy refused to take the drug tests. Beck did everything the child-protection department asked her to do. She starting seeing a psychiatrist, and she continued to pass her drug tests. As the investigations continued, however, more pus was found festering just beneath the surface. When they rang Pakenham primary school, they found that Alice — the middle child, who was then in Year 6 — had missed nearly a month of school days. Now that they lived in the town, fifteen minutes' drive away from the school, Beck had not been getting up in the morning to take her. When the department spoke with Beck's family, they would tell them that she had been disappearing for days, and sometimes a week at a time, to go to Smithy's — without warning — leaving Alice alone, and without a lift to school. When Beck
did
come back, she was usually so tired she would sleep for two or three days at a times, leaving it to her mother to cook and clean for Alice. The department would eventually make an order that it was Beck's mum's responsibility to take Alice to school.