The Ice Age (42 page)

I asked the researcher Nicole Lee, whose work I have quoted earlier in this book, what she thought of, respectively, decriminalisation and legalisation of meth. Lee told me that in general, she is in favour of decriminalisation of all illicit drugs:

Criminalisation is based on a conservative moral view about drugs and has been, globally, heavily driven by prohibitionist countries like the US and others (e.g. Sweden) for many decades. It increases harms and stigma and reduces our ability to provide treatment to those who need it. Treatment is more efficient and cost effective in reducing drug use and harms than policing. I think in Australia the couple of states that decriminalised cannabis show that it doesn't increase drug use or problems. And the Portuguese experience, a fairly bold move, shows more benefits than harms. Legalisation is a different, more complex issue, but I think decriminalisation is a good step to reducing harms among drug users and for the community.

Other supporters of decriminalisation include former Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Palmer, former New South Wales premier Bob Carr, and ASPI's Vern White. The ‘Geelong Our Town's ICE Fight' lead project officer Police Senior Sergeant Tony Francis has also called for decriminalisation. The
Geelong Advertiser
published his comments, along with a response from Premier Andrews, who has ruled out the possibility of decriminalising ice, as has Nationals senator Fiona Nash, who is both the assistant minister for health and the government head of the National Ice Taskforce that was launched on 7 April 2015.

Nash was actually quoted from a press release in which she plainly conflated legalisation and decriminalisation: ‘However, legalising the drug would send the message that ice is not dangerous. This is the wrong message to send. Legalising what is arguably the worst drug Australia has seen is madness.'

But it is again important to point out the nuance in this debate — Nash can hardly be characterised as a hard-liner, also saying: ‘During my recent 25,000-kilometre tour holding community consultations on ice — I've now done so in 12 regional communities — police of all ranks have repeatedly told me we can't arrest our way out of the ice problem. I've been open to new suggestions and understand a range of measures is needed. Education is key — we must teach our young people about the dangers of ice. There's no need to exaggerate the message — the truth is scary enough.'

Perhaps even more telling was that the then Abbott government appointed Ken Lay, former Victorian police commissioner, to the role of taskforce head. Lay's most famous remark about Australia's ice problem had been up to that point that ‘we can't arrest our way out of the ice problem'.

A Fairfax/Nielsen poll taken in 2012 found that two-thirds of Australians oppose decriminalisation. The poll showed 27 per cent of voters support decriminalisation, although that figure rose to 50 per cent of Greens and 34 per cent of Labor voters. Support among Liberal and National party voters was much lower, at 18 per cent. The poll results were almost exactly the same as they were when taken thirteen years earlier. Attitudes seem pretty fixed — just 4 per cent of respondents said they neither supported nor opposed decriminalisation, and 2 per cent said they did not know.

In any event, Australia will be unlikely to make any serious changes to criminalisation until there is a change in some of these international treaties, and for that to happen, it would need America's support.

Another side of the debate, and one that is similarly about the role of government, is the extent to which the harms associated with the crystal-meth surge are only symptomatic of other service gaps and social problems. The author James Fry, whose memoir
That Fry Boy
was released in early 2015, published an article in September 2015 in which he identified underfunding as the main problem facing people seeking access to appropriate drug and alcohol support:

Critics against the allocation of scarce public funds towards mental health are right to say that to bring the system up to an effective level, one that could rapidly respond to the Janes of the world when they need it most, would be very costly. But such critics fail to acknowledge that when we are not providing rapid access to mental-health treatment we default to providing far more costly responses to the problem. Largely this takes the form of law enforcement and emergency departments.

Fry's comments are important because they suggest that gaps in mental-health services are now joining up with gaps in drug and alcohol treatment, and, I would further suggest, with gaps in a lack of affordable housing to create ever-growing gaping holes.

It is, perhaps, worth reflecting here on the issue of ideology and the role of government. Since the 1980s, and under neoliberalism, the government's role has been, in theory at least, to help people help themselves, determined that it would not be seen as a panacea for all social ills. In another paper from 2011, ‘An assessment of illicit drug policy in Australia', Alison Ritter explored the move in the 1980s from governments ‘rowing' to ‘steering', suggesting that it has particularly impacted on drug policy and service provision. These changes in the provision of services, traditionally government-run and now privatised (including not-for-profits within this definition), are consistent with pluralised governance. Known by various terms — harnessing of non-state resources; co-production; multi-lateralisation; interagency/multi-agency partnerships; third-party policing; and hybrid governance — this new mentality reflects an acknowledgement that the state has limited resources, cannot manage everything in the best way, and that non-state actors can play an effective role.

Australia's crystal-meth surge occurred after the GFC, and while we came out of that largely unscathed, it did have an impact on unemployment, which rose from 4 per cent previously to 6 per cent by the start of 2010, and has since hovered somewhere between 5 per cent and 6.5 per cent. Since 2011, job vacancies have dropped around 25 per cent. Youth unemployment has been particularly high: in 2015, the official unemployment rate for 15–24-year-olds was, at 14 per cent, the highest since 1998. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's 2015 report showed that in 2013, 24.9 per cent of unemployed people reported that they had used illicit drugs in the past twelve months, compared with 16.8 per cent of employed people.

Former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett has said that one of the major reasons for the increasing prevalence of ice addiction is the growth in youth unemployment: ‘We don't have any idea of how we are going to grow society in a way that will provide employment for those who are out of work — and that's a failing of the political system on both sides,' he told
The
Sydney Morning Herald
in April 2015.

Geoff Munro from the Australian Drug Foundation told me he thinks that the cyclical nature of drug taking means that even if methamphetamine was taken out of the picture, a new and potentially more harmful drug may be abused in its place:

I think we have had a bit of a breakdown in our community and we need to re-think the way we operate. We need to create a better framework for our children, we need to re-engage the extended family in children's lives, we need to make sure children have a wider network who taken an interest in them. We need make sure schools are creating a better environment, we need to make sure we are building a society that overcomes social disadvantage and that is helping people build a king of emotional framework that is strong and deep enough so they don't feel the need to abuse drugs. We need better early intervention for mental health, we need actual psychologists in public schools, and we need to make sure schools are helping us build a cohesive society, were people feel like they have a place. Unless we look at what kind of society we are creating then all these other ways of treating problem drug users are merely a band-aid.

Chapter Sixteen

Beyond excess

STU FENTON, FORTY-TWO,
is ruggedly handsome and softly spoken. Ten years ago, he found that despite joining Narcotics Anonymous, and despite trying to take on what he was being taught, he was still going on crystal-meth binges. Nearly every time he did, he had recurring psychotic delusions: his prior sexual encounters were being shown on a television channel or being broadcast somewhere in a public space. It was either that, or he believed that the police were going to arrest and imprison him for something, or perhaps for nothing in particular — just for being himself.

Fenton told me that there was no apparent reason for when he called it quits other than he was exhausted. He moved into a residential rehab. He stayed for ten months. During that time, he thought through his early childhood on a rural Victorian farm, and, when searching his mind after I asked him for an example, he ummed and ahhed before finally saying: ‘It might sound trivial, but my dad never picked me up, never hugged me, never told he loved me.' Fenton grew up in his small country town to find other boys didn't like him because he was gay; this was during the 1980s, and at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

During his time in rehab, he began to feel a deep shame that he related back to his sexuality, and this shame played out in the delusion that his sex life was being played on televisions for all to see. These emotional realisations were only a starting point, though: ‘I think when I developed a belief in a higher power, that really finally allowed me to move on from drug abuse and drug addiction,' Fenton told me. ‘I am not talking about God, but something greater than yourself. Once I found that greater power then I started praying to it; it was like a life force, a higher intelligence, and it gave me a great sense of energy. It made me want to live life for the here and now.'

Over time he said he became ‘other-centred' instead of self-seeking. Today, nearly ten years clean, he said part of the process has been abstaining from
all
things — he hasn't had a drink of alcohol or smoked a cigarette since.

Jack Nagle (who you may remember as the guy who thought he was living in a ‘Truman Show' world) told me that he quit crystal meth shortly after that 10-day binge during which he smoked $7,500 worth of the drug. ‘It was standing in front of the mirror that I had a moment of clarity. It sounds funny to say, but the truth just kind of dawned on me — I stopped worrying about being filmed or being followed, and I just saw myself for what I was. I had dropped down to 66 kilos and for someone who is nearly 200 centimetres tall, that is bone-thin.'

After going through rehab, he, too, came to see his delusions of being recorded as having their roots in a deep sense of shame. ‘I think I was just quite insecure about myself … I always thought of myself as not being smart enough.'

Cassy McDonald sent me a Facebook message: ‘I did manage to get clean on my own without seeing a counsellor, but I found that when I quit I had a “feel for the steel” so I was shooting up water with syringe even after I stopped using just because I liked the routine of using it.'

In
Memoirs of an Addicted Brain
neuroscientist and former coke- and meth-addict Marc Lewis talks about a two-year period after a lifetime of drug use where his life was a ‘wide-open passage to nowhere'.

He described this time as consisting of periods of ‘resolve, even peacefulness, interspersed by bouts of depression'. Eventually Lewis starting working at a crisis centre for street kids; he became a development psychologist, and then a professor, before taking up his main gig in emotional neuroscience.

‘You could say my life became too full even to consider a return to drugs but that wouldn't tell the full story. Not at all the sculpting of synapses in my early twenties is irrevocable. The meaning of drugs, the imagined value they represent, is still inscribed in my orbito-frontal cortex … As is well known in addiction lore there is no final cure, just recovery, abstention and self-awareness. But there are happy endings.'

I found it tempting to write a joke here about how there are definitely ‘happy endings' to be found in crystal meth, particularly when one masturbates. More so, though, I was loath to write a ‘happy ending' when drug addiction more generally, and this book more specifically, deals with so many stories that end with anything but a meaningful resolution.

Writing an ending with a resolution is deeply problematic, too, when you consider the trajectory of Smithy and Beck. By the time I got to Melbourne, I was afraid to ask the few people I knew who had stayed in contact with them how they fared — particularly after they lost custody of the twins (and I was very conscious of my part in that).

And back in Melbourne, admittedly, I was often too deep in delusion or too distracted by simply surviving, to fully consider the fate of my former friends. Even the most terrible habits can be comfortable and comforting, and so, with no further ado, let me tell you about my crystal-meth relapse, which started in a half-empty, two-bedroom brick unit in Noble Park in early 2015. A relapse that must have occurred, let's see, about a week after I got back to Melbourne from Bundaberg. In truth — just as when I had left rehab in 2008 — I hadn't made a commitment to go 100 per cent clean. Despite seeing the obvious danger in using again, I had cravings for the drug, even on the plane (or especially on the plane because of the way it mimics
that
feeling) that made me daydream, shift excitedly on my seat, and begin to drool.

The night I relapsed I didn't actually seek it out, but drugs aren't hard to find when most of your friends are people you met through drugs or clubs. A guy named Steven who I had met in a nightclub about a decade prior contacted me via Facebook: he was moving out of his house, and asked if I wanted to come over and ‘hang out in the garage'. When I got there, I found that he was off his dial on crystal meth, and we soon ordered more. I smoked it and smoked it and smoked it all night with him in that musty, cluttered garage — sitting on an esky, on a cool summer night, as we plummeted the pleasurable ‘depths' of our bullshit and shallow self-love. In fact, it is fair to say I smoked until I went cross-eyed, and until I got out a piece of paper and started writing. I did some work on a creative writing piece, and for some reason during this, I started thinking about a bad argument I had with one of Steven's friends many moons earlier. I began to think that he had only invited me over to make fun of me, and that what we'd smoked wasn't really crystal meth. Then everything Steven said began to be interpreted through this psychotic prism — my ideas were resistant to whatever he said, so resistant that everything he said simply reinforced the idea that he was up to something really quite sinister. So even when he broke into his own psychosis, and believed that police had surrounded the house (Steven has never got into trouble with the law), I thought that this, too, was part of his nasty plot against me.