The Ice Age (6 page)

‘How?'

I looked at Smithy with his blotchy skin, a confused expression on his face, and the swabs, two used syringes, and used spoons sitting on either side of him.

‘I can tell you this, Smithy, because you're a good bloke and my friend, and I can be honest with you: your skin, the way you look, you've lost so much weight, you don't work anymore — '

‘There's nothing wrong with the way I look,' he said, his face flushed with blood. ‘All this boils down to is people talking about me. I knew it, I knew it, I had a feeling this was going on. Arseholes saying shit about me behind my back, spreading shit, saying I'm a fucking paedophile, Beck telling people not to visit me. Why does no fucking cunt visit me? Because people are fucking spreading shit, that's why. So next time someone says Smithy is a junkie, why not, rather than just accept it as gospel, come and ask me if it's true?'

‘So are you?'

‘Am I what?'

‘Y'know, a junkie?'

‘No!' he roars. ‘It's fucking Beck. She's just trying to fucking cover for her own fuck-ups—'

‘You mean cover for her own meth use?'

‘No fuckwit — to cover-up for New Year's Eve,' he said. ‘I suppose you're going to take her side about that as well?'

And so we moved on to the topic of New Year's Eve, when he was convinced Beck stole his acid, and had sex with one of his friends in the bushes.

Before I moved into the house, I had asked Beck about her meth use as well. Like Smithy, she would ask for evidence, and when I provided it she would dispute it. At other times, she wouldn't answer directly, but would instead put her hand on my knee and say something like, ‘I know your heart's in the right place, mate.' Then she'd change the topic to something she knew would interest me, before I had the chance to realise that that was what she'd done.

Meth users are often highly paranoid, and genuinely lose track of the ‘truth' somewhere along the way. In most circumstances, they wouldn't answer a trusted friend honestly about how much they were using, even if they
did
have the self-awareness to monitor it. And it's extremely difficult to keep track of meth use, as a user's perception of time speeds up at the same time as their reasoning skills slow down.

Beck and Smithy would not be the kind of people to answer government surveys — or, at least, not honestly — and nor did they ever get medical treatment for their addictions. I wonder how many other meth addicts answer phone surveys by saying they either don't use meth very much or perhaps not at all, while they are surrounded by their used needles, with tin foil wrapped around their heads. I know from my own experience that meth can eat away at your self-awareness
—
to put it mildly — so the idea that there are accurate national records about how many people use meth, how much meth is used, and the harm that arises from it, makes me deeply suspicious. And when I see how low the most respected survey, the government's National Drug Strategy Household Survey (NDSHS), shows meth use to be, my suspicions are heightened. Why? The NDSHS, which is carried out by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), reports that the prevalence of methamphetamine use in Australia and Victoria has remained relatively stable since 2001. This puts meth use at around 2.5 per cent of the population.

This raises a critical question: why would the NDSHS indicate no increase in the number of people using meth, when we are all so convinced it is such a problem? Are their surveys unreliable? Or is it the case that we are in the grip of a moral panic over meth that's affecting a far smaller cohort than we assume, and that I, for instance, was always wrong to assume that, just because I had known people who were addicted and didn't want to admit it, this was a broad social problem?

Indeed, on the other side of the debate, there are those who suggest that there is no ‘meth epidemic' — that meth is not a disease or virus-like problem that is spreading uncontrollably around the community. Some suggest that the sense of crisis we have about the drug is driven by a media beat-up, self-interested bureaucracies, and health agencies trying to get more funding, and by politicians driving their own agendas. Professor David Moore, for example, says that the public conversation around methamphetamine tends to be simplistic, panic-driven, and hyperbolic, leading to the perception that methamphetamine use is more prevalent and dangerous than the evidence suggests it is.

Could it be that our collective understanding of the ‘meth problem' is being driven by a panicked approach that fails to take into account individual responsibility and pre-existing human foibles? Or, conversely, is this perspective a kind of relativist, media-studies framework that waters down the reality that meth abuse causes genuine human suffering?

Moore and his co-author Robin Dwyer, in an article published in the
International Journal of Drug Policy
in 2013, do not definitively answer this question, but they do argue that catastrophising messages not only stigmatise users and reduce their willingness to get treatment, but also that disproportionate attitudes may lead to hard-line, punitive legal approaches to drugs that will inevitably make the situation worse. The pair also suggest that:

Policy and health promotion concerning methamphetamine should: (i) develop a less alarmist and more nuanced portrayal of the relationship between methamphetamine use and psychosis; (ii) avoid portraying psychosis (or hallucinations, visions and paranoia) as always and inevitably distressing and pathological — such messages are unlikely to resonate with consumers … and (iii) avoid representing methamphetamine consumers as out-of-control, dangerous, threatening, and irrational.

Another viewpoint is that of Columbia University's charismatic, dreadlocked associate professor of psychiatry Carl Hart, who Moore cites as a significant influence on his work. ‘Drug panics are a natural response to any threatening problem, but such panics are often exploited to advance the power, prestige, or financial interests of individuals and institutions claiming ownership of the problem,' Hart says.

Hart argues that it is moral panic and media hysteria that distorts the truth about meth, and not the attitudes of the users themselves. One of the most salient points about the meth phenomenon is that the ‘vast majority of meth users are not addicted,' he says, and that when a drug user is doing poorly in life, drugs become the scapegoat. ‘People stop looking for other reasons for problems once they know drugs are involved … that way, you don't have to look at more complicated problems.'

Bearing all this in mind, there is nevertheless strong evidence about increasing meth use in Australia that is hard to repudiate. When we look at the health figures, and hear stories from people working on the front line, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the meth problem is getting worse. Nationally, the number of amphetamine-related hospital admissions recorded in 2011–12 (2,895) was the highest since 1993–94 (which was, incidentally, the year that the first shipments of powdered methamphetamine arrived in Australia, as well as the year that ecstasy reached its peak popularity). What's more, these admissions had steadily increased over the previous three years. The figures from the health department are backed up not just by dozens of anecdotal reports by frontline workers, but by the crime statistics: the number of national arrests for all amphetamines (including ecstasy and speed) in Australia reached an all-time high of 22,189 over the 2012–13 period, which was a 32 per cent increase on the previous year. The number of clandestine laboratories detected nationally had more than doubled within a decade, increasing from 358 in 2003–04 to 757 in 2012–13. There was a 6.4 per cent decrease in the number of clandestine laboratories detected in Australia late in this period — from 809 in 2011–12 to 757 a year later — which was the first decrease since 2006–07. Despite this decrease, it was still the second-highest number of detections per year on record. Statistics and figures from state health departments also back the idea that the meth problem is ascending, as do the stories from rehab managers who say they now have a greater proportion of people seeking help because of methamphetamine.

So what's going on here? Are official government surveys failing to capture a group of transient, paranoid users who never seek help, lack the self-awareness to answer research groups properly, and lie about whether or not they are using meth (let alone whether or not it is causing them harm or psychosis)? Or are these surveys not even reaching the population group — such as the homeless, the mentally ill, and prisoners — who are statistically more likely to take meth?

This seems to be a controversial issue. The National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC) declined to provide a person to be interviewed on whether the NDSHS figures were accurate, although a spokesperson conceded that their research doesn't cover homeless or imprisoned populations. Indeed, slightly different research cohorts might be part of the confusing impressions left in the media. An NDARC spokesperson, Lucy Burns, told
The Guardian
Australia that:

The AIHW [the NDSHS] was a general population survey — which means they don't concentrate on people who might actually be in the drug market.

Perhaps, though, the answer is both simpler and more nuanced than it first seems. If you look more closely at the NDSHS data, you'll see that while meth use per capita isn't increasing, there has been a significant increase in the proportion of users taking it daily or weekly (from 9.3 per cent to 15.5 per cent), particularly among ice users (from 12.4 per cent to 25.3 per cent) between 2010 and 2013. What's more, it also shows that use of the less potent meth powder decreased significantly from 51 per cent to 29 per cent, while the use of ice (or crystal methamphetamine) more than doubled, from 22 per cent in 2010 to 50 per cent in 2013. From this, it can be concluded that while crystal meth is not taking over the community in ‘pandemic proportions', many existing drug users — who once had hold of their drug use — are slipping into potentially addictive behaviour because a more potent drug is on the market. The fact that amphetamine users are using methamphetamine more often could also explain why there is more harm being caused. Crystal meth isn't ‘recruiting' people with no drug history; instead, casual users of powdered meth — often referred to as ‘speed' or just ‘meth' — and ecstasy have found themselves taking a more powerful and far more addictive version of the class of drugs that they had thus far been able to use in moderation (although this may change as younger generations come through without prior experience of any other drugs, and find that crystal meth is available in the same way ecstasy or powdered meth has been for previous generations who eventually graduated to crystal-meth use). In this regard, we can say that while crystal meth is a significant social problem, there isn't really a ‘meth epidemic' — at least not if we define ‘epidemic' as a thing that spreads through the general community like an infectious disease — because it's pre-existing amphetamine users (not the population at large) who are being affected, albeit often very seriously.

In February 2016, NDARC released a report conducted by a research team that went beyond population surveys and instead measured data on treatment episodes for amphetamines, including people seeking counselling, rehabilitation, detoxification, and hospitalisation. The team, led by Professor Louisa Degenhardt, concluded that ‘the number of regular methamphetamine users has almost tripled from 90,000 in 2009–2010 to 268,000 in 2013–2014'. Noting that their figures provided us with the first ‘quantitative estimate of the scale of the problem of methamphetamine use in Australia', the study warned that methamphetamine dependence had more than doubled in people aged between fifteen and twenty-four between 2009–10 and 2013–14: ‘Worryingly 1.14 per cent of young people aged 15–24 are estimated to be dependent on the drug compared with only 0.4 per cent in 2009–2010' the report, published in
The
Medical Journal of Australia
, said.

ACC figures indicate that methamphetamine purity has risen, in Victoria, from approximately 20 per cent in the 2010–11 reporting period to more than 75 per cent in the 2012–13 period. In New South Wales, it rose over the same period from 9.5 per cent purity to 68 per cent; in Queensland, from 13 per cent to 52 per cent; in South Australia, from 31 per cent to 54 per cent; in West Australia, from 32 per cent to 50 per cent; and in Tasmania, from 9 per cent to 64 per cent.

Why is this purity rising? Over the last four years there has been far more methamphetamine coming into Australia from developing countries, particularly through the postal system via airmail. While we used to have powdered meth, the crystallised form is now far more common, and this form of the drug is far more potent (although, to confuse matters, they are both referred to as just ‘meth' in street slang). Powdered meth and crystal meth are made the same way, with the same ingredients; it's just that ‘crystallising' the ‘base' involves a few more steps in the process.

The vast majority of the 500,000 Australians who used meth in the last twelve months are
not
dependent on it (though this does not necessarily mean that meth isn't having a negative impact on their lives). Dependence is a slippery concept in meth, but generally — if we accept that the official statistics are accurate — most meth users use occasionally, and most (although I remain suspicious of this self-reporting statistic, for reasons already stated) do not report harms such as psychosis, or commit crimes. Australia Bureau of Statistics drug-market modellers have calculated that there are approximately ten times more ‘occasional' users of methamphetamine than there are ‘heavy users'. This is not the case with heroin, where they estimate ‘heavy users' outnumber ‘occasional users'. Rebecca McKetin, a fellow at ANU's College of Medicine, Biology and Environment, estimates that there are around 100,000 addicts, or about 20 per cent of this number. (Addict' refers to someone who is using more than once a week.)