The Ice Age (9 page)

In April 1981, Rob Smith was seven years old. Waking up one morning in his cosy three-bedroom brick house, on the foothills of the Melbourne's tree fern-covered Dandenong Ranges, his ears fixed on a strange howl coming from somewhere inside the house.

He followed the sound. His feet tapped along the cold floorboards, past a picture of a little English cottage surrounded by autumn trees. The path took him to his mother's room. The door was half-open, and his mother was sobbing on the end of her bed, her head resting on her left hand. Feeling his stare, she sat up, wiping her face with her hands. She smiled at her son, saying in her soft voice: ‘Hello, darling, how ya feelin' this morning? You're awake very early, mate.'

He trotted up to her and wrapped his hands gently around her neck. His face pressed against hers, and he felt the hotness of her tears as they soaked into his skin. She smelt like make-up, hairspray, and sweat. She smelt like his mummy. He didn't understand why she was crying, though, and instinctively he began to sob as well.

‘Dad's gone,' she said with a look of anguished, apologetic horror.

She told him to go back to bed. As he lay down, he could hear his mother's howls starting up again, more intensely, and she continued right through the morning.

In 1996, two awkward teenagers were sitting by the fire, wrapped in blankets, drinking sugary tea and enjoying each other's company at 2.00am on a Sunday. Those teenagers were Beck and me, and the lounge room was in her parent's musty, homely place in our rough bush-town. Beck had turned off
Rage
over an hour before; the open fire was only just still burning, and fatigue was slowing her monologue and slurring her words.

‘Some people are good at sport or maths, some people are pretty,' she explained. ‘I don't think I'm good at anything. I was hopeless at netball, I dropped out of school, and the best I ever got was a B. I'm not particularly good-looking, I don't even really have an identity — I'm not really
anyone
. Do you get what I mean?'

Beck continued at length, detailing all the things she wasn't good at before concluding:

‘The only thing I am good at is giving people money, and the only time I am happy is when I am sick. I really like
Trainspotting
and
Pulp Fiction
. It's just so cool, and they have so much fun, and I know this sounds really awful, so don't, like, tell anyone this, but I am thinking about becoming like a junkie — it makes you somebody.'

I didn't answer. The fire fizzled out. We both fell asleep.

In 1919, methamphetamine hydrochloride was synthesised by Nagayoshi's protégé, the Japanese pharmacologist Akira Ogata. Ogata was experimenting with Nagayoshi's formula and its base materials when he made a reduction of ephedrine using red phosphorus and iodine, producing the world's first batch of crystallised meth.

Today, the street slang for meth confuses the fact there are actually three distinct formulas: ‘speed' (which is amphetamine sulphate); Nagayoshi's ‘meth' (which is the powdered meth that has been in Australia since about the mid-1990s); and Ogata's ‘ice' (crystallised meth, the drug that is causing all the trouble of late). All three formulas were developed in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, but they didn't come into pharmaceutical use until the 1920s. When they did so, it was in the context of the creation of pharmaceutical patents, which allowed companies to ‘own' some of these formulas and variations of them, and therefore to sell them under specific brand names.

When little Smithy woke the day after he found his mum crying, his dad still wasn't there; nor was he there the next day, nor the one after that. The truth was obvious — his father was gone. For nearly nine months after, while the oval behind his house filled with large puddles and a choir of frogs, which then disappeared again, Rob Smith barely spoke a word. He spent nearly every spare minute lying on his bed, staring at the floor.

His mum increased her work hours as an office manager in a local factory to pay the mortgage. This meant she wasn't there in the morning and she was not usually home when he got back from school. But on the weekends, when she saw him lying on the bed, she would ask him what was wrong. ‘Nothing,' he would say. ‘Just tired.' When she gazed at him, she saw a littler version of her husband: the same brown hair, blue eyes, and oval face; the football watching, the cricket playing, and the fart jokes.

The months he spent in silence in his room were countered by her with toys, lollies, and chocolate. She enrolled him in football and cricket. And bit by bit, little Smithy came back to life, with a deeper, darker sense of humour, and a new taste for naughty things. He started watching football and cricket again, and got used to watching them by himself. He started socialising again like mad, with a particular taste for pranks and ridiculous jokes. He was never lacking in friends at school. He was ‘one of the boys', and all his mates played on the same football team as him. He admired alpha males, and had a soft spot for the underdog. Smithy remembers going to a friend's house, and overhearing the boy's mother talking about him before he walked in the door.

‘He's a no-hoper,' she said. ‘That's what happens when you don't have a father to set you right.'

He decided not to go in, and felt upset for a good week after. The words played on his mind for months, until he decided, ‘Well, I guess if I'm no good, I may as well have fun.' Perhaps, he decided, not having any expectations meant one thing — freedom.

As he a teenager, he loved parties. He liked to get drunk — he liked spin-the-bottle and truth-or-dare. At fourteen, he dropped out of school. He would spend many of his days getting drunk or stoned. Later, he'd be introduced to speed by a 37-year-old neighbour he was having an affair with. He loved the energy, the confidence, the sense of fullness and cohesion he got from speed — the feeling of a never-ending party.

For thirty years after they were made, nobody knew what to do with meth, crystal meth, and speed. Then along came Gordon Alles, a 6-foot-something, alpha American male who had completed a PhD at the California Institute of Technology, where he had attempted to find a synthetic version of human insulin. He went to work for a big pharma company, and spent most of his downtime working on a new cold-and-flu formulation. In 1928, he independently resynthesised the original amphetamine formula (that is, amphetamine sulphate) and discovered its wide-ranging effects on the human nervous system (this was speed, not meth, and Alles didn't create it — he just found out how it works). In early self-experiments, he would report a feeling of ‘self-exhilaration'; its results on asthma were mixed, but its effect on moods was exemplary. Nonetheless, he found it could also be used as a bronchial dilator, and sold his patent on the formulation to the big American pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline, & French (SKF). SKF then went on to sell the amphetamine under the brand name ‘Benzedrine' in pills and inhalers. It was first sold as a decongestant, but by the 1930s, the company was promoting it as a treatment for 33 different ailments, from alcoholism to erectile dysfunction. SKF also marketed it to expectant mothers for weight-loss, extra energy, and as an anti-depressant.

While meth was more powerful than speed, pharmaceutical companies and scientists were unable to find a way to tweak its formula enough to fit the legal criteria to make it an ‘original discovery' and therefore eligible to receive a proprietary patent. Benzedrine also received support from the American Psychological Association, which advised psychiatrists to start prescribing the drug to certain patients. This marked the start of a 20-year period in which amphetamines became the most commonly prescribed anti-depressant in the western world.

In post-depression America, speed (Benzedrine) became the obvious choice for a world in which things were moving faster, and individual unhappiness was seen as a purely personal medical problem in what was a booming economy. In fact, the 1930s were the start of amphetamine's golden age. Not only were the side effects of amphetamines unknown, but they were developed at a time when the pharmaceutical industry was largely unregulated, and amphetamines could be purchased without a prescription over the counter at a variety of different stores. People even started getting high while they were, well, already high: Benzo inhalers started appearing on Pan Am flight menus in the 1940s, alongside cigarettes, drinks, and cocktails.

Australia was also quick to embrace these new products. On 4 August 1936, Mt Gambier's
The Border Mail
published an article titled ‘New Drug will Banish Shyness' that referenced a ‘new drug called Benzedrine, which raises the blood pressure and is also thought to cure depression and shyness'. The
Adelaide Advertiser
followed on 28 August 1936 in an article titled ‘New Drug for Happiness', in which the journalist reported that ‘Dr Gordon Alles has found a new drug, according to the latest messages from England, which may result in happiness pills becoming a reality, and be able to turn melancholia into cheerfulness within an hour. Moreover, it is claimed that this new drug, Benzedrine, is supposed not to be habit-forming, and not to have dangerous after-effects.'

Evidently, there was unmitigated optimism about speed when it first hit the market legally. There were over 70 articles published about the drug in Australia throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, all of which talked up the newfound happiness pill that also made you smarter. No endorsement, though, compared to the one published in Adelaide's
The Mail
on 15 May 1937: ‘Soon We Will All Be Brilliant' ran the headline to the short article, reporting that while the drug might be addictive, it also led to more fluent and convincing speech.

For a long time, you could buy meth in Australian pharmacies. For a while, you didn't even need a prescription to buy it. Meth was often sold under the brand name ‘Methedrine', which was sometimes advertised in magazines and newspapers. One Methedrine ad from 1948 shows an illustration of a smiling woman, with the tagline ‘Methedrine is good for creating the Right Attitude'. Other ads suggested that the drug could ‘increase your optimism', help you lose weight (‘help
her
resist temptation'), and relieve fatigue. Syndrox, another legal powdered-meth formulation, was — according to the ad — for the overweight ‘patient who is all flesh and no will power'. Long before Prozac and anti-psychotics, meth — under its various brand names — was prescribed by psychiatrists as an anti-depressant, and you could even get an intravenous Methedrine injection from the doctor if you felt you needed it.

During the Second World War, meth and benzos were used widely by soldiers across all sides to boost military performance. This led to an excess of production, and to many soldiers returning to the US, Germany, Japan, and the UK with leftover meth and speed — thereby leading to one of the world's first black markets in amphetamines.

In his book
No Speed Limit: the highs and lows of meth,
Frank Owen says that the 1940s and 1950s were a time when ‘there was a naïve belief that science and technology could solve all our problems … Television and magazines bombarded consumers with images for a perfect lifestyle, especially for women, a number of whom felt trapped and alienated by this often-lonely new reality. Amphetamine appeared tailor-made for this new way of living — a synthetic drug for a synthetic environment.' In
Speed
, Professor Rasmussen tells how ‘President John F. Kennedy received regular injections of a methamphetamine, together with vitamins and hormones, from a German-trained physician named Max Jacobson. Jacobson would go onto treat Cecil B. DeMille, Alan Jay Lerner, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and the Rolling Stones.'

However, by the late 1940s Benzedrine was becoming associated with crime, counter-culture, and deviancy. In 1948, a New South Wales man was jailed for vagrancy (that is to say, poverty), having told the court that he had been taking 200 Benzedrine tablets a day. A few months later, a 47-year-old telegraphist from Burwood, Arthur Haybe, was charged with murder, and told detectives he had used Benzedrine tablets ‘to keep himself awake in the early hours of morning' because he believed his wife ‘visited a neighbour at night'. Even poor Dr George Basil Goswell, from Walgett, in New South Wales, fell into the trap. He started writing bad cheques after he became addicted to his clinic's Benzedrine tablets. He told the court that he became addicted because of the pressure of work.

By this time, both members of the public and prominent medical authorities were demanding that Benzedrine tablets be made available on prescription only. In October 1948, an unnamed 60-year-old mother of two Benzedrine addicts (aged twenty-six and twenty-eight) publicly urged effective control of Benzedrine sales. She told reporters that her sons were taking up to 80 tablets a day, and said ‘Benzedrine is slowly murdering my boys before my eyes. It is heart-breaking.' Her calls were welcomed and supported by both New South Wales police and the New South Wales public health director-general. Within a few years, and across all states, Benzedrine could only be obtained with a legal prescription. However, its less understood and more powerful older brother — Methedrine — was still widely available.

By the mid-1960s, edgy Australian partygoers were taking Methedrine in the bright, new discotheque scene. On Wednesday 28 June 1967,
The Canberra Times
published an article titled ‘Night Spot, a den for drug addicts and criminals', which went on to explain that the Licensing Court had denied a liquor licence to the Catcher Discotheque in Flinders Lane, Melbourne, following reports — among many others — that
girls had admitted taking
Methedrine
and Dexedrine to ‘keep dancing or just to stay awake'. Just a few months earlier, 19-year-old Peter Graham Johnson had been described by a magistrate as a ‘crazy mixed-up kid' while being sentenced to two years' probation for selling Methedrine at the Catcher.