Malcolm Knox is the author of three novels, Summerland, A Private Man, and most recently, Jamaica. Each has been published internationally. Malcolm was formerly literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, where he broke the Norma Khouri hoax story, for which he won a Walkley Award. He is also the author of Secrets of the Jury Room, a non-fiction account of his experience as a juror, and a history of the jury system. He lives in Sydney.

www.malcolmknox.com

SCATTERED

THE INSIDE STORY OF

ICE IN AUSTRALIA

SCATTERED

THE INSIDE STORY OF

ICE IN AUSTRALIA

MALCOLM KNOX

First published in 2008

Copyright © Malcolm Knox 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Knox, Malcolm, 1966-

Scattered: the inside story of ice in Australia.

ISBN: 978 1 74175 358 5 (pbk.)

Methamphetamine abuse - Australia. Methamphetamine - Social aspects - Australia.

362.2990994

Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE GOING UP 1986–2000

PART TWO THE HIGH 2001–2003

PART THREE COMING DOWN 2004–2008

ENDNOTES

INTRODUCTION

Q: What’s the best thing about being an ice addict?

A: Only two more sleeps to Christmas.

(Joke heard on 1 December 2007)

On the first Saturday of October 2007, the pay TV music channel [V] posted a mischievous double entendre in the guise of a viewer poll. On What U Want, its video request show, [V] asked its young, hedonistic audience to describe ‘Your favourite memories on ice’.

Although the question was ostensibly a promotional tie-in with the newly released ice-skating movie Blades of Glory, viewers were quick to see a second meaning. The text responses rolled across the TV screen:

Too many to name

Lots of sex

Everything’s great on meth!

The TV station’s response to the ensuing controversy was as paranoid and fast-moving as if it was itself affected by stimulants.

‘Channel [V] in no way endorses the use of drugs and in fact it is currently in development on an educational series for a youth audience on the drug ice,’ Tara King, Foxtel’s director of music channels, said in a written statement.

There is, and was, no suggestion that Foxtel believes ice, or crystal methamphetamine, is fun. But many of its viewers do, and therein sits the big elephant in the debate over drug education.

Most people who use illicit drugs do so because it is fun.

When I was a teenager, we were told that the effects of smoking marijuana on boys included growing breasts and becoming a heroin addict. The prospect of turning into a buxom street junkie proved as effective a deterrent as the threat of masturbation leading to dark glasses and a white cane. Someone dared to try it, and it didn’t happen. The entire official message therefore lost credibility. The real education on forbidden pleasures was subsequently taken into the hands of the kids themselves.

This remains the case, as the [V] incident demonstrates. What the authorities tell you is that marijuana smoking can lead to schizophrenia, a loss of motivation and devastating drug addiction. What they don’t tell you is that you have to smoke a hell of a lot before that happens. Most young people know this from the age of twenty. They are immediately at a knowledge advantage to their parents and teachers.

Likewise, as this book will demonstrate, using crystal methamphetamine can lead to paranoia, psychosis, violent actions and a smorgasbord of consequences that place it alongside heroin and cocaine as the most dangerous of the commonly used illicit substances. But it doesn’t happen immediately.

Ice also leads to a euphoria that is seldom, if ever, produced by natural causes. It leads to great sex. It leads to exhilarating moments with friends. It leads to self-confidence and clarity. It leads to an overwhelming feeling that everything in the user’s life is perfect.

This is not just anecdotal assertion, as the following pages will show. One of the biggest surveys of young drug users was carried out by the Australian Drug Foundation in 2007. The anonymous online survey of 6801 people found that 895 had used methamphetamine in the previous year. The study assessed the effects of different drugs on skilled activity—specifically, driving a car within three hours of taking the drug. Users of alcohol, cannabis, heroin, ecstasy, LSD, ketamine and GHB all tended to think their driving was worse on drugs. Only the stimulant users—those who had taken methamphetamine or cocaine—believed their driving improved after taking the drug. Of meth users, 56 per cent said their driving was unchanged, and 27 per cent said their driving was better. Everything’s great on meth: even activities that are mundane, such as work. As we will see, ice is the one illicit drug that is used not to relax from work, but to turn it into fun. Ice users feel not only euphoric, but more able. As one user who took ice before work told me, ‘It is the ultimate performance-enhancing substance. It enhances everything you do.’ Even though he has overcome his addiction, he still believes he has never performed better professionally than when he was using ice.

Perhaps the greatest danger in crystal methamphetamine, as with all mind- and mood-altering substances, is that the majority of the people who are using it are doing so lightly, and without drastic ill-effects. There is a silent majority of working, functioning, fun-loving young adults who enjoy ice occasionally. The addicts whose lives have fallen apart, the parents neglecting their children, the vulnerable individuals whose ice use tips their everyday conflicts into scenes out of horror movies, are a minority. They do not represent the typical drug user. I want to stress from the start that the majority of ice users are using it within safe limits and will give it up as they grow up.

There is a narrative arc to the ice phenomenon in Australia. Crystal methamphetamine appeared here in the mid to late 1990s, it caught on with thousands of mainstream middle-class users after 2000, it peaked around 2003 and 2004, it plateaued for a couple of years, and now it appears to be in a slight decline.

Coincidentally, this decline was noted in the same week as the Channel [V] incident. The leading fact-finders on illicit drug use in Australia, the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, reported that for the first time since the 1990s injecting drug users, the bellwether cohort—or, as NDARC researchers put it, the ‘sentinel group’—for emerging drug trends, were reporting a significant drop in the use of crystal methamphetamine. In 2006, 57 per cent of injecting users were using ice. By 2007, this fell to 47 per cent. Big drops were recorded in Perth, Brisbane and Canberra, where ice had been extremely popular compared with other injectable drugs. The lead researcher, Associate Professor Louisa Degenhardt, had looked at the possible causes for the decrease. Sometimes it is because a drug becomes more expensive, or less available. That hadn’t happened. Instead, Degenhardt discovered that the word had got around about the negative consequences of ice use. The drug was getting a bad reputation among the people who really mattered: those who use it. (On the downside, the old perennial, heroin, was undergoing a resurgence after a seven-year downturn.)

Ice is not about to disappear again, and to a degree the changes in overall use are always overstated. About 3.9 per cent of Australia’s population use amphetamines at least occasionally, and that figure has been reasonably stable for more than 30 years. It’s not the same 3.9 per cent of people—most users phase in and out of drug use as a rite of passage in their late adolescence and early adulthood—but the overall usage rate is remarkably steady, and is a salient and simple warning against hysteria.

Yet crystal methamphetamine has a story to tell in this country. The advent, growth, peak, plateau and decline of ice use, all in the last decade, have each had their causes. These causes have to do with the economics of drug supply, social and cultural factors, education, law enforcement, hospital treatment, criminal justice and the magical X-factor of the spoken word that is passed from person to person in homes, workplaces, nightclubs, pubs and on the street.

How all these factors interlock, and what they tell us about our country in this decade, is the subject of this story.

PART ONE

GOING UP

1986–2000

For Vicki Wolf and her boyfriend of four years, Mark Thomas, the trip to Thailand was something of a contradiction in terms. Having been committed and well-known weekend hedonists in the law faculty and their residential colleges during five years at Melbourne University, they wanted to celebrate the end of their final exams in November 1995 with a big detox. When it came to drugs, they’d experienced pretty much everything that was around—except heroin—and now they wanted to turn a corner. Life was about to get serious.

They chose Thailand almost as a challenge to themselves. They had been there for their first trip away together, back in 1992, and had spent a fortnight in a twenty-dollar-a-week beachfront bungalow in Koh Phangan, struggling out of bed only long enough to roll a hash joint and loll about in the water. Aside from the fogged-up sense that they’d had a blast, now, three and a half years later, they didn’t remember much of it, which saddened them. To go back to that part of the world and enjoy it healthy, straight and sober would be, they resolved, a kind of making up as well as a test.

As far as this objective was concerned, they succeeded, spending ten days in Krabi swimming, sailboarding, sleeping, enjoying each other’s company, and imbibing nothing stronger than a ritual early evening cocktail. When they returned to Bangkok for two nights before their flight home, they were feeling dangerously fit and healthy.

Vicki and Mark stayed with some Australian friends in Bangkok. These friends, who worked for the Australian government, mixed with some of the more glittering locals, bright and sophisticated twenty-somethings who seemed to have close connections with top families in the Thai national administration, or the royal family, or both; it was never quite clear and asking questions was considered bad form.

The night they arrived, Vicki and Mark were taken by their friends to a party in a high-rise apartment. Although the residential block was new and, by Thai standards, opulent, the apartment itself had only a few black-and-white leather couches and beanbags scattered around its white-tiled floors. One bedroom had a couple of single beds, but the other two bedrooms were empty save for futons and piles of clothes. The apartment was, someone explained, not a residence but a ‘party house’.

Vicki was, by her own account, ‘a two-pot screamer’ after her week of near-abstinence and healthy living on Krabi. She and Mark were soon happily drunk among Bangkok’s burnished youth, sitting on a couch listening to music and watching others dance, when someone passed Vicki a small folded sheet of tinfoil and a short thin straw. She had seen people smoking something off foil earlier in the night and assumed they were ‘spotting’ hash. Others had been smoking joints and cigarettes, and there was no peculiar smell to suggest anything else was going on. Instead, though, when she looked at the foil, there was a coarse pale-yellow powder.

She looked at Mark and asked him what it was. His response was to take the foil from her—he’d always been the willing guinea pig—hold a lighter under it, and suck the vapour through the straw. He passed the foil back where it had come from, gave Vicki a thumbs-up and mouthed ‘goey’, or speed. They’d done speed many times back in Melbourne and, although she hated the crash—which was drawn-out and depressing—it had always been one of Vicki’s favourites. It made you dance and chat and drink. Speed was simple, it didn’t bend your mind.

The foil took a while to come back. Mark had sprung up and, without inviting or consulting her, gone off to dance. Vicki took the foil and copied what he’d done.

‘It wasn’t like any speed I knew,’ Vicki says. She began to dance with Mark and with the others on the floor, but dancing didn’t seem enough. She wanted to—not sing, but roar. She remembers coming face to face with Mark on the dance floor and the pair of them roaring at each other, eyes wide, mouths split like jack-o’-lanterns, for what seemed like hours. At some point Mark had a group of Thais around him and was teaching them how to pack down in a rugby scrum. Later in the night, Vicki helped another woman take all the glassware and cutlery from the kitchen and organise them in order of height and length down a corridor.

‘It was just a lot stronger than speed, like the difference between drinking a schooner of spirits compared with a schooner of beer,’ she says. ‘You could tell it was the same thing, but you were instantly much, much higher. It’s hard to describe.’

But there were other, quantifiable differences from the amphetamines they’d snorted back in Melbourne. Where usually on a speed binge they’d refresh by doing more lines every few hours, they didn’t have any more of the stuff on the foil that night in Bangkok, yet were still high for eight to ten hours. Where speed usually gave Mark an immediate and long-lasting case of genital shrinkage (‘needle dick’ is his term), this stuff made both of them horny and helped them have marathon sex. And after they had a sleep back at their friends’ place, there was no hangover, no crash, no anxious-depressive speed comedown. It was the best of all worlds.

Back home, they moved from Melbourne to Sydney. They did get serious and relatively drug-free as they both joined commercial city law firms and mixed with a new set of friends. With their old Melbourne friends from time to time, they would speak about this ‘super-speed’, the dream party drug from Thailand. The Thais had called it ‘shabu’. Through the late 1990s, Vicki and Mark heard about shabu surfacing in Australia, but they believed it belonged to their past. They had two children eighteen months apart in 1998 and 1999, and settled down to a life of nappies, bottles and interrupted sleep. Their priorities changed, and they consigned their drug-taking days to their shared history. Many of their friends still partied, and it wasn’t that Vicki and Mark wouldn’t have liked to dabble again, but they never had the requisite two or three nights for the full-on experience; they were simply too busy and too tired.

That night in Bangkok wouldn’t be their last experience with shabu, as it turned out. Shabu would re-enter their world under another name some years down the track. But they still hold to the belief that they were among the first Australians to dabble with crystal methamphetamine, or, as it became commonly known, ice.

It travels under different aliases. Ice, gas, crystal, glass, shabu, tina. Paul Bennett’s mob called it ‘pure’—not as an adjective, but a noun. Bennett, a Maori raised on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island, was living on the Gold Coast in 1995 and working as a formwork carpenter on construction sites.

At 38 years of age, Bennett had plenty of regrets. He’d once been a leading surfer, entering professional events in Australia and New Zealand with the dream of joining the world tour. He’d had a daughter when he was 24, but had not seen much of her for the next decade, which he had pretty much blown through a prodigious alcohol and drug habit.

A heavy pot smoker and heroin user since his teens, Paul Bennett had been using speed since around 1988.

‘I started using it as a recreational drug at first, and only on special occasions. This substance had been around me for years, but after my handbrake (the missus) gave me the flick, I started to have the odd dabble at it, because there was no one around to pull me back into line. The guys I was working beside and associating with now were all big users, and it was only a matter of time before my addictive gene kicked in, greedy for that high that only class A and B drugs can achieve . . .

‘The rocket powder was everywhere, and the quality was wicked, the very best. It gave me such a high and so much energy that I tore into my work like a bat out of hell.’

Speed suited his bachelor’s lifestyle: work, pub, party, work. Speed made him feel ‘bullet-proof . . . I had so much energy and confidence’. And he wasn’t alone in the early-90s Gold Coast. ‘I began hanging out with other users—and they were everywhere. The place was crazy, people racing around off their dials, insane pedestrian traffic. There was a methamphetamine epidemic . . .’

In 1995, Bennett had ‘my first taste of the pure form, known as “pure” or crystal meth. It could cost from $200–$1000 upward per gram, depending on who you knew, and the quality and quantity involved.’

With hardcore and experienced drug users like Bennett and his mates, the difference between crystal meth and old-fashioned speed was noticed and analysed.

‘The crystallised rocket fuel was capable of giving you a turbo-rush that was more deadly than shooting up, blasting you from Cher to blur within seconds, and nuking your brains . . . The meth user stayed up there, and the pupils dilated hugely. Sometimes, depending on how long they’d been up, the entire iris was pitch-black like a possum. The lights were out, but someone was home, someone with a wicked, scary-wired look that warned, “Don’t fuck with me”.’

Bennett’s nostrils were destroyed from years of snorting drugs, and, as an asthmatic bearing the damage from two decades of smoking, he couldn’t take smoking crystal in the glass pipes his mates used. Instead he drank it, mixing it with alcoholic or nonalcoholic drinks. The onset was slower than smoking or snorting, but equally powerful.

He would drink pure before work, during the day, and after work. Playing pool, he had delusions of genius: ‘I rarely missed. I’d see the sweet spot and kapow! . . . It also gave me the libido of a teenager.

‘When I first hooked into the methamphetamine, it was full speed ahead. I was sharp as a tack with a wicked sense of humour and a sexual appetite like a rampant rabbit, so it’s no surprise that that was my drug of choice. I had never known such a euphoric high, and it led to an addiction like no other I had known.’

But as a long-term drug user, just as the upside came quickly for Paul Bennett, so did the downside.

‘I never got the same clean, clear buzz as the first time, because by now I was truly fried. At first users think this shit gives you mana because you believe you are smart and irresistible. In fact you’re an egotistical, annoying, motor-mouthed know-it-all, who would sell his soul for the next fix.’

Within months, the partnership of crystal meth and massive alcohol consumption was eating away at Bennett’s sanity.

‘Most times on the meth we’d get on the piss something wicked, and it wasn’t just because we got the dry-horrors from the meth. Alcohol seemed to take the edge off my anxiety, and sometimes before I knew it I was on a binge and would lose another 48 hours plus . . . I couldn’t relax or sleep properly because my mind was still racing. Night-time was the pits, lying alone in the dark, trying to handle being depressed, thinking what a fuck-up I was. I would make myself crazier, rolling things over and over in my mind. Depending on how hard I went, it would take me two to four days at least to come down properly, and then the cycle began again . . .’

He was hiding his addiction from his girlfriend, but she caught him once and started crying.

‘We talked later and she told me she could notice the changes in my personality. I knew I was losing it, especially when I went too hard for too long. I’d get paranoid, and spin out with close friends over the smallest thing. I almost cut a flatmate’s nose off with a broken mussel shell; it was right under his nostrils. I was at my worst when I was coming down, with mood swings and depression. I had all the personalities of Snow White’s seven dwarfs . . .’

Bennett also noticed the spread of dangerous paranoid behaviour among his acquaintances.

‘You had to watch your back, because you couldn’t trust these speed freaks. Some of them were like attack dogs, and would take you out or rip you off without batting an eyelid. No honour amongst thieves with this lot.’

Then came the last of a succession of wake-up calls. Bennett had a friend who had been buying pure on tick; like a junkie, he could not afford his habit in cash, but could sustain it by dealing and taking a cut for himself. Like many a junkie, he got into trouble, using too much and not selling enough to pay back his supplier. ‘It was,’ says Bennett, ‘like putting an alcoholic in charge of a pub.’

Bennett’s friend began to suffer an unending paranoia—not without reason, perhaps. But as a result, he began to carry a gun.

‘I hadn’t seen him for a while,’ Bennett recalls, ‘and one day when I spotted him, I snuck up behind to give him a fright. The poor bugger was tripping out with fear and the next thing I saw was a gun in his hand . . . I could literally feel the blood draining from my face, and it must have taken twenty years off my life. I had been wanting to get out of the scene for a long time, as my health was failing, and that moment made the decision easier.’

It was 1997 when Paul Bennett left the Gold Coast. The next year he fell critically ill with a range of ailments, and was put on a waiting list for a double lung transplant. He returned to New Zealand to try to rebuild his health, and his life.

Crystal meth had barely hit Australia. Paul Bennett might have been the first man in this country to go through the entire cycle of use, abuse and organ failure; he might have been the first to give up ice.

The National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC) is in a nondescript modern building on the campus of the University of New South Wales in Kensington, eastern Sydney. When they blow, northerly breezes carry the scent of horse manure over the university from the neighbouring Royal Randwick racetrack and stables. NDARC itself, funded by the federal government, is an unpretentious warren of small offices and shelves overcrowded with files. Researchers sit at computers quietly absorbing and collating data, or conducting one-on-one interviews with people from the outside who inform their studies.

Notwithstanding its quiet atmosphere, NDARC has become the country’s leading research centre on drugs and alcohol. Partly this is because it is situated in Sydney, close to the action. While other capital cities have developed their signature drug cultures over time, Sydney remains the most highly populated drug capital and the main gateway for imported substances such as heroin and cocaine. It is home to drug users, researchers and legal and health workers, who have been around the scene for several generations.

In mid-1996, researchers Shane Darke and Julie Hando were tapping into this network, surveying 154 injecting drug users for the centre’s annual NSW Drug Trends report. Injecting drug users are sampled because of their importance as a ‘sentinel group’—they take whatever drugs are washing around on the street in central and south-western Sydney, and if a new drug turns up in Australia it usually shows up among Sydney’s injectors first.

For that 1996 survey, Darke and Hando also interviewed other ‘key informants’, including health and outreach workers, police and a researcher. The researcher told them that drug injectors were claiming to use ‘ice’, or the crystalline form of methamphetamine, rather than old-fashioned powder ‘speed’, or amphetamine sulphate.

This was the first time ice had been named in local Australian research, and it crept in more or less without comment. Injecting drug users, while connoisseurs in detecting the purity and effect of what they are taking, are notoriously loose in their terminology. A second-hand report of one user claiming to take ‘ice’ could mean anything. It could have been a marketing term promoted by a dealer; it could have been the user’s way of describing some speed hybrid that didn’t behave quite like the speed they were used to.

NDARC published its report, but the first mention of ice in Sydney passed inconspicuously. It certainly wasn’t picked up by the media. That was soon to change. In 1997, a young PhD student joined the NDARC team working on the next NSW Drug Trends report. Rebecca McKetin had studied animal behaviour as an undergraduate, and became interested in the psychotic reactions of rodents to injections of amphetamines.

‘I wanted to do my PhD on [amphetamine-induced] psychosis,’ she now recalls, ‘but there weren’t enough people to form a sample.’ She modified her subject to ‘proneness to psychosis’, and began asking amphetamine users during the NDARC surveys if they had suffered psychotic reactions to the drug.

‘Some said they did,’ she says, ‘but when we talked about it further it was more likely to be mild paranoia or panic attacks.’

There was scarce grant money around for a study on amphetamine psychosis in the mid-1990s, as the problem wasn’t widespread enough. As it turned out, McKetin’s interest was a few years ahead of its time. She had correctly anticipated the crisis, but its trigger—a form of amphetamine sufficiently potent, cheap and quickly absorbed into the bloodstream—had yet to fully hit the streets.

In her first year at NDARC, she interviewed a Sydney health worker who reported that one drug user claimed to have smoked shabu. Another user reported having used ‘crank’—one of the drug’s American pseudonyms—which he believed to be a mixture of amphetamine and cocaine. The effect was different from the normal amphetamine high, he said. An extreme euphoria came on very quickly, like with cocaine, but rather than lasting cocaine’s usual half hour or so it lasted several hours, like an amphetamine. He thought it was so good, it could be dangerous if it got around. And it was cheap—$100 a gram compared with $200–$240 a gram for cocaine.

Still, these reports were sporadic at best.

While Rebecca McKetin was exploring the first glimmers of ice among Sydney drug users, Mohammed Kerbatieh was rotting in jail in Queensland. In the early 1990s, Kerbatieh—who as a young adult had already been convicted twice of unlawful assault—had lived in a flat in Windsor, a northern suburb of Brisbane, with his wife, Runda.

Kerbatieh and Runda were a far from happy couple. Runda was severely hearing-impaired and Kerbatieh, then in his mid-twenties, complained that he had been pressured into marrying her, by family and social expectations, after she fell pregnant in 1994.

On 10 March 1995, Runda gave birth to their first child, a daughter. The volatile Kerbatieh visited the hospital, had an argument with Runda, and shook the baby. Runda remonstrated with him, later showing a nurse how he had shaken the days-old girl.

Runda and the baby went home to a worsening cyclone of arguments with Kerbatieh. Neighbours would hear him shouting at her and throwing things. On the night of 29 March 1995, they had a furious row. Kerbatieh would often accuse Runda of cheating on him, and claimed the baby was not his. That night he punched and shook Runda and stormed around the flat carrying the baby roughly in his arms, before leaving at 3 am.

At 3.30 am he turned up at the Fortitude Valley police station. In an interview with two officers he claimed that he had been in a domestic fight with Runda—she had attacked him, he said—but when pressed to make a formal complaint, he decided he did not want any further action taken against her. He told the police that he wanted to leave her, but if he did she would make trouble for him. He also said, ‘I never touched her or the baby’— in retrospect a brazen attempt to deflect the serious trouble heading his way.

Returning to the flat at around 5 am, Kerbatieh took the nineteen-day-old baby out of her cot and shook her so hard her eyes went wobbly and she stopped breathing. Runda screamed at him to stop. Only at 6.15 am, with his daughter yellow and short of breath, did Kerbatieh call an ambulance.

The daughter survived, but Runda was courageous enough to tell police what had happened.

Charged with causing his daughter grievous bodily harm, Kerbatieh said at his trial that Runda, not he, had been the one who shook the baby. The jury didn’t believe him, and he was convicted and sentenced to see the end of the twentieth century behind bars.

Through those years, Kerbatieh sat in jail, behaving himself, and talked the talk of fresh starts.

It was while Dudley Mark Aslett was in Lithgow Correctional Centre in 1997, as a 26-year-old, that he started smoking heroin, sprinkling it on marijuana cones. The next year, while still in jail, he tried to commit suicide by slashing his wrists, and required blood transfusions to save his life.

To anyone looking at him from the outside, it would seem that Dudley Aslett had every reason to end it all. Since the age of eleven he had spent only one Christmas and one birthday out of jail or some kind of detention. Fifteen Christmases, fifteen birthdays, right through adolescence, past voting age, into what should have been the prime of his life, Aslett was behind bars.

Dudley Aslett was one of eleven children of an Aboriginal mother, Rita, who worked as a nurse, and a white father who was a removalist. Living in the Granville and Mount Druitt areas of western Sydney, the Aslett parents were in a stable relationship; life for Dudley was anything but.

At the age of eight, he would tell psychiatrists, he was sexually molested by an older brother. This lasted up to two years, during which Dudley ran away from home and stopped attending school, spending his time with a group of delinquent older boys. From time to time he was rounded up by state services and put in foster homes. He returned to school, but only intermittently. The majority of his education, it seems, was in the science of stealing cars and taking drugs.

Aslett had sniffed glue and petrol at eight—the age when he was first molested—though he suffered a bad reaction while sniffing glue in a detention centre and turned to smoking cannabis on a daily basis in his early adolescence. Being incarcerated didn’t stop him from getting as much dope as he wanted.

By 1997, he had the rap sheet to end all rap sheets.

At eleven, he was sentenced to four years’ probation for stealing property and cars, breaking and entering, and malicious injury.

Before he turned twelve, he was put in a children’s detention centre for break and enter.

He got out, and as a twelve-year-old was placed on probation for larceny.

At thirteen he was given a suspended sentence for malicious injury, break and enter, and stealing. Within two months he was put in detention for stealing again.

After he got out, still only thirteen, he stole another car and was put back in detention.

At fourteen he was convicted for two years for thirteen new offences, including stealing a car, malicious injury, escaping lawful custody and dangerous driving. He received further convictions that year for stealing cars and absconding.

In the course of the next year, 1986, he was convicted for 27 similar offences.

After escaping from custody, he stole more cars and injured more victims. His brief releases through 1987 and 1988 resulted in further convictions. By the time he graduated out of the children’s criminal system, he had been sentenced by courts at Cobham, Yasmar, Minda, Bidura, Yass, Orange, Kempsey and Tamworth.

Little changed when Aslett turned eighteen. In March 1989, a few days after his eighteenth birthday, he was convicted for assault. In July he was convicted for dangerous driving. In September he was imprisoned for four years for stealing and other offences. The next year, more charges and convictions followed for offences committed during his brief time outside: break and enter, malicious damage, stealing a car, larceny, dangerous driving.

After his release he was soon put away again. The repetition of his crimes continued: break and enter, stealing cars, larceny, possession of housebreaking implements, malicious wounding, assault with intent to rob. He served the next decade, more or less, in jail for a string of different offences. He just couldn’t make it on the outside. Stealing cars was all he could do, all he had a gift for.

And then, in Lithgow, he found heroin.

In the decade up to 1998, the drug ice had been mentioned in the Australian print media—all newspapers and magazines—a grand total of ten times. Old-fashioned speed amphetamine was part of the furniture, a recreational drug never carrying the fatal and chaotic baggage of heroin or the fear factor associated with more recent party drugs like ecstasy. Ice, when it was mentioned at all, was seen as a synonym for amphetamine sulphate.

Overseas, however, the drug was entering its hey-day. In 1989, the first year ice was mentioned in the Australian print media—a South Sydney drug unit detective, Brent Martin, said ice might one day replace the more expensive cocaine as a problem stimulant—there were 20 000 arrests for ice possession and sale in Japan. Japan is where we must go for the genesis of the crystal methamphetamine story.

Basic amphetamine was first synthesised by a German chemist, L. Edeleano, on 18 January 1887, under the name phenylisopropylamine. Japanese chemists also synthesised it six years later, though it was to remain a drug without an application for several decades.

In 1919, Japanese chemists added the methyl molecule to amphetamine, making methamphetamine. Chemically, there is little difference between methamphetamine and amphetamine; the methyl molecule simply greases the wheels for absorption in the human brain.

It was in the 1920s that amphetamine and methamphetamine found their first use. Dissolved in water and administered intravenously, the drug was found to be effective in treating asthma, nasal congestion and hay fever. It dilated the bronchial passages and relaxed the patient. In 1932, the drug company Smith Kline and French marketed it in over-the-counter asthma inhalers under the name Benzedrine.

During the 1930s, Benzedrine was found to have some significant side effects. The American Medical Association noted in 1937: ‘A feeling of exhilaration and sense of well-being was a consistent effect, and patients volunteered that there had been a definite increase in mental activity and efficiency.’

Word passed around about the zip in these inhalers. Each inhaler carried a strip that was enriched with amphetamine, and users without asthma or any other bronchial disorder would pull off the nasal strips and dip them in drinks. Jazz great Charlie Parker claimed to get high by dunking nasal inhaler strips in his coffee.

Now available in pill form by prescription, Benzedrine was mobilised in the 1930s to treat the sleeping disorder narcolepsy, depression, Parkinson’s disease and attention disorders among children. The research snowballed: narcolepsy patients were reporting that as well as keeping them awake, Benzedrine was taming their appetite and they were losing weight. And so the drug was prescribed for patients struggling with obesity. In all cases, it was marketed and prescribed as non-addictive.

War is a laboratory for innovation, and the spread of amphetamines into the broader culture was ignited by the Second World War. Benzedrine’s effectiveness in elevating concentration and wakefulness among children had been noted by the military in more than one country. The United States distributed dextroamphetamine—marketed under the brand name Dexedrine, colloquially called dexies or ‘pep pills’—to soldiers and pilots in the Pacific and European theatres. Japan distributed methamphetamine (Philopon) not only to soldiers and airmen (including Kamikaze pilots) but to war-industry factory workers. German, Commonwealth and Russian troops were less well supplied, but Dr Theodor Morell injected Adolf Hitler with amphetamines daily to treat the Parkinson’s disease that had surfaced in the early 1930s and worsened during the war. Although a vegetarian, non-smoker and something of a health fanatic, Hitler was by his last days a full-blown speed addict.

Just as they would two decades later, after Vietnam, many soldiers came home from the war with drug habits. In Japan, veterans’ demand for Philopon was satisfied by pharmaceutical companies needing to offload giant stockpiles built up during the war and a government that allowed them to be sold without regulation or prescription. It is unknown how many Japanese became addicted to methamphetamine in the years before 1948, when the government woke up to the problem and prohibited the production of tablet and powder Philopon, but it was certainly epidemic. Unusually, however, production of the liquid injectable form remained unregulated. Commerce in the drug spread from pharmacies to unlicensed dealers. In 1951, Japanese police confiscated 4.6 million vials of methamphetamine and arrested 17 000 suspects for illegally selling the drug. In 1954, as many as 55 000 such arrests were made.

The Japanese methamphetamine rage was uncontrollable by border policing. The drug was made locally, often in improvised laboratories in rural areas. Ephedrine, common in many medications, was obtained as a precursor chemical and turned into methamphetamine by the barrowload. We will see later how easily methamphetamine is manufactured, and how the ‘home cooking’ nature of this drug makes it such a challenge for law enforcement.

In America, amphetamine use was not so much cultural as subcultural. Long-distance truck drivers, Beatniks (Jack Kerouac claimed to have written On the Road during a three-week Benzedrine high, typing on a single long spool of paper), and veterans and athletes took bennies and dexies within their own circles, unknown to each other. Housewives, prescribed the pep pills by their doctors for depression and weight control, took them unknown even to their husbands. Geographically, problem amphetamine usage was mostly confined to California (in San Francisco amphetamine injections were used to treat heroin addiction) with a few notable exceptions: President John F. Kennedy received three amphetamine injections each day from his personal ‘Dr Feelgood’, Dr Max Jacobson. From the top down, American doctors handed out amphetamines like lollies.

The confluence of amphetamine-addicted servicemen returning from Korea (where American soldiers used more speed than in the entirety of World War II) and Vietnam with the rising counterculture brought the drug a higher profile in the 1960s, though amphetamine, the defining drug of the Beat movement, was overshadowed by the use of cannabis, LSD and eventually heroin.

The cultural differences between the drugs are a reflection of the properties of the substances themselves. LSD, opiates and cannabis have always produced a dreamy, slow-moving, colour-filled kind of literature, art and music, whereas amphetamines are aligned more with thrash metal, Beat poetry and gestural painting. It’s a generalisation, of course, but Paul Bennett captures the distinction succinctly when he says: ‘On the smack some refer to the buzz as going downtown. If someone overdosed, the central nervous system got so smacked out, it eventually shut down. Hard-core methamphetamine users experience the total opposite. You go uptown. Going so fast for so long, you inevitably go out of your mind, and start imagining things. Then you crash!’

The clash between two drug cultures—uptown meeting downtown—had certain signal moments. One was the passing of Beat icons like Kerouac, dead of complications from his Benzedrine addiction. Another was the Altamont Free Concert, the 1969 event when the Rolling Stones hired Hells Angels as security guards. The bikies, revved up on speed, let loose their contempt for spaced-out hippies and attacked some of the musicians from the Jefferson Airplane before murdering an eighteen-year-old man, Meredith Hunter, while the Stones were playing ‘Under My Thumb’. (Hunter, it has to be said, drew a gun on the bouncers and was believed to have been high on methamphetamine himself.)

American law enforcement was already responding. The 1965 Drug Abuse Control Act restricted access to amphetamines, and the Drug Abuse Regulation and Control Act (the so-called Controlled Substances Act) five years later established five different ‘schedules’ classifying drugs according to their harmfulness and appropriate use. Schedule I substances—illegal drugs with no medicinal value—were deemed the hardest, while Schedule V drugs were the least controlled. Heroin and mescaline were among the Schedule I drugs. Amphetamines, along with cocaine and codeine, fell into Schedule II, defined as dangerous drugs that did have medicinal value but only under prescribed guidelines. By this stage, more than 12 billion amphetamine-containing pills were produced legally in America each year. Their wholesale cost was as little as 75 cents per thousand tablets.

Under the 1970 Act, injectable liquid methamphetamine was virtually prohibited. Like previous prohibitions, this gave rise to underground improvisation, with bikie-backed labs springing up in northern California to produce P2P, or phenyl-2-propanone, an easily cooked methamphetamine variant. Now that amphetamines were restricted in pharmacies, over-the-counter cold medications containing ephedrine were bought in large amounts and cooked with other ingredients to produce street speed, an altogether more toxic and harmful substance.

Australian amphetamine use up to the 1990s might be best described as a weak echo of what was happening in America. Truck drivers, students and some returned servicemen were, in small numbers, the amphetamine-using subcultures, while doctors also prescribed the drug for obesity, depression and attention disorders. A recreational drug subculture sprang up in the 1960s but, as in America, speed bore the stigma of a cheap, bikie-favoured pill.

Dr Nicolas Rasmussen, a University of NSW academic who has written about the history of amphetamines, says that there was a ‘quiet epidemic’ of amphetamine use here in the late 1960s and early 1970s. ‘As early as 1967, the Medical Journal of Australia had reported on addiction to stimulants prescribed under the brand names Methedrine and Desoxyn,’ he says. ‘Doctors who had been prescribing it were seeing addiction and psychosis.’

In 1971, Australia and the United States were signatories to the United Nations Convention on Psychotropics, which led to a crackdown on amphetamines. The signatory nations enacted laws to regulate the sale of the drug by ‘scheduling’ it, making it available only under strict medical conditions. In the signatory countries, however, Dr Rasmussen says that ‘scheduling created the market’ for criminal manufacturers. Overall amphetamine use in the population fell, but a new black market was born.

The rise of cocaine in the 1980s—again, nowhere near as prevalent in Australia as in the United States—did have a rejuvenating effect on amphetamine use, if only as a by-product. Cocaine was mostly snorted off a flat shiny surface, often a mirror, via a straw, metal tube or rolled-up paper money. Dealers of speed, the old unglamorous pill, captured some of cocaine’s reflected glory by grinding it up and selling it as a powder. If you could not afford cocaine, speed was about a quarter of the price and produced a rough copy of the effect.

On the other hand, the marketing of speed in powder form only entrenched the ‘brand’ differentiation between the two stimulants. Cocaine was the expensive, shorter-lasting, ‘cleaner’ high; coke users could later go to sleep. Speed users, on the other hand, spent less money but paid the price in drawn-out, depressing post-high crashes.

In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, however, it was alterations in cocaine use that eventually led to the reinvention of amphetamine in a new, dangerously glamorous context.

In the 1980s, heavily addicted cocaine users began to prepare the drug in a different way. Instead of snorting it in powder form, users bought the drug in purer, crystalline form and smoked it in water pipes, or ‘freebased’. This form of cocaine, known as crack, fast became the most destructive drug in modern American history, mostly because crack was cheaper, more concentrated and more accessible to the poor.

The allure of crack lay partly in the method of delivery. Smoking had a quicker and more exciting effect than snorting, yet it didn’t carry the stigma or threat of blood-borne diseases that came with injection. Snorted speed takes effect within three to five minutes. Smoked, it hits within seconds. Snorted speed comes on without an extreme rush. Smoked, it fires the user up like a rocket.

The crystal, smokable form of methamphetamine, the crack to speed’s coke, also had a new name, owing to its appearance. It was called ice.

Around the Pacific, in Japan and south-east Asia, methamphetamine had been sold as crystals and smoked since the 1960s. As early as 1968, the smoking of crystalline methamphetamine was reported in Hawaii. But it was in South Korea and Taiwan that the production and distribution of crystalline methamphetamine was taken on by large organised-crime concerns and turned into a profitable international trade.

One reason for the production shift to Asia was the long history of the ephedra plant in China. Known also as mahuang, ephedra had been used as a herbal stimulant for more than five thousand years. When reduced in a laboratory with hydriodic acid, ephedra derivatives make methamphetamine. Most of the drug factories converting ephedra into precursor chemicals such as ephedrine and pseudoephedrine were, by the 1990s, in India and China—convenient for the east Asian drug cartels who were fighting a worldwide war against law enforcement officials over the heroin trade. In manufacturing methamphetamine, they saw an opportunity to reap higher profits at lower risk. America was already being serviced by speed cartels based in Mexico. For the south-east Asian traders, the natural orbit of their market was their neighbouring countries: the prosperous, fast-growing, pacy urbanised centres in Thailand, South Korea, China, Taiwan and Indonesia. The United Nations 1997 World Drug Report said methamphetamine, with 260 000 addicts, had overtaken opiates in Thailand. A gram of meth sold for as little as ten dollars. The International Narcotics Board said Thai police had seized 500 000 ice hits in six months, and a raid in the Philippines uncovered 600 kilograms of meth and 1.6 tonnes of ephedrine.

Further south, there was another market—small, to be sure, but with many of the same characteristics as America, which by 1995 had taken to crystal meth with a vengeance. Within two years, ice was starting to trickle from south-east Asia into Australia.

In 1998, Damien Peters turned 29. Not for the first time in his adult life, Peters was nurturing a new hope for the future. He felt he had turned a corner. He felt that he might have fallen in love.

Peters’s teenage and adult history was a sorry one. The youngest of four children, he had always struggled to live up to the high expectations of his suburban pharmacist father. Suffering from attention deficit disorder and consequently a poor academic performer, Peters left school after year ten hoping to gain an apprenticeship as a chef. Buffeted by what he perceived as his father’s bullying and teasing, he soon lost that job. His mother died of cancer in 1987, when Peters was eighteen.

Around that time, Peters began using cannabis, but his drug of choice soon became amphetamines. While amphetamines will normally elevate the user’s mood, inducing euphoria and high activity, the ADD-affected Peters found they calmed him down and enabled him to concentrate. Little did he know it, but he 23 was self-medicating along the same regime that doctors had once prescribed for ADD-affected children in the United States.

Soon he was using speed regularly as he bounced from job to job. He lived at home until 1996, but grew more and more withdrawn and secretive. He and his father had a final falling-out when Peters was 27; he left the suburbs and moved to inner Sydney, where he added heroin and prescription pills to his regular drug diet of speed and cannabis.

Like many young gay men moving in from the suburbs with the hope of finding some sort of like-minded community, not to mention excitement, the shy, callow and slightly built Peters found himself intimidated by the inner-city scene. Other men were smarter, stronger, more handsome. To make up for what he saw as his physical deficits, he worked out in gymnasiums and took body-building drugs on top of his recreational input.

He couldn’t hold down a job. Either he would lose his temper with a boss and blow his chance, or his difficulties with concentration led to some failure or harassment. He still needed money, though, and during the 1990s he built up a record of stealing, break-and-enter and assault convictions, followed by court-ordered stints in rehab.

In 1998 he was sent by a court to the Langton Clinic, a halfway house for recovering drug abusers in South Sydney. There he met an older man, Tereaupii Akai, known as Andre. Akai offered protection and love for Peters, as well as somewhere to live. They moved into Akai’s housing department flat in Surry Hills.

When they first slept together Andre Akai assured Peters that he had no sexually transmitted infections. Soon after, however, Damien Peters contracted both gonorrhoea and HIV He was, of course, devastated; HIV was tantamount to a death sentence. As Akai had been his only recent sexual partner, he was able to get Akai to confess that he did, in fact, have AIDS.

Damien Peters was shattered. He would stay with his lover, and nurse him, but he would never forgive him.

In 1998, Darren Jason Blackburn received his first criminal conviction for behaving wildly while drunk on a train in Melbourne. It would be the start of a series of offences over the next three years: theft, possession of stolen property, obtaining property by deception, theft again, drunken behaviour again.

Petty crime was part of his birthright. Born in 1972 on New Zealand’s North Island, Blackburn grew up in a family destabilised by his father’s heavy drinking, dope smoking and violence. Blackburn’s father left the household when Darren was six, but the old man’s shadow fell darkly over his four children, even when he was serving time in jail—which he often was.

Darren loved his father and was upset, from a young age, by the schoolyard teasing about being the son of a prisoner. His three siblings fared little better, if for different reasons. One, a sister, was severely intellectually disabled, but got married and had children whom she could not look after. Darren’s mother, who’d brought up four children single-handedly, now also had to look after her grandchildren. A brother developed a drug addiction early in life and followed his father into jail for committing violent crimes. Another brother, with whom Darren was closest in his early years, died of cancer the same year that the father walked out on the family.

Unsurprisingly, Darren Blackburn showed little interest in school. He wagged repeatedly and paid no attention to his classes when he did attend. His school moved him up each year, but he ended his secondary education without any functional ability to read or write.

What he really liked doing was getting stoned and drunk. From twelve years old, Blackburn was smoking marijuana—a joint each day at first, gradually moving up to half an ounce a week, a prodigious amount when started in adolescence and sustained over years. He also popped anti-psychotic pills which another boy had given him: they made him feel calm. And at the end of the day he would also put away up to five or six bottles of wine before passing out. Pot, wine and pills—a standard day for Darren Blackburn by the time he was fifteen.

On leaving school, he held a variety of jobs that would have done Jack London proud. He worked as a window tinter, Venetian blind maker, and cobblestone paver. He worked in a textiles factory assembling jackets. None of the jobs lasted. His real passion, for drink and drugs, formed a symbiotic relationship with the paranoid schizophrenia he was diagnosed with after leaving school. Whether the schizophrenia resulted from the drug use, or the drug use was a self-medication against the schizophrenia, is impossible to untangle. Both the substance abuse and the mental illness started from too early an age to separate into cause and effect. He saw psychiatrists and other doctors, taking medication from time to time until he left New Zealand in 1996, at the age of 24, and moved to Australia with his girlfriend, Louise. Darren Blackburn wanted very much to be saved by the love of a good woman. He and Louise had a baby together, and were expecting their second when they arrived in Melbourne.

Once in Australia, Blackburn stopped seeking medical attention. He didn’t see the need; booze and pot made him feel better.

His first job in his new home was a case of a fox being put in charge of the henhouse: working for a bottle shop, an Aussie Liquor Mart in Melbourne’s western suburbs, as a labourer carting boxes of beer and wine. He tried not to drink so much, but now, instead of drinking steadily each night, he would sober up for days or weeks and then go on massive benders, sometimes lasting for weeks. He’d consume two to four casks of wine each day and a slab of beer. Drunk, his taste for dope rose again.

For eighteen months he kept going at the bottle shop—the longest he’d ever held down a single job. He could drink right through the day and, being an experienced alcoholic, he was capable of putting away enormous amounts without getting falling-down drunk. He was reprimanded for stealing alcohol, and for being intoxicated at work, but when he left it was his own choice rather than his employer’s. On a binge, he simply didn’t turn up one day.

Louise, having had enough of his drinking, kicked him out of home. He moved to Werribee and lived in a tent on the riverbank. One day he came back to find his tent destroyed; he moved on, sleeping behind a church until his niche was boarded up to stop him staying there. He wandered around western Melbourne, sometimes sleeping in parks, sometimes in a hostel for homeless men in Footscray. He received unemployment benefits and spent them on alcohol and, on happy days when he could score, marijuana.

So this was Darren Jason Blackburn at the age of 26, in the late 1990s: homeless, unemployed, separated from his girlfriend and two young children. Hopeless, suffering from untreated paranoid schizophrenia, his days revolved entirely around getting drunk and stoned. Nothing else mattered. He was existing, just, in western Melbourne and outlying towns like Werribee, simply waiting for the fates to pick him up and drag him by the scruff of his neck into the future.

Back in July 1989, a former US serviceman and his wife had been busted in Honolulu for receiving 10 kilograms of ice from an Asian syndicate. A police crackdown on marijuana plantations in Hawaii was having a predictable effect: the drug trade shifted from the high-risk but less dangerous pot plantation to the lower-risk and more profitable methamphetamine lab. By the mid-1990s, Hawaii had a crystal meth problem as bad as the mainland US West Coast. Though originally synthesised in Japan, East Asian ice was now being made cheaply and less riskily in Taiwan and South Korea, then smuggled down the east Asian archipelago and across the Pacific. Ice was also being manufactured in the Philippines and trafficked directly to the nearest American states: Hawaii, California and Oregon.

Australia, however, had remained largely insulated. In November 1991, Frank Kelly, the Comptroller-General of Australian Customs, warned of ice’s popularity in south-east Asia. The 1991 Asian and Pacific Heads of National Drug Law Enforcement Agencies conference, at which Kelly spoke, issued a statement saying that criminal motorcycle gangs continued to control the manufacture and distribution of amphetamines in Australia. It said the Japanese crime syndicate, the Yakuza, was behind the increased use of ice in Japan, and that South American cocaine cartels were building networks with the Yakuza. Now Australia was believed to be in their sights. Law enforcement officials tasked themselves with monitoring and stopping any link between the Yakuza, other east Asian syndicates, and Australian bikie groups.

Yet Kelly, noting that this link was so far speculative rather than based on hard evidence, also voiced confidence that Australia could stop ice from coming in, relying on the same effective combination of education and law enforcement that had kept the country for the most part free of the crack cocaine epidemic. Law enforcement officials had stopped Latin American cartels from trafficking huge quantities of cocaine across the Pacific, and the same could be done to stop Asian organised crime syndicates from exporting ice or its precursors.

Australia had been largely untouched by cocaine and crack; but as a stimulant-drug problem, says Nicolas Rasmussen, it was a zero-sum game. ‘Amphetamine use in the US dropped by about half in the 1970s, and 1980s,’ he says, ‘largely due to the abundance of cocaine. But in Australia, where there wasn’t much cocaine, the use of illicit amphetamines didn’t drop by anywhere near as much. It probably explains why now we’re second in the world (after Thailand) for amphetamine use.’

Police busts of ice importation into Australia were still small-time and sporadic. A 29-year-old Filipino immigrant, Luisito Javillonar, was arrested by Australian Federal Police officers in July 1992 when some jars of face cream containing 12 grams of crystal meth were imported from Manila to his flat above a pet shop in Marrickville, in Sydney’s inner west. Javillonar, who had been under surveillance, appeared only to want the drug for his personal use and was released on $2000 bail. He obtained a false passport and fled the country, to return some years later.

Busts were mainly of this trivial magnitude. But their numbers increased stealthily through the nineties. In 1998–99, Australian Customs captured a total of 971 grams of methamphetamine in 22 separate interceptions at the borders.

Yet word was beginning to filter out that ice was on the streets, even if much of it was still conjectural. More and more drug researchers were getting reports of shabu among injecting drug users, and local police in Sydney were making their first arrests of suspects in an unusually heightened, proto-psychotic state.

The evidence about a coming wave of ice was far from uncontested. NSW Premier Bob Carr became the first politician to raise the spectre of ice in February 1998, when he wrote to the Prime Minister, John Howard, saying that police had told him ice was on the streets of Sydney and was a potential national menace. But Paul Dillon, the information officer for NDARC, aware that only a handful of informants had mentioned ice in NDARC’s studies, said it was ‘incredibly irresponsible’ of Carr to overreact to a marginal drug that was, in any case, possibly not even ice.

‘A lot of the time users say they’ve taken ice or shabu, when really it’s just speed,’ Dillon said. At the time he was right, going by the research. But the police were telling a different story.

In Victoria, the head of the drug squad, Detective Chief Inspector John McKoy, sounded the first alarms about ice in July 1998.

Informants in universities and TAFE colleges were telling police that pills being sold as ecstasy were in fact a mixture of other ingredients, including methamphetamine. For users expecting an ecstasy trip, the difference was quite stark. Whereas ecstasy produces a quasi-hallucinogenic, ‘warm’ high, enriching sensory perceptions, an amphetamine or methamphetamine high is more ‘edgy’, prompting the user to talk in a vigorous rush, act extremely energetically and, finally, endure a prolonged, anxious and depressed comedown.

A month after his initial warnings, Chief Inspector McKoy announced that Victorian police had charged four students from Holmesglen TAFE with possessing 200 grams of methamphetamine after a raid on a house in Glenferrie Road, near the Hawthorn Football Club’s famous ground in eastern Melbourne. The students, Indonesian nationals, had been trying to sell the meth to undercover police officers. As no manufacturing equipment was found, the police assumed that the drug was imported from Asia.

This wasn’t just another drug bust. Chief Inspector McKoy became one of the first law enforcement officials to warn of ice’s uniquely dangerous properties.

‘The experts tell us users really do turn to violence when under the influence of ice and that is one of the great concerns that we have,’ he told reporters. ‘It even scares some experienced junkies . . . it makes them feel like they are going to explode.

‘One of the side effects is that users tend to continue using to avoid the withdrawal off it, because once they start to withdraw it gives them the worst feeling possible, over and above every type of other illicit drug.’

The Victorian drug squad chief was onto something, pushing the ice issue from another drug story of manufacture/ trafficking/law enforcement towards a recognition of what ice did from the user’s point of view. As every drug taker knows, substances have their own personalities. Australians were about to discover more about the personality of crystal methamphetamine. But it was going to take a human tragedy to open their eyes.

The first Australian to die as a direct result of methamphetamine (as opposed to amphetamine) abuse might not have been Darri Denis Haynes, but he was the first to come to public attention. Haynes, 37 years old in September 1999, took stimulants for one of the oldest and most common reasons: he was a long-distance truck driver. Since the Second World War, the most prevalent use of amphetamine wasn’t to treat asthma or ADD or even to facilitate a good time at a party; it was to keep workers awake and alert. And while Japanese fighter pilots and other combat soldiers, munitions workers and world leaders were the first occupational guinea pigs, in the decades since the biggest professional amphetamine users around the world were drivers like Haynes.

In the week leading up to 1 September 1999, Haynes had driven his articulated semitrailer a total of 5468 kilometres for a company called Jim Hitchcock Haulage. On 30 and 31 August, Haynes drove approximately 1300 kilometres from Brisbane to Nowra, on the south coast of New South Wales, to transport a load of bricks; he washed his truck, returned to Brisbane, and was then taking a load of crates from Coca-Cola back down to Sydney, another 1000 kilometres. During those two days he had five hours’ sleep.

Twice a day he talked over the phone to a longstanding friend and fellow truckie, Leonard Duncan Mackellar. His last call to Mackellar came on 1 September from a cafe in Ballina. Mackellar, who also took amphetamines to stay awake for as long as seven days running for transcontinental drives to Perth and back, later said that Haynes was clearly overtired. During the call from Ballina, Haynes complained about hearing voices in his head.

‘I’m even talking to them,’ Haynes said.

Mackellar replied light-heartedly, ‘That’s okay, as long as they don’t answer back.’

Later that day, Haynes collided with another semitrailer south of Tyndale, near Grafton. He died when his cabin burst into flames.

The aftermath of Haynes’s death involved a long-running legal dispute over the responsibility of Hitchcock Haulage for pushing its drivers too hard. One of the thrusts of Hitchcock’s defence was that it was Haynes’s methamphetamine intake, not the demands of the company, that broke the driver’s concentration.

In the broader context of methamphetamine use, however, the most interesting statements came from a NSW Police consultant pharmacologist, Dr Judith Perl, who had found traces of meth in Haynes’s liver. She described vividly what she had heard from meth users who drove trucks: ‘From my personal experience, one reported seeing a jogger . . . next to the truck all the way from Sydney to Melbourne. One thought he saw an elephant. Generally, they perceive other vehicles trying to run them off the road, or bizarre types of imaginings where, when the police have just stopped them, they think it’s some sort of secret agent or the CIA.’

Dr Perl was pointing to the paranoia and delusions brought on by sustained methamphetamine use, phenomena that were still in the process of being studied and understood. It would be these symptoms which would bring on ice-related fatalities that were far more peculiar and stomach-turning than a truckie losing control at the wheel.

Dudley Aslett was released from Lithgow Correctional Centre in 1998. He’d survived his suicide attempt, but had developed a new and uncontrollable taste for heroin. When he got out, it was same-old, same-old. He stole more cars, skirmished with police, and racked up his first drug conviction, for possession. He went back inside, serving another eight months.

Up to 1999, there was still scepticism about the term ‘ice’. Many in law enforcement, health and academic research believed ice was a meaningless new dealers’ brand name for speed. Since the rise of ecstasy, speed was an unfashionable drug; ecstasy users would complain if the pills they bought were too ‘speedy’. There was every motive for speed dealers to try to reinvent speed under a glamorous new name.

But it wasn’t so. Ice was, in fact, new. A profound drug revolution was taking place—a revolution in composition, manufacture, the economics of supply, and usage—a true cultural revolution.

As we have seen, amphetamines had been around in Australia for a long time, and the lifetime-usage rate—people in the population who had ever tried speed—had hovered around 4 per cent since the 1970s. Beneath the surface, though, a bigger change was afoot in the manufacture of amphetamine-type substances. With hindsight, it is easier to see what was happening.

Once again, we have to look overseas for the beginnings of this revolution. In the United States as in Australia, illegal amphetamines were mostly manufactured by bikie gangs and their associates. The annual number of clandestine laboratories discovered by police in the United States hovered below 200 until 1985, when they suddenly went up to 500. The next year 600 were found, and by 1989 the number was 800—a fourfold increase in four years. The difference was almost entirely due to uncovered clandestine methamphetamine labs, which went from 180 to 652 in that period.

The rise was driven by changes in the chemicals used.

Until the 1980s, manufacturers of speed synthesised P2P, methylamine, hydrochloric acid, mercury and aluminium metal in an alcohol solution. When P2P was controlled as a Schedule II substance in the early 1980s, manufacturers switched to ephedrine as the precursor chemical, and synthesised it with pyridine, hydrogen iodide and red phosphorus. This was a cleaner process that produced a more pure methamphetamine.

Ephedrine, manufactured at plants in India and China, was imported in bulk into the United States for incorporation into legitimate over-the-counter cough and cold medications. In 1988, the US Chemical Diversion and Trafficking Act was written to require importers of ephedrine to report to regulators all movements of ephedrine-containing products. Lobbying from pharmaceutical companies, however, allowed an exception for ephedrine that was already in pills and capsules when it arrived.

If anything, this made it easier for methamphetamine manufacturers to obtain what they needed. Mail-order services allowed buyers to purchase hundreds of bottles of ephedrine tablets at a time. The US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) estimated that 48 000 25-milligram tablets of cold medicine were needed to extract one kilogram of pure ephedrine. This kilo could then multiply many times in the hands of a street cook.

In 1993 the US Congress passed the Domestic Chemical Diversion Control Act, which regulated ephedrine. It also allowed prosecutors to build a case against people who were buying large amounts of ephedrine without having to prove that there was criminal intent. Simply having the ephedrine in sufficient quantities could be enough to establish guilt.

But the 1993 Act, while shutting down or at least restricting access to ephedrine, did not cover pseudoephedrine. Again, this was the work of the drug companies, who knew that pseudo-ephedrine was the newer, cheaper, more widespread active ingredient in medications like Sudafed and Sinutab.

Meth users, if they’d known at the time, would have rejoiced. Pseudoephedrine produces a more potent ‘right-handed molecule’, d-methamphetamine, rather than l-methamphetamine produced from ephedrine (for the difference, see page 85). As a result of the 1993 Act, the quality, availability and ease of production of meth actually increased.

The Methamphetamine Control Act of 1996 was the US Congress’s first attempt to focus on the specific drug. It brought pseudoephedrine under its umbrella. In a compromise on packaging, the drug companies would now sell pseudo-ephedrine-containing tablets in ‘blister packs’. The logic was that the labour of popping pills out of blisters, rather than pouring them straight from the bottle, would discourage meth cooks. Nice logic, it failed to take account of the kinds of mindless repetition beloved of meth users; across America, users involved in production would happily sit for hours popping Sudafeds out of blister packs, as if Congress had sent them a gift.

However inventive law-makers and law enforcers are, they are always playing catch-up. When the trafficking of metham-phetamine across borders became illegal, American organised crime groups would load up Mexican immigrants with pseudo-ephedrine-containing tablets and bring them across the border with the legal precursor, rather than the illegal finished product. The pills would then be converted into methamphetamine in Californian and Texan labs. The profits were extraordinary. According to the DEA in the early 1990s, a $500 purchase of pseudoephedrine pills could yield $20 000 worth of crystal meth. Mexican cartels, already well established in the cocaine, heroin and cannabis trade, widened their business to crystal meth. When American law enforcement officials were able to interdict the traffic of cold medicines across the border in 1995–96, the cost of street meth went up, purity went down, and the number of presentations of meth psychosis and other health and criminal effects declined. But in the next few years, when the Mexican cartels got hold of greater quantities of powdered pseudoephedrine directly from the factories in India that were making it, usage flared again. In 1998–99, when these supplies were shut down, meth use dropped off. An investigation by the Oregonian newspaper in 2004 was able to correlate, with astonishing precision, peaks in the supply of the precursor chemicals with peaks in crime and health problems in the American west. By 2004, when the Oregonian published its report, the problem was raging again. ‘Authorities in Portland, Spokane, San Diego and Phoenix report that 25 percent to 38 percent of men arrested for any crime have methamphetamine in their bloodstream,’ the newspaper reported.

Given the waxing and waning availability of the precursor chemicals, the knowledge of how to cook methamphetamine had to remain alive and responsive to changes. Since the 1960s, knowledge about cooking speed was commonly learnt and passed around in jail, or as a kind of ‘samizdat’ among bikie gangs. Indeed, the first common moniker for meth, ‘crank’, derived from bikies carrying around the lab equipment and the product in their crankcases.

Until the 1990s, the spread of knowledge was limited by the physical delivery method—word of mouth and recipes scrawled on the backs of coasters—and by the networks in which manufacturers moved. But with the advent of the internet in the mid-1990s, the genie escaped from the bottle and the recipes became available to anyone, from teenage chemistry students to middle-aged farmers. And they were just as keen to spread it onwards: one American expert estimated that each year, the average meth maker would teach another ten people to make the drug.

Today, it takes seconds to find a recipe for crystal methamphetamine on the internet. The following one, by an author known as ‘MethodMan’, is arguably the most widely propagated. It appears on hundreds, if not thousands, of websites and chat rooms. On its original site it carries a preamble that reads: No lies here, folks, this recipe will manufacture methamphetamine this will get you into trouble if you do this BE CAREFUL!

As with any recipe, it begins with a list of ingredients. The brand names are American, but Australian equivalents are all available. In the recipe reproduced here, however, I have omitted several key ingredients and steps in the process so as not ‘to get you into trouble’. In Australia, possession of a recipe for the manufacture of a drug is a criminal offence so I have edited the recipe to ensure that it will not work to manufacture methamphetamine, but will still demonstrate the approximate level of skill required.

• Mason Jars (Used for canning)

• Contact 12 hour time released tablets

• Heet

• Surgical tubing

• Rubbing Alchohol

• Muriatic Acid (Used for cleaning concrete)

• Coleman’s Fuel

• Aceton

• Coffee Filters

• Electric Skillet

• Iodine Tincture 2%

• Hydrogen peroxide

• Coke Bottles (Plastic type)(with Lids/caps)

• Red Devils Lye

• Sharp scissors

• Book Matches

• Baking dish

• Execto razor blades single sided

• Digital scale that reads grams

• Distilled water

• Aluminum foil tape

Then comes the method:

First things first—the Iodine Crystals. Take a Coke Bottle and pour tincture into it.

Add Hydrogen Peroxide to this . . . After this you know, the jug that the Muriatic acid comes in take the cap off and fill this cap level with the acid. Add the acid to the coke bottle . . .

While the Iodine crystals are being made we are going to extract the Pseudo from the Contacts. You are going to need a towel for this so go get one. Take the pills out of one box, add it to one of the mason jars fill with rubbing alchohol just enough to cover the pills let set . . . Remove pills and take the towel and wipe the top coating off the pills this will remove the wax. Do the same with the other box of Contacts as well, after this add those wiped off pills only 10 to a clean mason jar. On top of this add Heat do the same for the other box of Contact. Let theese two mason jars with pills, heat stand . . . Then shake the jars till pills are completly broke down then let the jars sit again . . . Once clear syphon the heat off (Not the powder stuff at the Bottom you don’t want this it will fuck your dope up).

Well anyway syphon the heat off with a piece of the sergical tubing syphon this into a pyrodex baking dish place in microwave . . . Take out of microwave. Now plug up your electric plate set the pyrodex dish on this . . . continue evaporating till you get a white powder on the pyrodex . . . after you get it dried take a razor blade and scrape this powder up (put this aside for later use).

Now we are going to get the red phosphorus from the book matches take a pair of scissors and cut along the edge of the phosphorus . . . then take a coffee cup will work to this coffee cup add Acetone dip the match book strike pads into the acetone . . . this will loosen the phosphorus so it will be easier to scrape with the razor blades. (put the phosphorus in an empty match book box to let dry. Now it’s time to get the iodine crystals get a clean mason jar on top of this place coffee filter and pour the contents of the iodine +muriatic+Hydrogen Peroxide into the filter (do it slowly don’t over pour) well once you get though with the filtering on top of the coffee filter will be a black substance (This is iodine crystals) dry them by wraping in more coffee filters till you get a pretty good thick pile around the original filter place on ground and step on it to get the rest of the liquids off save this for the cook.

Next take your digital scales weigh your pills . . . then weigh out an equal amount of iodine crystals then for the phosphorus devide the total weight of pills . . . Now its time to make the cook jars you will need 2 clean mason jars with lids . . . surgical tubing poke a hole in both jar lids place one end of the tubing into each jar lid and seal with foil tape (buy this at walmart for about $ 1.60 well anyway seal off the tubes as well as you can so you should have 2 mason jars with lids that have surgical tubing foiled taped and sealed . . . add distilled water . . . now get you hotplate hot first . . . when the plate get hot then its time to add the Iodine+pill powder to the other mason jar not the one with water in it once you get both Iodine and pill powder to the jar add . . . water to this place it on the hotplate now add the phosphorus once you put this in the jar there is going to be a imediatereaction place the other lid with hose onto the jar screw on tightly then turn your hotplate up . . . the best way to tell when it is done is when the contents of the cook jar doesn’t boil anymore once this has happened turn the hotplate off and let the jar cool so you can touch it now its time to see if we have dope once it has cooled open the lid and you should smell rotten egg like smell if it has this smell congrads you have dope now we have to remove the dope from the black goey substance . . .

Next take another clean mason jar and place a coffee filter and filter the cook jars contents . . . place lid on the jar and shake the hell out of it then sit the jar somewhere . . . Now we are going to pull the dope out of the coleman fuel . . . fallow what i say exactly . . .

It’s not quite boiling an egg, but anyone who can follow a Neil Perry recipe can probably do it. And this is how it played out across America through the 1990s. Mobile methamphetamine labs mushroomed in homes, garages, motels, storage units and even in cars. Police busts of clandestine meth kitchens rose into the thousands.

As the home-cooking craze spread, so did the number of incidents showing what a dangerous practice it was. Internet sites spreading the recipe were not especially responsible on warning of the hazards in dealing with chemicals that are toxic, corrosive and flammable, and which could be absorbed by inhalation and via the skin. Once the manufacture of meth democratised, away from the experienced bikie gang specialists and into the home hobbyist cohort, accidents became commonplace. According to one study, 30 per cent of the drug laboratories found by police in the state of Oregon attracted attention because there had been a mysterious explosion or fire.

The more cooks there were, the more amateurs were having a go. Fewer and fewer meth cooks knew the correct proportions of ingredients or had the skill to synthesise them properly. They produced methamphetamine of variable quality, both in terms of its potency and its purity. Where lead acetate was used in production via the P2P method, users suffered lead poisoning when they smoked or injected the product. In the late 1980s a cluster of injecting meth users presented at Oregon hospitals with acute lead poisoning. One Oregon test of a seized meth sample found that it was 60 per cent lead.

Chemical spills released solvents and cyanide into the air. Many cooks lacked adequate knowledge of how to ventilate their labs and control the temperature. On the contrary, meth cooks were typically so paranoid about being detected, they would double-seal all windows and doors so that no smells would get out—thus elevating the risk of poisoning to those inside. Meth cooks in Oregon were reported to experience skin, eye, nose, throat and lung irritations, coughing and chest pain, nausea, headache and lethargy. Extreme effects included kidney and liver damage, and fainting.

Hazardous waste was poured into sewers and septic systems and contaminated ground water and run-off into lakes and oceans. Where motel rooms were used, a toxic and flammable mess was often left behind, or at the very least traces of chemicals were left permeating carpets, furniture and curtains. Phenylacetic acid, leaving a ‘cat’s piss’ smell, would be a telltale after-odour once a meth lab had been dismantled and moved away. Decontamination of premises was in some cases too costly to carry out; American police allocated funds seized during busts to covering the cost of making spaces habitable again.

But if the cooking of methamphetamine was that hard, and that dangerous, and that poisonous, and that unreliable in its production of a reasonably pure and effective drug, then nobody would have been doing it. While explosions, injuries and busts were well publicised by American law enforcement officials, meth cooks were responding by developing less combustible, odour-free, more mobile labs. Nobody knows how many labs are busted each year as a proportion of those that exist. Nobody can even estimate it. (Incidentally, the US DEA has estimated that of all labs busted, 80 per cent produced crystal methamphetamine.) One thing is sure, however, which is that for all the dangers the process posed, it didn’t stop millions of grams of crystal meth being produced and sold across America each year. Seizures of amphetamine-type stimulants by US Customs went from 750 000 doses in 1998 to 3 million in 1999 and 6 million by the turn of the century. Much of the Pacific coast and some of the rural western states were, by 2000, in the grip of a true crystal meth epidemic. Within four years, 12.4 million Americans said they had used methamphetamine at least once in their lives.

Even though setting up a home methamphetamine lab might have tempted thousands of users, more than three-quarters of America’s meth was by the end of the century produced in ‘superlabs’ controlled by organised crime groups. The superlab method goes as follows.

First, the pseudoephedrine tablets are poured into a blender and ground up. Then they are mixed, in a pot, with a solvent which separates the pseudoephedrine (or ephedrine) from the other chemicals that bind the tablets together. The mixture is poured through a filter, and then simmered on low heat to take the solvent away. What remains is the pure pseudoephedrine, in a gluggy paste form.

Again on low heat, the pseudoephedrine is mixed with red phosphorus and acid. The gas output is vented out through a pipe attached to the bubbling mixture.

At this stage the chemist has pure methamphetamine, but the remaining acidic component in the mix is still too powerful, so the red phosphorus residue is filtered out by pouring the liquid through a hessian sheet and then caustic soda is added to the methamphetamine in barrels with ice packed around them to keep the heat under control.

Next, freon is added to the methamphetamine base and decanted out of the barrel to be mixed with hydrogen chloride. What the hydrogen chloride does is draw the acidic hydrogen atoms away from the methamphetamine, leaving the drug as a wet precipitate, or ‘salt’.

Finally, the methamphetamine is dried on a filter cloth, measured out, probably cut with additives to enhance the weight of the product, and packaged up for sale.

In Australia, events moved slowly, lagging behind the United States, but in the same direction. Australia lagged because there was not the same historical saturation in stimulants as there had been in the United States. Australia was remote from the efficient Latin American trafficking businesses. And, it could be speculated, Australian bikies didn’t have the same degree of competitive enterprise as their American cousins.

Up to the mid-1990s, only one major Australian police bust for ice manufacture had made it through the courts to result in convictions, when a syndicate led by chemicals importer John Barrie Oldfield, from Winston Hills in western Sydney, was broken open back in 1989. Over three years, beginning in 1986, Oldfield and a group of associates including ‘master cook’ and police informant John Michael Gazzard had manufactured 76 kilograms of ice in five different locations from Sydney to northern Queensland, with Oldfield supplying the active ingredient, pseudoephedrine, and Gazzard using his knowledge of chemistry to make the methamphetamine—though he wasn’t expert enough to avoid harm. In Gazzard’s own version, one ten-day cook-up in Como, in southern Sydney, produced fumes so strong that his eyes puffed up as if he’d ‘gone 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali’.

They sold the ice to the Black Ulans bikie gang before being caught by Gosford police. The syndicate had done very nicely, Gazzard admitting that he’d spent $684 000 of his income from the drug deals on jewellery, entertainment, bribes to police, travel (including a $70 000 round-the-world trip), an apartment in Oxford Street and a property at Swansea, near Newcastle.

Nevertheless, ice figured so meagrely in the public consciousness that the Oldfield/Gazzard bust attracted more attention for subsequent charges of police receiving bribes than it did for the fact of ice being made.

In 1996, Australian police broke open 58 clandestine amphetamine labs across the country. Few were producing crystal meth, which accounted for only 100 grams in seizures. The vast majority were making old-fashioned amphetamine sulphate.

The unleashing of the ice genie in Australia happened in a disconcertingly similar manner to the American experience. Again, it was inadvertently caused by legislators.

In the last year of the Keating Labor government, the federal health minister Graham Richardson announced that a concerted federal and state police crackdown on the supply of amphetamine’s precursor chemicals would end the amphetamine problem. For about a year, it promised to do so. In 1996, NDARC researchers had noted a decline in the purity of street amphetamine. While its price remained stable at around $100 a gram, users were saying amphetamine was growing weaker and weaker, cut more and more with caffeine and other dilutants. Traditional amphetamine was on the way out.

But like the American drug crackdowns, this one only motivated the ingenuity of manufacturers and drove them to more potent and easily concocted variants. In 1997, injecting drug users told Rebecca McKetin at NDARC that some Queensland manufacturers had found a way of cooking speed in smaller labs—the size of a box rather than a room—which would do the job faster and produce a higher yield. They were using pseudoephedrine, from common flu and sinus tablets like Sudafed and Sinutab, as the vital precursor chemical. To obtain the large quantities of the tablets needed, manufacturers paid ‘pseud runners’ to drive up and down the east coast picking up a few packets at a time from pharmacies until they had big commercial loads. The output of the pseudoephedrine lab wasn’t old-style amphetamine—it was methamphetamine. And this revolution in manufacture in the late 1990s was the single most important catalyst to what was tagged, after the turn of the century, as the new ‘ice age’.

The difference, both chemically and subjectively, between methamphetamine and amphetamine sulphate is small yet significant. Methamphetamine is what it sounds like— amphetamine with a methyl molecule added on. Some researchers believe the methyl molecule slightly enhances the amphetamine’s crossover from the blood to the brain. Some users have reported a slightly smoother, faster high. But this probably owes more to the purity and the rapidity of ingestion, both of which rose when smokable meth came onto the market. Chemically, methamphetamine and amphetamine are essentially the same stimulant.

Among users, the key difference in promoting ice as fashionable, as opposed to nasty old speed, was twofold. First was the purity. Second was the method of administering it.

Speed had always come in three forms: powder, tablet and liquid. For decades it was taken in pill form, or injected. Then, from the 1980s, novice users might snort it, an experience that was somewhat less efficient than injection and often quite painful, due to the impurities cut into the street drug. Less efficient still was sprinkling it onto a marijuana cone—a ‘snow cone’. But snow cones (which might also involve cocaine or heroin) were more socially acceptable for the casual user than injecting. Thousands of drug users who will put anything into their body, every day for years and years, refuse steadfastly to use a needle. There is the fear of blood-borne infections and the queasiness about penetrating the skin, which many people simply find impossible to do. There is also a superstitious, semi-mystical revulsion about, in Neil Young’s lyric, ‘the needle and the damage done’. Injecting, the most efficient pathway to a high, has always been a marginal practice.

The crossover in manufacture from amphetamine to methamphetamine introduced a ritual of taking the drug that was more acceptable than injecting yet almost as efficient. ‘There are lots of young drug users who think they’re not going to put a needle in their arm but, if someone is handing round a glass pipe with a bit of crystal in it and all [their] friends are smoking it, that doesn’t seem so scary,’ Rebecca McKetin says.

Crystalline methamphetamine is not actually ‘smoked’, in the way tobacco and marijuana combust in a flame. In an ‘ice’ pipe, the crystals are placed in a chamber, usually glass, and heated by an external flame. The flame doesn’t oxidise the crystals, but causes them to vaporise. By drawing back on the stem of the pipe, the user is inhaling not smoke but methamphetamine vapour.

In Australia, ice pipes were emerging alongside methamphetamine around 1997. Compared with amphetamine, meth seizures were gradually creeping up. In 1997, the Australian Federal Police reported that for every 100 seizures of amphetamine, there were 79 of meth. In 1998 that rose to 83. In 1999 it rose to 89. The next year meth overtook amphetamine, and it has never looked back.

As for purity, probably a more significant factor in the marketplace, meth was easily outstripping amphetamine sulphate. When police seized amphetamine, they tested its purity. In the late 1990s it was always less than 10 per cent pure. But when they seized methamphetamine, the purity ranged from 15 to 32 per cent. For the user, that was the essential difference. It has been said that ice is just speed in a new guise. The basic truth in this statement ignores the impact of changes in purity and the way it was used. Higher purity, and a more efficient method of ingestion, created a whole new drug experience.

In the 1999 NDARC survey, after many years in which users had said amphetamine purity was low and declining, they began saying the opposite. The new variant, meth, was purer and getting better—or, for some, worse.

On the loose again in 1999, Dudley Aslett committed a robbery and was locked up for two years. Soon after his release, he assaulted a policeman, stole a car, and was caught with knives and drug paraphernalia. He was imprisoned until the end of 2002, the longest continuous sentence of his life. It would be his second-last jail term. His heroin habit continued unabated.

In 2000, Mohammed Kerbatieh was released from jail in Queensland after serving four and a half years of his six-year sentence, paroled early on the basis of a prison record showing an adequate standard of behaviour. Upon his release, feeling that he had too many ghosts haunting him in Queensland, and too many relatives likely to ask too many questions, he decided to move south, to Victoria. There he found a new drug.

PART TWO

THE HIGH

2001–2003

The turn of the century wasn’t the best of times for a sixteen-year-old in Canberra named Matthew Gagalowicz.

Born on 26 February 1984, Gagalowicz had enjoyed a happy childhood in country Victoria until his family moved to Canberra when he was eight. From there, a chain of events upended his stability. His best friend slipped while climbing on the roof of a house and fell to the ground, breaking his neck. He later died, and Gagalowicz didn’t recover easily. He struggled to make new friends, became withdrawn and started losing weight. Often he fell asleep in class. His mother took him to hospital, so worried about his behaviour that she was almost hoping it had a medical explanation. And it did. Matthew had developed diabetes, which was to require four insulin injections a day.

Gagalowicz was particularly close to his grandmother, but she fell sick during these years and was diagnosed with brain cancer. Her suffering was protracted, and she died when Gagalowicz was thirteen. Shortly afterwards, his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer; it was successfully treated with chemotherapy, but then another tumour was discovered in her other breast. The atmosphere around the home became defined by medications, tests and doctor’s appointments.

The constant shadow of death striking his loved ones, and his own fight with diabetes, on top of the usual turmoil of adolescence, drove Gagalowicz into chronic depression. He had to give up competitive basketball and football due to his diabetes, his previously good marks plummeted, and he began fighting with his teachers. Anyone who hadn’t known him before would have described him now as an unsociable, disruptive, surly boy—an extreme case of otherwise typical teenage behaviour. But Gagalowicz was in fact struggling with problems that even adults would have had trouble combating.

The gash in Gagalowicz’s psyche, was staunched, perhaps inevitably, by illicit drugs. He started smoking marijuana in his early teens; his smoking buddies were his only social outlet at school. He got his laughs when he was stoned; he talked about weed, he dreamt about it, and he configured his life around it. Pot helped him out of his depression, and then made it worse: by as early as fourteen or fifteen, Gagalowicz was locked into the habitual drug user’s spin cycle.

Anyone who uses a number of drugs will develop a preference. Among keen recreational users, desert island drugs are a favourite subject of conversation: If you could choose just one drug, which would it be? Matthew Gagalowicz found his desert island drug in 2000, at the age of sixteen, when one of his school friends gave him his first try of amphetamines.

This was a ‘clean’ amphetamine—some dexamphetamine the friend had been prescribed to cope with his attention deficit disorder. Unlike street amphetamines, dexamphetamine is not cut with who-knows-what impurities. When Gagalowicz took dexies, for the first time in memory he felt comfortable, light on his feet, confident and energetic. Smoking so much dope had begun to make him lethargic and paranoid, introverted and mostly miserable. Now he wasn’t feeling anxious about a thing. He felt supremely ‘normal’.

In year eleven he changed high schools. He only stayed at the new school for a short time, but it was long enough to make some new friends who introduced him to ecstasy and cocaine. Though he enjoyed these, dexamphetamine, or the more commonly available methamphetamine, remained his drug of first resort.

By 2001, Vicki Wolf and Mark Thomas would tell friends that they were emerging from a long, dark tunnel. Having two babies so close together was a challenge to their fitness and sanity, but the moments of joy outweighed the fatigue and sense of being a little old before their time. The friends they had made at their respective law firms since moving to Sydney tended not to have children, and Vicki and Mark spent most of 1998–2001 quietly envying their colleagues’ Friday-to-Sunday merry-go-round. Observing their friends’ party lifestyle was a form of nostalgia; Vicki and Mark mocked the shallowness, but also acknowledged that they missed it. A little shallowness once in a while might make a refreshing change.

In 2001, they took their first holiday away together without their daughters, whom they left in Melbourne with Mark’s parents. The girls were sleeping to a sound routine, waking up at a luxurious six-thirty in the mornings, and were generally a great deal easier; they were no longer toddlers.

So Mark and Vicki went back to Thailand, their old happy hunting ground, and lay on beaches for a week. They avoided situations where they might be tempted to take any drugs, let alone shabu, but they did find themselves talking about their past trips to Thailand, romanticising their golden days, almost daring each other to plunge back into a past that they weren’t absolutely sure they wanted to remain, simply, the past.

When they returned to Sydney they went to a party in Coogee. They were feeling rested and tanned, healthier than they’d been at any point since 1998. Everyone at the party told them how good they were looking.

Mark was quite drunk by about 10 pm, when he went to the toilet. It was occupied, so he waited outside the door. After a few minutes the door opened and a male face peeped out. It was Peter, a workmate of Vicki’s. He bobbled his eyebrows at Mark. Mark went in.

Peter and two other lawyers, one a barrister and the other from Vicki’s firm, made space for Mark. One of the guys was bent at the vanity tipping some crystals from a plastic bag into the ball-shaped end of what Mark recognised, like an old friend, as a pipe for smoking drugs. Without a word, the guy passed Mark the pipe and a metal lighter in the shape of a revolver.

‘Pow-pow!’ the guy said.

Mark declined—could they give him a minute?

He left the bathroom and found Vicki talking to someone in the kitchen. Like a caveman, Mark dragged his woman off by the wrist. Laughing, she went along.

It was the old mad rush they remembered, only more so. They only had two or three puffs each, then suddenly wanted to be out of the bathroom, away from the three lawyers, who were—unlike Mark and Vicki—strangely quiet and concentrated.

Mark felt that the top of his head had come off. The first words Vicki said were: ‘I remember this now.’ Mark’s eyes were dewy. She knew what he was remembering.

They stayed at the party for another three or four hours. They thought they’d given up dancing. They hadn’t. They thought they’d given up having sex on the floor of someone’s garage. They hadn’t. They thought they’d given up having sex twice or more in one night. They hadn’t.

And the next morning, there was no hangover, no comedown. This shabu was better than the old shabu. Mark and Vicki talked about it all the next day; it seemed there was nothing else of any great importance or excitement to talk about. And talking about it made them excited and horny again. They made love on the aphrodisiac memory of the previous night, and said, over and over, ‘How could we have forgotten how good this is?’ They meant the sex, but they also meant the drug.

In the following weeks, Vicki became friendlier at work with Peter and the other guy who’d been in the bathroom. Mark, through his law firm, manipulated one case so he could brief the barrister who’d been the source of the shabu at the Coogee party. Only the barrister didn’t call it shabu. He called it crystal.

Vicki and Mark used it again, about twice in the next six months, with their new friends. When they were on it, they loved to philosophise about it. Alcohol made them tired. Children also made them tired. Life had made them tired. So why would they use alcohol to relax? At this time in their lives, what they needed was a pick-me-up, not a depressant. It seemed they’d grown into this drug. When they were energetic youngsters they’d loved smoking dope or taking acid trips, but now they were so tired all the time, what they wanted from a drug was not a transcendent experience but a burst of energy. The best thing about crystal was that it affected them even after it had worn off; that is, it improved their sense of their own powers. Three years of parenting had depleted their vitality, but now they had it back, almost more than they needed.

In 2001, an Australian statistical milestone was passed. Noticed only in law enforcement circles at the time, its repercussions were not yet fully understood.

That year, nationwide drug arrests for amphetamine offences exceeded heroin arrests for the first time.

To put that into perspective, in three decades heroin supply, possession, trafficking and importation had grown into Australia’s number one drug menace. Heroin imports, mainly from Burma but also from Thailand, Afghanistan and elsewhere in Asia, set off a domino effect of crimes against property and people, family tragedies, overdoses, imprisonment and personal ruin. Australia’s distance from the coca-producing countries of South America had to a degree insulated it from the cocaine epidemic seen in the United States. Among the illicit drugs of addiction, in Australia heroin was king.

At the turn of the century, this changed quite abruptly. As a rule, nothing happens quickly in the illicit drugs world. Behaviour changes direction like the Queen Mary. But this change was, in relative terms, like the throwing of a switch.

A prolonged policing assault on Asian opium poppy production, the effects of the anti-opium policies of the Taliban government in Afghanistan and a concerted police/customs chokehold on the importation of heroin across Australian borders produced results on the street. The average price of heroin went up from $350 to $450 a gram in the capital cities. Meanwhile, its average purity dropped from 51 to 39 per cent. So junkies were paying 30 per cent more for 25 per cent less. Deaths from heroin overdoses in New South Wales fell by almost half in 2000, from 491 to 296. Non-fatal overdoses also dropped.

Politicians jockeyed to claim victory. Prime Minister John Howard and his health minister, Michael Wooldridge, extolled the virtues of heavier law enforcement in creating the heroin drought. (They had opposed the safe injecting room project in Sydney’s Kings Cross, which was also responsible for reducing the number of overdose deaths and the spread of blood-borne infections.)

Meanwhile, on the street, injecting drug users didn’t simply pack up their fixes and give up. As Rebecca McKetin points out, the sentinel groups ‘soak up whatever’s going around’. And what was going around was to have even more devastating consequences than heroin.

The NDARC Drug Trends studies in 2000 and 2001, which showed such good news on the heroin front, also suggested that this, like so many law-enforcement initiatives, was a zero-sum game. As the king of hard drugs died, another king stood up to claim its throne.

In New South Wales, the number of injecting drug users wasn’t actually falling. They were just changing their drug. The portion of injecting drug users who had used ice in the previous year rose from 7 per cent in 2000 to 35 per cent in 2001. The purity of police amphetamine seizures, which had bottomed out at around 5 per cent in the mid-1990s, had crept up to 14 per cent by 1999 and was now hitting 36 per cent. The price of methamphetamine, meanwhile, was stable or dropping—to as low as $25 for a shot in Sydney. Methamphetamine was even cheaper in South Australia and Victoria.

In the United States, the crystal meth epidemic had followed a clear geographic path through the 1990s. The Pacific Northwest and California, being closest to the supply chains of Asia and Hawaii—and, in California’s case, Mexico—felt it first. Texas was hit when the pseudoephedrine traffic started coming in from Mexico. But overall, ice’s journey in the mainland United States could be said to have started on the West Coast, in centres like Portland and San Francisco, and spread steadily eastwards.

In Australia, reports of ice seemed to flower simultaneously in all states. And it all happened in 2000–2001. As New South Wales usage rates among injecting drug users rose from 7 per cent to 35 per cent in that year, in Victoria it rose from 8 to 18 per cent, in South Australia 13 to 20 per cent, in Queensland from negligible up to 18 per cent and in the ACT from negligible up to 21 per cent. As it had in Sweden, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, ice in Australia went everywhere at once.

Police and researchers could never answer precisely why this happened, but the strongest theory was quite simple: major illegal drug distribution in Australia is concentrated at the top. When the big importers couldn’t get heroin, they shifted to methamphetamine. The bikie gangs who organised on-the-ground distribution were unfussed: bikie gangs had long controlled the amphetamines manufacture and sale in Australia. And bikies were everywhere, in all states.

Dr Michael Dawson, a chemist at the University of Technology, Sydney, is a leading expert on the chemistry of methamphetamine. He says it is impossible to determine the origin of pseudoephedrine chemically—making it hard to know where the methamphetamine police capture is coming from.

‘It is not like plant-based drugs [such as cannabis, cocaine and heroin] where you can identify the origin,’ he says. ‘It’s been said that you can tell local pseudoephedrine from imported pseudoephedrine, but that’s bullshit.’

The big change, Dr Dawson says, was in the early 1990s from the P2P method, producing a 50-50 mix of left- and right-handed isomers, to the method that used pseudoephedrine to produce methamphetamine hydrochloride, entirely made up of the right-handed isomer. This happened simultaneously in Australia and overseas.

‘My back-of-the-envelope estimation is that more methamphetamine in Australia is imported than local,’ says Dr Dawson. ‘That’s just from the economics of it. A kilo of pure methamphetamine yields about 20 000 doses. To make it in Asia, where the big production centres are, and secrete one kilo in a shipment to Australia, doesn’t seem too difficult.’

By the age of 29, five years after moving to Australia, Darren Jason Blackburn had been homeless around western Melbourne for the best part of three years. He still wasn’t seeing doctors for his schizophrenia or taking any medication other than the alcohol he drank and marijuana he smoked.

Every now and then he landed a job. After one of several stints in a hostel for homeless men in Footscray, he found casual work loading containers for the dairy company Bonlac. With his cash wages topping up his dole cheques, Blackburn was able to buy his nightly two casks of wine and get quietly sozzled.

Or not quite quietly. On 12 December 2001 he was convicted, after a vicious fight with another man, for intentionally causing serious injury. He was sentenced to six months’ periodic detention, but didn’t turn up one day and was ordered to serve the remaining 69 days all at once. He also went to a detox centre when his drinking overwhelmed him. He did the course, but as soon as he came out he resumed his consumption of alcohol and drugs.

Blackburn’s downward spiral was accelerated by three significant events in 2001. First, he met Graham ‘Banjo’ Band. Thirty years Blackburn’s senior, Band was a disreputable old drunk who presented himself to Darren Blackburn as a kindred spirit. They lived together in a house in Seddon, in western Melbourne, and spent each night drinking.

Then Blackburn met Lyn Henry. Notwithstanding his deep-seated alcoholism and mental illness, his drug-taking and his sketchy employment, Blackburn remained a fairly robust, cocky and good-looking man, at least on the outside, and Henry fell in love with him. She moved in with him and Banjo Band, and, just as he had a few years earlier, Blackburn believed he could be saved by love.

But there were competing love interests. In 2001, he started becoming a frequent user of intravenous drugs such as heroin. He was also introduced to ice. He liked heroin, but it was hard to come by. He liked ice more, and it was cheap and plentiful. As Dr Peter McGeorge, the mental health director at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, would say a few years later, ice became the ultimate democratic drug—it was popular in the party scene, among white-collar professionals who liked a weekend buzz, and also, because it cost $50 a point (a shot of one-tenth of a gram), it found favour with the homeless. For the first time in years, Darren Blackburn felt that his luck was coming good.

It’s not as if the consequences of the heroin drought hadn’t been foreseen. By 2000, Australia was a client state on the doorstep of the world’s biggest producers. We have seen how by 1997 methamphetamines were a bigger problem than opiates in Thailand. In 1998, the Australian Bureau of Crime Intelligence reported that Indonesia was threatening as a base for ice export to Australia.

So it proved with actual seizures. The 971 grams of amphetamines seized by Australian Customs in 2000–2001 surged to 305 kilograms the next year. In the following years the seized amounts were 6 kilos, 6 kilos, 157 kilos and 90 kilos. And that was only what was being intercepted at the borders. Police seizures of ice inside Australia rose phenomenally, from one kilo in 1998–99 to 6 kilos in 1999–2000, 80 kilos the next year, 150 kilos the next, and 225 kilos in 2002–03.

These figures were distorted by big single busts, some of which were spectacular or newsworthy. In March 1999, an unemployed seventeen-year-old youth was arrested in Sydney over the delivery of 238 grams of methamphetamine, packed into children’s toys, from south-east Asia. He was connected to an identical package, with 331 grams of the drug, left at a courier firm near Sydney Airport. That was the size of bust that made the news in 1999. In April 2000, a joint operation of the Australian Federal Police and Hong Kong police caught an Australian and a Hong Kong national about to send 20 kilograms of methamphetamine in a shipping container to Australia. In October 2000, Henry Sutanto, a heroin-using ‘pit boss’ at Melbourne’s Crown Casino, was arrested after trying to on-sell half a kilogram of ice that he had bought from an Indonesian national named Henry Lu. Sutanto was trying to make money to finance his upcoming wedding.

These busts were small-time compared with what was to come. In November 2000, Australian Federal Police intercepted 79 kilograms of methamphetamine bound for Sydney from China. By a factor of ten, it was the AFP’s biggest ice interception to that point. The drug was found in a container alongside 184 kilograms of heroin, fuelling the theory that heroin and methamphetamine were passing through the same hands from Asia into Australia.

In the following year, that record seizure was doubled again, with police impounding 152 kilograms of methamphetamine in a yacht off Mooloolaba, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. It seemed that the constriction of heroin supply didn’t make much difference to the south Asian syndicates. Ice production was booming in Thailand, so the traffickers simply filled the bags with the more easily produced, less risky substance.

One of the first authoritative Australian voices to join the dots between the ice flood and the heroin drought was Dr Alex Wodak, the director of the Alcohol and Drug Service at St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst, Sydney. In November 2001, Wodak warned publicly that the switch from heroin to methamphetamine among injecting drug users would lead to a spike in HIV infections. He knew the psychology of the stimulant user, as opposed to the narcotic. As Paul Bennett puts it, opiates take you downtown and meth takes you uptown. Wodak knew, better than most, that heroin users shot up and nodded off. While on the drug, heroin users are fairly sedate. While high on meth, the ice user would be running around, full of manic energy, dreading the depressing comedown, easily persuaded to top up again and keep going.

To take just one example of an ice user’s frenetic industry, here is a log of 23-year-old Sydney ice user Ersen Cicekdag’s actions, on 4 and 5 September 2005:

Afternoon, 4 September: Came into possession of credit cards, mobile phones, laptop computer and personal papers stolen from a house that afternoon.

11.05 pm: Used stolen credit card in a brothel to pay for sexual services costing $132.

11.59 pm: With stolen credit card, bought groceries for $72.85 at a service station.

12 midnight: Bought more groceries, costing $128.17.

5 September, 12.08 am: Bought food and drink costing $12.10 from McDonald’s.

12.41 am: Bought goods costing $207.94 at a service station.

12.42 am: Bought goods costing $115.30 at the same service station.

Daytime: Came into possession of stolen car keys, and used them to drive away a Toyota motor vehicle.

Afternoon: Led police on a high-speed chase, crashed into another car, ran away from police, was eventually arrested in possession of 0.4 grams, or four ‘points’, of ice.

Compared with other drug users, crystal meth users are extremely active when they are high, pursuing their obsessive tasks or pleasures for days on end. For Wodak, the consequences in the potential spread of blood-borne infections were both obvious and ominous.

Wodak was already a controversial figure in the public health world. When the federal government set up a Senate committee to investigate illicit drugs in 2006, the committee chair, Senator Bronwyn Bishop, went on a crusade to discredit Wodak. In this she was aided by many charity workers and members of various organisations who came before the committee to advocate a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to illegal drugs. Wodak, as a promoter of ‘harm reduction’, was held up as public enemy number one.

It’s worth a digression to see how he had developed his views. Wodak started working at St Vincent’s on 1 July 1982. Exactly one year earlier, the US Centers for Disease Control identified Auto-Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS. At that point nobody had much idea whether AIDS was caused by a virus or bacteria, what kind of syndrome it was or how it was spread, let alone how to combat it. Over the next 24 months the evidence, worldwide, was pieced together: gay men having unprotected sex and injecting drug users sharing dirty needles were the two groups most at risk.

‘All of this was happening during my first year in this room,’ says Wodak in his cramped office in Victoria Street, on the fringe of Sydney’s red light district. ‘We knew quickly that this was a major epidemic. It was starting with gay men, of whom 35 per cent were HIV-infected already. Then some of those men who used needles were spreading it to heterosexual injecting drug users. Then they were spreading it by having sex with heterosexual non-drug users. From there it was out into the community in an orderly sequence.’

Wodak, whose family had fled the plague of Nazism in Czechoslovakia forty years earlier to settle first in Singapore and then Australia, became ‘obsessed with doing what I could to stop’ an epidemic that was ‘the worst since the Black Death in Europe in the fourteenth century’.

The immediacy of the problem pressed itself upon him.

‘The largest population of HIV-infected gay men were walking the same streets as the largest population of injecting drug users, and these were the streets around this hospital, the same streets I was walking every day.’

Wodak’s mission was to instil a culture of clean needle use. Programs were already in place in the Netherlands and the UK (where it had been promoted, incidentally, by the conservative wing of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party). Over the next few years Wodak wrote thirteen separate submissions to the federal health department laying out the case for funding a syringe exchange program, and was rebuffed each time. Wodak’s encounters with authority ‘led me to wonder what on earth was going on. We had a chance to do something about this epidemic, but people [meaning politicians and bureaucrats] wouldn’t let us.’ By 1986 he was ready to press ahead regardless of government support. He was threatened with legal penalties and interviewed by police, but the syringe program got underway and in the next twenty years would save countless lives. Whether stimulant or opiate consumers, injecting drug users now understood the consequences of sharing needles, and while they may make many questionable decisions with their lives, the shift to clean needles in two decades represented a remarkable cultural change.

Wodak read the literature of drug policy in different countries, and discovered ‘that it’s always an arbitrary and capricious process. There’s a deep belief that piling on drug law enforcement will bring trafficking to an end, when the evidence shows it has the opposite effect, including corrupting police.’

By the mid-1990s, Wodak had become aware of a new threat on the horizon. Although he’d been burnt with the needle exchange experience, he was prepared to go through the same process of applying for government funding for what he saw as an urgent public health menace.

‘We began hearing more and more about amphetamines,’ he says. ‘Compared with heroin, amphetamines were under-researched. We understood heroin and had some effective treatments, even if they were underfunded. But there was already global evidence of a trend from plant-based to synthetic substances. When you cook the substance inside a room, you’re not subject to the aerial and satellite surveillance you get if you’re growing a plantation of cannabis or opium poppies.’

In 1996, Wodak went to a conference in Italy where one of the participants talked about a urine test that could distinguish between prescribed amphetamine (mostly dexamphetamine) and street amphetamine.

‘We need that test,’ was his first thought, he says now. ‘I could see the amphetamine problem coming, and this looked like it could be an effective treatment.’

The idea was that dexamphetamine could become for speed addicts what methadone was for smackies: a safe, clean substitute for the drug that could be prescribed and used medicinally to help the addict through withdrawal symptoms, and remove the risk of overdosing or catching a blood-borne infection.

As he had a decade earlier, Wodak wrote to the federal government repeatedly, requesting grants for a pilot project to see how such a test would go. Again and again he was rejected— not on scientific but political grounds. Michael Wooldridge eventually consented, but Wodak then met obstruction after obstruction in the bureaucracy. A senior health department official told him that ‘you are throwing me into a swimming pool with lead boots on. The same thing will happen to me as happened to my predecessor.’ That is, he would be sacked for supporting one of Wodak’s controversial programs.

What followed was one of those minor scandals that have hampered many drug treatment projects in Australia. Wodak’s application to the National Health and Medical Research Council received an outstanding mark of 88 per cent, easily enough to get the grant, but was still rejected. Another organisation received $500 000 to explore non-pharmacological treatments of amphetamine addiction. ‘It eventually found, to no one’s surprise, that such treatments, on their own, had little effect,’ Wodak says.

At that point, methamphetamine use was still relatively low in Australia. But then came the heroin drought.

‘The amphetamine market changed dramatically,’ Wodak recalls. ‘Heroin purity went down and the price went up. Meanwhile amphetamine purity went up, the way it was absorbed became easy as crystal methamphetamine came onto the market, and consumption skyrocketed with a spectacular increase in adverse consequences.’

To what extent can this be attributed to the heroin drought? Hugely, says Wodak, quoting a paper from 1976, written by American psychiatrist Joseph Westermeyer. That document, called ‘The Pro-Heroin Effects of Anti-Opium Laws in Asia’, traced the consequences of opium crackdowns in Hong Kong (1945), Thailand (1959) and Laos (1972). In each case, cutting off opium traffic led to devastating rises in heroin use. ‘Opium smoking among elderly men was replaced by heroin injecting among young men,’ Wodak says. Heroin was manufactured underground, was more concentrated and was easily transportable. Injection, as a method of administration, was more efficient and less likely to be sniffed out by police than opium smoked in a pipe.

‘This fits in with all prohibitions,’ Wodak says. ‘In the 1920s, the prohibition of beer led to more production and consumption of spirits. The crackdown on cannabis in Hawaii (in the 1980s and 90s) led to an explosion of methamphetamine use. Cracking down on opium in Burma led to amphetamine use.’

The same, he says, happened in Australia with the heroin drought. Criminal syndicates found something that was less risky to make and more profitable to sell. Users found something that was cheaper and lasted longer. Police and hospitals found themselves unprepared for a crisis.

Wodak’s analysis was backed up by a study conducted by Andrew Macintosh for the Australia Institute in 2006. The paper, ‘Drug Law Reform: Beyond Prohibition’, said four out of every five dollars spent by state and federal governments on illegal drug programs went to law enforcement rather than treatment.

Macintosh suggested that authorities were compounding the problem by prosecuting users at the end of the supply chain. Eighty per cent of those charged with drug offences in 2003–04 were caught for using, most often cannabis.

The study linked the heroin drought causally to the methamphetamine outbreak, saying organised crime gangs had made ‘marketing and production decisions’, particularly ‘a decision to switch from producing and trafficking heroin to methamphetamines’.

So should police have done nothing, and tolerated heroin rather than risk the effects of a drought? To anyone who asks if clamping down on heroin trafficking was a bad idea, Wodak also cites Westermeyer. Neither would advocate anything like turning a blind eye to heroin. But Westermeyer concluded that before authorities crack down on one drug, they should lay the ground for its aftermath, by ‘(1) changing society’s attitude toward the traditional drug from ambivalence to opposition; (2) mobilizing resources to treat and rehabilitate all addicts within a short period of time; (3) developing the social will to incarcerate all “recidivist” addicts for a prolonged period; and (4) preventing narcotic production or importation.’ Lay the ground first; the crackdown comes last. Needless to say, in Australia none of these preventative actions was taken, or nowhere near to the extent that was needed. As a result, another act of prohibition led to another outbreak of a more dangerous and socially damaging drug.

In 2001, Novica Jakimov separated from his wife. It came as a surprise to some of their family and friends in Melbourne, who knew Jakimov as a successful sportsman and reliable bricklayer from a good family.

Born in 1968 in what was then Yugoslavia, Jakimov had come to Australia with his parents as a three-year-old in 1971. At school he was popular with his peers and talented at sports, particularly cricket, football and water polo. When he left school after year twelve in 1986, he worked steadily as a brickie and in other building trades.

In 1998 he married, but by then he was a fairly frequent recreational user of drugs, including cannabis and amphetamines. He was never physically violent towards his wife, but would suffer eruptions of temper, screaming and threatening her. After three years she had had enough.

Alone, Novica Jakimov decided it was time to be a full-on bachelor again. He was getting high on something or other every few days. And someone introduced him to crystal meth.

He still wanted to rekindle his relationship with his wife, and contacted her regularly to sound her out about a reconciliation.

As well as the easier importation of meth and its precursor chemicals, the essential economic difference between ice and heroin was that ice only required the importation of knowledge. You didn’t need poppy growers to produce for you in Asia and make risky shipments by sea or air. All the ingredients for making methamphetamine were already here. And the internet was providing a handy platform for anyone interested in becoming a home cook.

If crystal methamphetamine were an imported drug that relied on shipping or other freight routes, its spread could be charted from the eastern capital cities into the rest of Australia. But due to the near-simultaneous importation of knowledge, and the ready availability of pseudoephedrine in Australian pharmacies, meth bloomed everywhere at once.

By January 2001, Adelaide police said the street scene was fully penetrated by ice. Dr Rachel Humeniuk, a senior researcher with the Drug and Alcohol Services Council, said ice was more popular in South Australia, relative to opiates, cocaine and hallucinogens, than in the eastern states. She noted that the purity was increasing and the price was falling faster in South Australia than elsewhere. Later that year, statistics showed that hospital admissions for amphetamine psychoses had risen in South Australia from 10 to 25 a month. Busts of methamphetamine laboratories shot up from one every two weeks to one every five days, with police predicting further increases.

Meanwhile, Queensland would soon be staking its claim as the nation’s ‘ice capital’ (a declaration that would actually be made by the Courier-Mail newspaper in 2005). As early as 1995, a Gympie man had been arrested after finding a way to accelerate the amphetamine-making process fourfold, using methyl alcohol or acetone and other solvents, including hydrochloric and other acids, iodine and mineral spirits. Dale Francis Drake was one of the first Australian cooks to show how easily the process could be replicated. Queensland Health forensic chemist Peter Vallely (now an adviser to the UN’s International Narcotics Board) would say that Dale Francis Drake revolutionised the economics of local methamphetamine production: ‘Before that, criminal elements used cooks and they were looked after as a bit of a prize, but then they were suddenly growing like money trees.’

Drake’s laboratory was one of only twelve to be uncovered by police in 1995. Since then, busts of clandestine laboratories, or ‘clan labs’ as police called them, had surged in the Sunshine State. By 1998–99, there were 83 lab busts. In 1999–2000 there were 70, and in 2000–2001 there were 138.

In Queensland, though, compared with the other states, the many lab busts were yielding low weights of methamphetamine. That is, Queensland might not really have been the meth capital of the country, but it was certainly the capital of the mini-lab. Cook-ups occurred in boats, motel rooms and car boots. Police couldn’t explain why Queensland had this particular characteristic. But it had been around for a while. Back in 1996, Paul Bennett had seen an explosion in the number of small labs, very possibly as a flow-on from Dale Francis Drake.

‘Master cooks were soon in demand because they knew how to extract the maximum amount of pure methamphetamine from these medicines, and were “persuaded” by organised crime groups to cook for them alone.

‘I know a guy who did a runner into the Glass House Mountains north of Brisbane. Some of these bunny backyard cooks had as much know-how and compassion for mankind as Iraq’s Chemical Ali, and got it majorly wrong. Not only did they make some toxic shit by using the incorrect ingredients and recipes, but also blew themselves up in the process. When going through certain stages of the cooking or methamphetamine process, buffer substances need to be removed to get the ephedrine. This process involves adding toxic chemicals such as acetone, methanol, ether, different acids, cleaning agents, iodine, red phosphorus, etc. Because some of these cooks had inadequate skills or ingredients or exhaust systems, gases would mix, or envelop a spark, and then KA-BOOM!’

Bennett says that through some ‘working girl’ friends of his, he found his ‘own cook. It was someone you’d really want to hang onto.’

One of the reasons for trusting ‘your’ cook, he says, was the variation in the products that came out from unknown labs.

‘For a few months there was a batch of pure going around that had many of the big users hallucinating. I was used to seeing opaque-coloured crystals, but now some pinkish and aqua-coloured crystals were rocking up. This batch I’m talking about was a dark orange-red in colour, thick and gooey like tar. (I now know it hadn’t been washed properly, a greed for money buzz.) It was best kept under refrigeration . . . because it would start melting, especially in the high temperatures of a Gold Coast summer. Users imagined bugs crawling all over and inside their bodies, inflicting a burning itch. Some of them scratched big sores in themselves. Some tried to burn the bugs off using cigarette lighters. One guy who was off his face poured lighter fluid over himself, then his mate, also under the influence, set him alight . . .’

Dr Michael Dawson, used regularly as an expert witness in methamphetamine court cases, says the biggest downfall for ‘master-cooks’ is not incompetence but ego.

‘I was involved in a case which seemed to be going well for the defence until the alleged cook’s ego got the better of him,’ Dr Dawson says. ‘He was denying it, but then he had to show me, as a chemist, how good he was. It turned out he was so proud of his work, he’d kept records of how he’d made it. Why would you keep records of illegal activity? Only if you’re a complete smart-arse.’

Whatever the reason for Queensland’s reputation as a cook-up capital, the consequences were extreme. In 2002 the Queensland Premier, Peter Beattie, said that recreational drug users, particularly young men on amphetamines, had contributed to a 400 per cent increase in the number of people avoiding trial due to mental illness. Bob Aldred, the chief executive of the Queensland Alcohol and Drug Foundation, would say in 2005 that: ‘If I had to make the awful choice I would prefer my son or daughter to be on heroin rather than amphetamines. Although heroin has the chance of mortality, you can usually keep them alive until you get them off the heroin. With amphetamines your psychosis can become a chronic psychosis. Then you have a lifetime illness and that person is going to be a major problem for the rest of their lives.’

Aldred said some parents would score the drug for their child rather than let them wander the streets. ‘You see a lot in this game but when a parent phones I just go to water,’ he said.

At the same time, Jane Fischer, a researcher from the Queensland Alcohol and Drug Research and Education Centre at Queensland University, said an unprecedented 28 per cent of ecstasy users were smoking ice as well, even when they didn’t name ice as their drug of first choice.

‘That suggests that methamphetamine use in Queensland is driven by availability,’ she said. In other words, all those little meth labs in Queensland—hundreds more than were being detected—were having an impact on the habits of people who wouldn’t ordinarily take the drug. Supply-side economics were at work. Here was proof that if one drug was cheaper, more abundant and easier to score than other drugs, then users would switch rather than take nothing. Unable to obtain heroin, a smackie wouldn’t just go home and watch TV and have a quiet night; he or she would buy methamphetamine instead.

Queensland law enforcement officials weren’t going to ignore ice. Queensland, after all, had always had a schizophrenic relationship with illicit drugs: under National Party Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Queensland was simultaneously the place where the most marijuana was grown and sold, where police were believed to be most corrupted by drug money, and where the criminal penalties were the most draconian. In 2001, Tim Carmody, the Queensland Crime Commissioner, successfully lobbied the state government to raise the maximum jail term for amphetamine trafficking from 20 to 25 years. Paul de Jersey, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, called for amphetamines to be reclassified as Schedule I drugs, alongside what he called the ‘undoubtedly demonic’ heroin, cocaine and LSD. The Chief Judge Administrator, Justice Martin Moynihan, said the rise of amphetamine-related crime in Queensland was ‘horrifying’ him.

‘I have the distinct impression that cannabis is being used less as a first drug of choice in favour of methamphetamines and heroin,’ he said. ‘And if this is true, we’re not going anywhere near winning the war against drugs.’

It was in Victoria, however, that the most sensational stories about ice were hitting the news.

Senior Constable Barry Hills, of the Victorian elite detective squad, spent the winter of 2001 with arguably the state’s worst job. In Ballarat South, a cold part of a cold state, Hills was spending four to five hours a night in a sleeping bag in long, wet grass overlooking the home of a 36-year-old single mother, Jayne Rawlings. Whenever someone came or went—which happened frequently—Hills would photograph them.

Rawlings was under surveillance as part of Operation Sally-port, a Victorian police sting that was to bust the state’s biggest known crystal meth operation. At the Ballarat station, detectives were amassing information on dozens of people, known as ‘primary targets’, ‘secondary targets’ and ‘suppliers’.

Rawlings had been a primary target for some time, even though she had no criminal record. In 1999, she had begun using ice and soon became addicted. By 2001 she was using a gram a day. Rawlings had been a heroin user but the Ballarat trade in the narcotic had been cut off by the same detectives in 1999, when Operation Rickard had snared the prize scalp of Dragan Gnjatovic, 35, known as ‘Bill from Ballarat’. Gnjatovic had headed a syndicate that bought heroin in Deer Park, in Melbourne’s western suburbs, and transported it to Ballarat. Several overdoses drew attention to the heroin glut, and Operation Rickard monitored Gnjatovic’s phone calls for 42 days. In late 1999 police had enough evidence to pounce, and Bill from Ballarat went down for five years. Eight other members of the syndicate also went to jail.

Just as it did elsewhere in Australia, ice slipped neatly into the hole left by heroin. Bill might have left Ballarat, but injecting drug users like Jayne Rawlings were still ready to part with their scant cash for whatever was on the market. She came to the notice of Ballarat police in 2001, and Operation Sallyport detectives obtained a Supreme Court warrant to tape what amounted to around 12 000 phone calls in the ensuing months.

On 6 August 2001, detectives were able to fix a pattern on Rawlings’s habit. Every day she would order ice by phone or text message from two Filipino men. She paid for it with cash deposits into their TAB accounts, then drove to Melbourne to collect it. In the two months during which Constable Hills was lying in the long grass near her house, Rawlings made 60 trips to Melbourne and back, bringing to Ballarat around 400 one-gram deals of ice, selling them for around $350 each. Once they’d reached an evidentiary threshold, Victorian police released Constable Hills from his chilly vigil and arrested Rawlings. Caught, she saved police the forensic nightmare of bringing thousands of phone intercepts to court, and pleaded guilty.

Others accused of ice-related crimes were not so compliant. Mohammed Kerbatieh was, by 2001, exactly the kind of person the detectives of Operation Sallyport were endeavouring to keep ice away from.

Upon his release from a Queensland jail in 2000, Kerbatieh had moved to Victoria. He was introduced to crystal methamphetamine and, throwing away all of the good resolutions he had made in prison, he became a regular user. His hot-headed tendencies worsened immediately and dramatically. Ice, his lawyer would later tell a court, ‘took away his sense of feeling and conscience’.

Kerbatieh smoked methamphetamine on the night of 23 September 2001. He was a big shot, a single man with some cash and charisma—at least in his own mind. He went for a late-night walk around Coburg, where he lived. Some time after midnight, he approached two teenage girls walking home from Coburg train station. He began big-noting himself, saying he was a drug dealer and asking if they’d like anything. The girls said no. He persuaded one of them, a fifteen-year-old known in the courts as ‘C’, to walk with him to Moreland train station, where he said he had to drop off some drugs.

As they walked, he asked her if she ever took drugs and if she was a virgin. He grabbed her and kissed her on the mouth, then asked her if she wanted him to be her boyfriend. C, terrified, said she already had a boyfriend. Kerbatieh said she needn’t panic, because he had a gun on him and ‘nobody will hurt you’.

Kerbatieh told C that he needed to phone a friend. Too scared to run away, she stood by while he pretended to make a call on his mobile phone. After the fake conversation, Kerbatieh told C that the drop-off had been changed to the parklands near the closed-down Coburg High School.

When they got there, he told her to sit on his jacket. As she sat, he pinned her to the ground and said, ‘I’m your worst nightmare.’ He said he would kill her if she didn’t do what he wanted.

C began to cry, and wet her pants. She tried to yell out, but Kerbatieh pulled her skivvy over her mouth and slapped her on the face, lying on top of her, grabbing and switching off her mobile phone. He proceeded to rape her with his fingers and his penis—C could not be sure how many times he penetrated her—and then forced her to touch his testicles.

‘Now you have to say this,’ he said. ‘Listen. Say, “I love you, Sam, I want to have sex with you”.’

C, shaking with fear, did what he wanted.

‘Now say, “I am a whore”.’

Kerbatieh masturbated throughout, finally forcing her to tongue-kiss him and pose for him ‘doggy style’. As he ejaculated, he instructed her to ‘look at me come’.

Kerbatieh dressed himself. As he got ready to stroll off into the night, he told C that he would kill her if she reported the incident.

She managed to find a taxi home. Shortly afterwards, she went to a police station, where a medical examination showed clear evidence that she had been assaulted.

Three nights later, again shortly after midnight, another fifteen-year-old girl, ‘S’, was at a pool hall in Fawkner with some friends. Kerbatieh hovered near the group. When S’s friends left, he moved in and chatted her up, saying he was a drug dealer and inviting her to come and help him finish off a deal. S refused, saying she was fifteen and didn’t take drugs. Kerbatieh changed tack, saying he had to meet a girl at a nearby train station—apparently the girl was in trouble after arguing with her boyfriend.

As lame as his story sounds, S agreed to go with him. He was brimming with self-confidence. He seemed like an important kind of guy, and something about him warned her not to say no to him.

They walked to the station, and Kerbatieh bragged about being a trained kickboxer, and an ecstasy and cocaine dealer.

‘You want a fake ID? Driver’s licence? I always get them for underage girls, no worries,’ he said.

At the station, they smoked cigarettes and waited for the phantom girl, then walked back towards the Fawkner pool hall. Kerbatieh persuaded S to take a shortcut through a hole in a fence at the back of a building. He had prepared the ground, where a mattress was lying under cover. He sat S on the mattress and asked if he could kiss her. She refused. Eventually he appeared to give up, saying he would call his brother to come and drive her home.

A car arrived with two men in it, taking S and Kerbatieh to the Drums Hotel in Coburg. As soon as she could, S said she had to go home. Freezing cold, she didn’t want Kerbatieh to walk with her, but he insisted. Seeing how cold she was, he said he would borrow a jacket for her from his friend’s house nearby.

S waited outside while Kerbatieh went into a house in Bell Street, Coburg, which he said was his friend’s. In fact it was his own. When he didn’t re-emerge, she followed him inside. Saying he was looking for a coat, he led her into a bedroom, where he pretended to try several times to call a friend who would drive her home.

Kerbatieh was charming and gentlemanly throughout. In spite of her better instincts, S had allowed him to make her feel safe. At 31, he was sixteen years her senior and powerfully built. In the house he offered her what he said was ecstasy; she refused again. Then, after taking what were more likely tranquillisers or barbiturates, Kerbatieh fell asleep. S didn’t know he’d been taking ice, but now that his high had worn off, he only wanted to pass out. S was happy that he had.

S slept too, but when she woke him at daybreak Kerbatieh’s mood was altogether changed. He was dishevelled, snarling and aggressive. He said he didn’t know how she’d come to be with him, and accused her of stealing $20 000 from a suitcase in his room. He said he was calling a friend over to help him find the $20 000; he handcuffed S in the bedroom, tying her feet with black cotton strips.

As she cried, he slapped her and told her to be quiet. He kept slapping and swearing at her as she resisted his efforts to take off her belt. He removed the cotton bindings and took off her clothes, saying he wanted her to feel ashamed. After stripping and re-cuffing her, he asked if she’d ever ‘sucked a dick before’. S said no. Kerbatieh pulled down his pants, but was unable to get an erection. He blamed the drugs he was taking, and stormed out of the bedroom.

He soon came back, having worked up an erection for himself. He also brought a carving knife and fork from the kitchen. He forced his penis into S’s mouth with the knife at her throat. Then he penetrated her vagina with his tongue, the handle of the carving fork, and finally his penis, demanding that she say, ‘I want you to fuck me like a slut, fuck my tight vagina, oh, I love your big dick.’ He said he was ejaculating inside her, but she needn’t worry because he ‘couldn’t have children’.

He repeated more sexual assaults throughout the morning, finally saying: ‘I don’t know if I can trust you. Maybe I should just kill you instead.’

He let her get dressed, however, and leave his house, warning her again not to go to the police. He said he couldn’t afford to get into trouble, as he had previously been jailed for killing three men.

He let S go, and at first she was too frightened of Kerbatieh to tell any authorities. She did tell some friends, however, and two months later S was ready to give a statement to the Victorian police.

This was not soon enough to save Kerbatieh’s third victim, a sixteen-year-old codenamed ‘E’. By this point Kerbatieh was locked in a death spiral of ice use, taking the drug several times a day, staying up for as long as he could, crashing into deep sleep, waking again with a paranoia and depression that could only be relieved by taking more crystal meth. He had to live with his terrible past—not merely what he had done in recent days, but the way he had treated Runda, his wife, and their child back in Queensland. Then there was the time he had spent in jail. He had every reason to want to block out his history, to avoid coming face to face with himself.

It was obvious to anyone but himself that Kerbatieh was delusional by this time. He believed his encounters with S and C had involved consensual sex, and he was fully swept up in the stories he had told them about being a professional kickboxer and wealthy drug dealer.

A fortnight after his assaults on S, Kerbatieh approached E as she was walking to a tram stop in Sydney Road, Coburg. It was 7.45 am and she was on her way to school, wearing her uniform and carrying her school bag. Kerbatieh struck up a conversation, asking where Hawthorn Street was. This was the street where S lived.

As they talked, Kerbatieh’s mobile phone rang. He had an animated (though quite possibly faked) conversation, ending with him saying, ‘How am I meant to pick up $15 000—with my bare hands?’

E was wary of the 31-year-old at first, and asked if she had seen him before. Kerbatieh made up a story about boxing with a friend of her brother.

‘What’s your brother look like?’ Kerbatieh asked.

When E described her brother, Kerbatieh said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I know him.’

E, believing he was an adult acquaintance of her brother, saw no harm in showing Kerbatieh the way to Hawthorn Street, a few blocks away. He had another conversation about the $15 000, after which he told the schoolgirl that he would give her $200 if she helped him and his sister collect the money from Bell Street. E declined, but continued walking with him towards Bell Street. Kerbatieh was following his usual modus operandi.

He boasted to E that he was a well-known drug dealer and lit a joint, offering her a puff, which she refused. They had been walking for more than fifteen minutes when Kerbatieh said he knew a shortcut down a lane to the back fence of the house where he had to pick up the money. As with S, he was only luring E to his own house.

When they arrived at the back of his property, E declined his offer to go inside with him. After a while he came out with a stick, brandishing it at her, and pulled her through the hole in the fence. E resisted him, saying he had to let her go to school, but he forced her into the back part of the house, a bedroom with an unmade bed. E tried to leave, but Kerbatieh grappled her down and put his hand over her mouth. E was so scared she wet her pants, but she kept fighting him. She managed to get out of the house and back up the lane towards Bell Street. She was so panicked that when she dropped her bag along the way, she kept running without looking back.

On Bell Street she found a woman and told her that a man had tried to rape her. They went to the local police station where E made her complaint. Police executed a search warrant on Kerbatieh’s house and found several items, including the black cotton strips with which, they would later learn, Kerbatieh had tied up his second victim, S.

At his trial in early 2003, Kerbatieh accepted that he had been with the three girls, but in the case of S he argued the sex had been consensual, and with C and E he said that he had rejected them after they had ‘cockteased’ him. He was a disruptive and wily defendant, often sacking his lawyers and even calling for his trial to be aborted when the jury heard of his untruthful boasts that he had killed three men, which he said would prejudice them against him.

The issue of Kerbatieh’s crystal methamphetamine use came up after he was examined by a psychologist, Warren Simmonds. Kerbatieh had been taking ice solidly for six months leading up to the rapes. He had no prior record of sexual assault. He said that the ice had changed him, heightening his sexual urges and lowering his ability to control them. He wanted his ice use to be treated as a mitigation of what he had done, and as evidence that, once he was off the drug, he had a good chance of rehabilitation. Judges in the trial and appeal courts rejected this. Legally, although his crystal methamphetamine use might have had this effect on him, he had been taking it for long enough to be aware of its effects and was able, in Judge Jim Duggan’s words, to ‘take it or leave it’. Kerbatieh knew that ice made him horny, and he wasn’t so addicted that he had no power to choose whether or not to take it.

Kerbatieh’s ice intoxication, while undoubtedly a true precursor to his crimes, was not severe enough to get him off the legal hook. He was found guilty of eighteen separate charges and sentenced to 22 years in jail.

By 2001, Rebecca McKetin and the researchers at NDARC believed that old-fashioned amphetamine sulphate had been more or less totally replaced in Australia by methamphetamine, whether in powder, paste or crystalline form. Users, health workers and police reported that what was still called speed was, in fact, methamphetamine. There was still some confusion, among users at least, as to what ‘ice’ was. Some thought ice was speed mixed with heroin; others that it was a completely different drug. What generated these misperceptions was partly dealer marketing-talk, but also a registering of the different effects of the more potent form. ‘Chemically,’ NDARC’s 2001 Drug Trends report said,

amphetamine and methamphetamine are closely related. Both exert their effects indirectly by stimulating the release of peripheral and central monoamines (principally dopamine, noradrenaline, adrenaline and serotonin), and both have psychomotor, cardiovascular, anorexogenic and hyperthermic properties . . . Compared to amphetamine, methamphetamine has proportionally greater central stimulatory effects than peripheral circulatory actions . . . and is a more potent form with stronger subjective effects.

The subjective effects of methamphetamine are, as we have seen, both consistent and variable. Principally, a person uses meth because it induces feelings of extreme wellbeing, power and self-confidence. But that extremity can tip over into the kind of reckless sense of invulnerability and grandiosity exhibited by Mohammed Kerbatieh. As use continues, methamphetamine can also induce the flipside of all that wellbeing, in the form of paranoia, insomnia, anxiety and depression. And when the negatives reach the extreme end of the spectrum, the paranoia can tip over into acts of senseless violence.

What is going on inside the brain to produce such a cornucopia of emotions and responses? From Charlie Parker dipping asthma inhaler strips in his coffee to American and Japanese Second World War pilots, from Jack Kerouac and 1990s party kids all the way to Mohammed Kerbatieh losing any contact with reality and assaulting three girls, what was the common chemical event happening in the human brain?

When they enter the body, methamphetamine molecules head, via the bloodstream, to the central nervous system, kidney and liver. In the brain, they easily cross the blood-brain barrier and enter tiny ‘storage terminals’ in the nerves.

Nerve cells, or neurons, are asymmetrical. At one end is the axon, and the storage terminals are located in the end of each axon. One nerve cell’s axon is adjacent to the next cell’s dendrite—the part of the nerve cell that receives messages. When one nerve cell communicates with the next, it sends out neurotransmitters to cross the gap, or synapse, between the axon and the neighbouring dendrite. These neurotransmitters are held in the storage terminals.

Among the different types of neurotransmitters are the so-called ‘feel-good’ neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. Methamphetamine molecules are very similar in shape to dopamine molecules. What the methamphetamine molecules do, crucially, is force the neurotransmitters out of their storage terminals and across the synapses in large numbers. The normal role of these neurotransmitters is to respond to different kinds of signals. Sometimes those signals are pleasant, and the spread of neurotransmitters is, literally, what makes us feel good. At other times, neurotransmitters are released as a defence against pain; again, their role is to make us feel better. When something good happens, axons release neurotransmitters like dopamine across a synapse; when they lodge in the nearest dendrite, they pass on a message that says ‘be happy’.

But nature only intends for them to work in moderation. Methamphetamine, particularly in large doses, sets loose great multitudes of neurotransmitters—hence the observation of many users that meth is ‘a thousand times better than sex’. The pleasure effect, measured by the amount of dopamine and serotonin released, can literally be a thousand times greater than what would naturally occur during sex.

This would not be so bad for the brain if it was the only effect, and if, afterwards, the production of neurotransmitters could resume as per normal. But in the aftermath of neurotransmitter release, the methamphetamine is involved in other chemical reactions that damage the body’s capacity to make new neurotransmitters.

Normally, once they have carried their message across a synapse, neurotransmitters either die or are taken back by the axon they originated from. This process is called the ‘reuptake’ of the neurotransmitter. But methamphetamine inhibits the reuptake process. Dopamine and serotonin, instead of being replenished, are oxidised and damaged by the methamphetamine. They are left in the system for an unusually long time, thus extending the high, but they are unable to return to the axon. The payoff is that the half-life of methamphetamine can be ten to twenty hours, rather than the much shorter half-life of cocaine, for instance.

The downside is that once the released dopamine is gone, it is gone. Subjectively, this is the cause of the ‘crash’—the user feels awful because the brain is not producing or releasing neurotransmitters in sufficient numbers. It’s also one of the things that makes methamphetamine addictive. When it wears off, it leaves you feeling so terrible that the only solution is to take more. Unfortunately, the greater the dose, the more the damage, and the more the damage, the greater the dose needs to be to create the same effect. This squirrel-wheel inside the user’s chemistry is what we know as ‘tolerance’ to the drug. It’s also responsible for the particular pains of methamphetamine withdrawal. Whereas a withdrawing heroin user might experience symptoms similar to a bad flu, a withdrawing meth user can suffer from a depression lasting months. The risk of relapse is correspondingly higher, as the withdrawal symptoms last much longer.

Whether or not the brain recovers, and if so how much, has been a point of scientific contention for many years. It is now generally agreed that long-term use can cause permanent damage to the process of neurotransmitter production and secretion, so that mental health consequences such as chronic depression can have a lifetime effect even when the user has given up.

More disturbing still is recent research suggesting that methamphetamine catalyses a process called apoptosis, or a form of natural cell death. Apoptosis is very important to the body; cancer, for instance, can be a deficiency of apoptosis, in which cells are allowed to proliferate without the downward regulation of natural cell death. In embryos, apoptosis is what happens between the fingers and toes, killing off cells so that we have gaps between our digits rather than joined flesh.

But apoptosis, if out of control, means the devastation of cells, a premature old age. Some research has indicated that long-term methamphetamine use can ravage nerve cells in many regions of the brain, permanently. Imaging of meth users’ brains has shown apoptosis that is similar in appearance to the brains of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease sufferers. In the worst cases, heavy methamphetamine use can give the abuser every appearance of being a senior citizen decades before his or her time.

When someone takes methamphetamine, its peak presence in the bloodstream extends from one to three hours after ingestion. But there are faster effects. Blood pressure and pulse rates go up, the pupils dilate, and the sense of wellbeing and energy comes on fast. Sweating increases. Also, harking back to the original medicinal use of amphetamine, the lung passageways dilate, allowing for easier breathing—the rate of respiration also goes up.

In manageable doses, the subjective response is only pleasurable. One of the interesting things about the human brain is that many of the best feelings it produces are on the spectrum of many of the worst feelings. That is, the feeling of energy that methamphetamine induces is on the same continuum as hyperactivity. A greater dose pushes the user out towards the hyperactivity end. The teeth-grinding which overtakes even the most moderate methamphetamine users is a step out towards agitation and restlessness. Likewise, the opening of the bronchial pathways can lead to hyperventilation. The feeling of awareness and acuity is one step along the road towards confusion and paranoia. At its worst, this paranoia can mesh with hallucinations and delusions, where the user feels that someone is out to harm him. And it is that fear, and ‘hearing voices’, which in turn can lead to acts that are suicidal and homicidal.

For more than twenty years, scientists have identified an effect that is probably known to all meth users. The user’s pulse, blood pressure, breathing rate and eye dilation are all switched up so high that the user is unable to move, almost paralysed by an overflow of neurotransmitters. It is unlikely to result in death— methamphetamine rarely has the fatal overdose effect of opiates like heroin—but users have described a feeling of chest tightness in these ‘over-amped’ situations that may resemble a heart attack.

This description covers basic amphetamine effects, and within it lie the variations of methamphetamine and drugs like MDMA (commonly known as ecstasy) and MDA. The differences in the molecular structures of these drugs are responsible for the differences in the subjective experience. For instance, MDMA and MDA have more of a visual hallucinogenic effect than amphetamine.

When some unknown chemist on the Pacific Rim first synthesised a smokable crystal form of meth in the 1980s, the chemical secret lay in mirroring the drug’s molecular structure. Ice is dextro-isomer methamphetamine, what is called a ‘right-handed molecule’. Older forms of meth are the levo-isomer methamphetamine, or ‘left-handed molecule’. Whereas the l-isomer is more stimulating to the cardiovascular and respiratory systems, the d-isomer is much more stimulating to the brain.

Pseudoephedrine is a left-handed molecule which, when synthesised, makes the right-handed d-isomer methamphetamine molecule. It apes dopamine in a subtly different way, but users of the new version found that there was only one thing that mattered: it was better. And as it was sold in the smokable crystal form, it did something else. It gave users the rush or lift that was previously available only by injection.

But as far as the brain is concerned, it doesn’t end there. Chris Cruickshank is a PhD student at the University of Western Australia. When the heroin drought struck in that state, there was a rush towards methamphetamine like the Boxing Day sales. Everyone wanted to get onto meth. Cruickshank’s interest is in meth withdrawal—he interviews users on the sleeping problems, the anxiety, and the depression they experience in withdrawal.

But there’s also the guilt, in some cases. Users have to live with the memory of acting impulsively. They had sex with someone they shouldn’t have. They hit someone. They went into a screaming fit. They smashed up their parents’ home.

‘The aggression,’ says Cruickshank, ‘comes down to an impairment of cognition. With prolonged use of this drug, the sections of the brain that control impulses are impaired.’

In other words, the meth user is dealing with a brain chemistry double-whammy. At the same time that he or she is feeling invulnerable, full of self-confidence, bursting with energy and ideas, or maybe exploding with fear and paranoia, he or she is also least able to say no to acting upon those impulses. The motivation to do something rash is at its highest, and the ability to stop it is at its lowest. And the worst of it is, both of these mechanisms—the impulse and the means to control it—move further apart over time.

‘The neurotoxicity of methamphetamine is cumulative,’ Cruickshank says. ‘The sections of the brain that inhibit impulses get progressively worse with use of the drug, so the person acts out their physical impulses more and more.’

In America, stories of the results—shocking, almost unbelievable violence—had been around for years. A causal link between amphetamines and violence had been investigated as early as the 1970s. Australia, in 2001, was about to get its wake-up call.

Among inner South Sydney’s stacked-up Legoland of housing department units, few blocks had a worse reputation than Northcott Flats in Surry Hills. Inspired, along with other similar public-housing experiments, by the post-war ideal of social improvement through architecture, Northcott had by the end of the century degenerated into a 24-hour crime scene, a second home for many South Sydney police. Although surrounded by lush grounds and a fast-gentrifying urban neighbourhood, Northcott’s tiny flats were a hotbed of poverty, petty crime, drug dealing, violence and sexual abuse.

Residents of the flats have in recent years banded together successfully to establish a more functional community. North-cott’s turnaround was a reaction to a series of watershed moments showing just how bad things were, including two of the most horrible murders imaginable. Ice played a pivotal role in both.

By 2001, Damien Peters was 32 years old and still living in Flat B9/15 Northcott Flats with his lover, Andre Akai, as they had been since 1998.

Since Akai had confessed he had AIDS, Peters was often upset, and his anger, which had resulted in many broken friendships and lost jobs before, sometimes got the better of him. Akai’s health worsened, and even though Peters hated him for giving him the infection, he nursed him at home. Peters had nowhere else to go. Even when Akai maltreated their pet dog and accused Peters of being first to have contracted the virus, Peters remained loyal. The relationship was abusive yet dependant; their days were filled with fighting and reconciliation. The make-up sessions usually took place with the help of a new score of heroin, cannabis or speed.

Neighbours would often hear Peters and Akai screaming and throwing things at each other, but in the late summer of 2000–01, the fights stopped overnight. Peters told neighbours and other acquaintances that Akai had decided to go away for a while; they needed time apart.

Akai’s disability pension was still going into his bank account, however, and Peters was using Akai’s ATM card to make cash withdrawals. He told a friend, Jillian Nash, that he and Akai had a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’: if Peters looked after the flat and the dog, Akai would allow him to use his money to pay the rent and other bills.

But in August 2001, Peters told Nash that the ATM card had been stolen and he needed her to go to a bank, taking with her a letter he had written, to withdraw money on his behalf.

Nash suspected something was amiss. She quizzed Peters about Akai’s whereabouts, and he broke down, confessing that he had killed Akai six months earlier, had cut up his body and put it down the toilet and into the rubbish, and had undertaken other measures to prevent the parts being identified: he had cut off Akai’s fingertips, knocked out his teeth, and burnt his hair.

Shocked, Nash went to the police, who executed a search warrant on Flat B9/15 Northcott Flats. Peters had cleared out. The flat had been ransacked; there were blood smears throughout and a smashed window.

The police found Peters in rehab at the Langton Clinic. In subsequent interviews, he repeated his story about the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ and said he was ‘tearing my hair out’ worrying where Akai had gone. He admitted ransacking the flat, but said he had done so out of anger at Akai. He’d cut his hand in the course of doing so, he said, and the blood in the flat was his own.

During the next week, at the beginning of September 2001, police tapped phone calls between Peters and Nash. He repeatedly expressed his fear that he would be arrested for killing Akai.

What the police didn’t know yet was that Peters hadn’t been living in Flat B9/15 for six months. He had moved in with another older gay man in Northcott, Bevan James Frost, who lived in Flat A3/1. The pattern of the relationship had been much the same as with Akai: Peters had sought a protector, but had found only abuse. Frost had promised Peters protection, but had turned into a nasty, jealous, abusive bully.

Fretting over his police interview only drove Peters into a more erratic state. On 9 September, Frost lay face-down on his bed and asked Peters to give him his regular back massage.

Instead, as Frost lay on the bed, Peters began stabbing him in the back and the neck with a 32-centimetre carving knife he had got from the kitchen. Then he decapitated Frost and put the corpse in the bathtub. For the next two days Peters stayed in the flat, periodically erupting in fear and anger, overturning furniture and smashing windows. When the police arrived on 11 September, it might have come as a relief to Peters. Certainly he went quietly, admitting to murdering Frost and telling the police he had hidden the weapon under the carpet near the front door.

Arrested and taken into custody, Peters confessed to killing Akai as well. He said Andre had repeatedly called him stupid, and Peters had got ‘revved up’, taking a knife from the kitchen and stabbing Akai. He detailed the six hours he had spent dismembering Akai—flushing his teeth and liver down the toilet, burning his hair, slashing the fingerpads off his hands, all very calmly and in full knowledge of what he was doing. He had been engaged in doing the same with Frost’s body, and had cut out a number of internal organs, but had grown sickened by the task and hadn’t been able to complete it.

Peters had cut off his victims’ genitals, pointing to what he said was one of his motives: he was ‘sick of being used for sex’. There was no doubt that his sexual relationships were disturbing and dysfunctional, and a key subjective motive for the murders. Frost, he said, would ‘fist’ him against his will, a practice that sounds painful enough when performed with consent, let alone without it. When police asked him why he didn’t just leave the relationships, Peters said he had nowhere else to go and had to keep looking after the pet dog.

Yet if the killings were instances of domestic violence, they were unusual in their ferocity. Why, when Peters lost his temper, did he go all the way and kill his lovers? Why did he stab them repeatedly, in a merciless frenzy? How had he then had the presence of mind to dismember them over a period of several hours, with the clear purpose of rendering them unidentifiable? What explained this coexistence of uncontrollable, homicidal fury and cool, clear-headed cover-up?

The answer, found in subsequent examinations of Peters, lay in his pharmacological history.

At the time of his arrest, Peters had a veritable chemist’s shop in his bloodstream: apart from cannabis, amphetamines, cocaine, heroin and methadone, Peters had been prescribed or been given a number of antidepressants, anticonvulsants, tranquillisers and body-building drugs, including Valium, Zoloft, Prozac, testosterone, Xanax, Dilantin and Mogadon. It doesn’t take much to imagine what the pure toxicity of his drug use alone did to Peters’s mental state, but none of this provided a clear key to his murderous eruptions. That key was provided by Peters himself, in his admissions to medical examiners.

Speed, as noted earlier, had been Peters’s principal drug of choice for more than a decade. Yet he had no record of violence, only one minor assault in 1998. He had exhibited no behaviour as frenzied, excessive and paradoxically cool-headed as that which followed in 2001.

Peters, as an inner-city polydrug user, embodied why Rebecca McKetin and the NDARC researchers viewed such people as a sentinel group for the advent of new drugs. When ice hit the streets, as noticed by NDARC in the late 1990s, Peters was one of the population who would first notice it. It’s not known exactly when Peters bought highly purified methamphetamine rather than the low-grade speed he’d been taking since his late teens, but it most likely happened in 1999–2000, when he was living with Andre Akai. By early 2001, Peters was a frequent and often daily user of ice. Significantly, when he told medical examiners of his mood leading up to Akai’s murder, it was his methamphetamine intake, out of all the other drugs he was using, that he blamed. He said he was ‘depressed from speed’ when he killed Akai.

That depression had a sharp edge. Spread over the two days leading up to Akai’s murder, Peters injected himself with half a gram of ice. In the two days leading up to Frost’s murder, he was still injecting ice, about the same amount. When describing his state of mind, although much of what had happened was a blur Peters could remember the severe depression he was suffering as he was coming down from ice highs. This was a man who had been taking amphetamine, and suffering its crashes, for perhaps thirteen years. But the ice crash was so terrible that he lost his sense of where to stop lashing out.

Could ice be held responsible for the murders of Akai and Frost? Not in the legal sense: Peters pleaded guilty to murder, and courts concluded that he was never so impaired by his drug use that he could use the defence of intoxication. Nor could Akai’s infecting him with HIV, or Frost’s cruel sexual demands, amount to provocation that could bring the charges down to manslaughter. Legally, Peters was a double murderer, and was sentenced to stay in jail until at least 2014.

But in the psychiatric sense, ice was fingered as the straw that broke the camel’s back. The distinguished psychiatrist Dr Yvonne Skinner, a former president of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, examined Peters. Dr Skinner looked at his unhappy childhood, his history of drug abuse, and his adjustment to learning that he had HIV. All of these factors, she said, had been part of Peters’s make-up for a long time. None could be said to have tipped him over the edge. She found that he had no psychiatric disorder, cognitive defect, or immature personality structure. He knew what he was doing, and he knew the difference between right and wrong. The major emotion he was feeling at the time of the murders was depression. Dr Skinner summed up her report categorically: Peters’s depression ‘did not arise from an underlying condition, but from the transitory effect of the drug “Ice” amphetamine’.

Just a couple of years after the inner-city drug users first reported the influx of this new, purified stimulant, the country had its first bizarre and horrific crime that could be put down, in no small part, to the influence of ice. It would be far from the last.

Having risen sharply, many aspects of ice use were stable across Australia between 2000 and 2001. The price had settled at $30 to $50 per point, purity was generally around 22 per cent—though it could range as low as 5 per cent and as high as 85 per cent— and availability was described by injecting drug users in NDARC studies as ‘easy’. The mode of scoring wasn’t changing much, with only 10 per cent of users buying from street dealers, the vast majority getting it through friends or at a dealer’s house.

But due to the drop-off in heroin availability, one statistic— the most ominous of all indicators—had skyrocketed. By 2001, 58 per cent of NSW speed users were taking ice; 66 per cent in Victoria; 72 per cent in South Australia; 79 per cent in Queensland; 92 per cent in Western Australia; 66 per cent in Tasmania; 34 per cent in the Northern Territory; and 87 per cent in the ACT. In other words, while methamphetamine had gradually crept up on amphetamine and overtaken it during the years 1995–2000, between 2000 and 2001 there was a prodigious shift from snorting powder to smoking or injecting the potent crystalline form. It was as if a nation of beer drinkers had suddenly switched wholesale to overproof rum. The basic intoxicant was the same, but the purity and the form of consumption had undergone a quantum leap within the space of a year.

The essential consequence of this was not a chemical one, but a social one. As crystal meth had broken free of the stigma of injection, and was now a smokable drug in a novel new ice pipe, it was attracting a younger and more diverse range of users. Damien Peters was not the typical ice user. On the decline, as a portion of all users, was the emaciated junkie; more representative now was the ‘social’ or ‘recreational’ smoker of the occasional ice pipe: employed, in a stable relationship, better able to absorb the impact of the drug on their lives.

The 2002 NDARC Australian Drug Trends report also underscored how drug habits were conditioned by what was available. Injecting drug users preferred heroin—if they were given the choice—in every state except South Australia, where they preferred meth. But only in New South Wales was heroin the drug they had most recently injected. Everywhere else, even though they preferred heroin, they used methamphetamine more.

It was only a matter of time before habit started to influence preference. This is the way addictive drugs work. You may love heroin most of all, and inject ice because it’s the only thing you can score. Soon, if there is only ice around and no heroin, you may say you still prefer heroin, but your body has developed a craving for the amphetamine. Before long, users in all states except New South Wales would nominate meth as their drug of choice. (NSW users’ continued preference for heroin reflected the difference that proximity to ports can make. The supply of heroin, a plant-based drug originating in Asia, depended on successful importation into a big port like Sydney. Methamphetamine, which could be made anywhere, was not so geography-dependent. The purest meth in Australia, judging from police seizures, was now being made in Queensland.)

Researchers and authorities never know with precision how much of a drug is being used around the country. So they rely on analogous indicators. The 2002 Australian Drug Trends report showed a rise in all those key analogous indicators for ice use. Nationwide police busts on clandestine labs were up by 20 per cent, from 201 to 240. Of the drugs being intercepted at the borders, customs seizures of all methamphetamines in 2000–2001 went up past 400 kilograms, when in the previous year they had risen from a then-worrying 10 to 90 kilograms. Among those, the amount of crystal meth seized had gone from 8.8 kilograms, to 82.1 kilograms, to 154.3 kilograms in those three years. Which begs the question: How much were they missing? Were customs and police choking off supply and, as with heroin, causing a meth drought? And if so, what drug would come next?

The answer was that they were barely scraping off the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. If law enforcement interceptions had constricted supply into the market, the price would have gone up, the purity gone down, and the availability decreased. Even though seizures went up by such large amounts, none of that happened: the price was stable, the purity rose, and the drug became more available in every state. The law enforcement figures were sending out a mixed message. Yes, customs and the federal police were intercepting more of the drug. But rather than staunching the flow, all these interceptions were doing was providing another indicator of how that flow had broken the levees.

Crystal use, as a proportion of all methamphetamine use, was by now highest in Western Australia and South Australia. Up to this point, there had been conjecture over whether ice was more addictive than other forms of methamphetamine. By 2002, the picture was clarifying. In Western Australia, where 74 per cent of injecting drug users reported that they had recently taken ice, the average frequency of meth use—every three days—was also the highest in the country. Where ice use was next highest, in South Australia, frequency was next highest. And so on all the way down the line. By 2002 there was an almost perfect correlation between this one form of methamphetamine and how habit-forming it was.

As alarming as these figures might have been, the ice age in Australia still had some way to travel before reaching its peak.

Crime, or the fear of crime, has such a hold over the public imagination because of its sheer randomness. Victims are often simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. This sense of chance feeds an instability that is reflected, ultimately, in the persuasiveness of law and order agendas when elected officials come asking for votes. The politics of the late 1990s and early 2000s both responded to and exacerbated that fear. Whether it was federal politicians talking about hordes of terrorists, state politicians talking about more police on the beat, or local politicians talking about making the mall a hoon-free zone, the connective tissue of the time was fear.

Crystal meth only aggravated that sense of randomness, because of the Brownian motion of dangerous users. ‘Tweakers’ or ‘freaks’, as ice users came to be known, could turn up anywhere, at any time, covering dozens of kilometres, sometimes with an obscure purpose, in the space of one binge. And when they get there—wherever ‘there’ turns out to be—they could do anything.

In the early hours of 19 October 2002, Andrew Hennessey and John Pestana were driving the 904 kilometres south from the banana and fishing town of Carnarvon to Perth. The North West Coastal Highway is a numbing desert road, with 481 kilometres between Carnarvon and the next town, Geraldton. They had left in the middle of the night in a Mitsubishi Colt sedan owned by their friend Robert Robson, with Hennessey driving. But the weariness of the late start overcame him, and after about 200 kilometres he told Pestana he was too tired to go any further. Pestana was also too tired to drive, so Hennessey pulled into a parking bay on the side of the road 10 kilometres north of the Overlander Roadhouse, near the southern edge of Shark Bay.

As they went to sleep, the pair had no idea they were about to be swept up in the tidal wave of West Australian ice use in the person of Dimitrios ‘Jim’ Kyriakidis.

Kyriakidis, aged 28, was on the type of high that would have just about killed a person who wasn’t already habituated to hard drugs. A year earlier, on 2 July 2001, his father had died from a heart attack. Kyriakidis, already an occasional methamphetamine user, was very close to his father and devastated when he lost him. Having lost the steadying ballast in his life, Kyriakidis stepped up his meth use. Within months, he was smoking an eight-ball, or 3.5 grams, of ice through the course of each week. Soon he started injecting it, shooting up a gram a day in four or five different sessions. He also took industrial quantities of ecstasy—very often amounting to fifteen to twenty tablets a week.

By the first anniversary of his father’s death, Kyriakidis was out of control. During the previous year, as well as building a solid drug habit, he had gambled away $35 000 of his inheritance.

In that first week of July 2002, he stayed up on crystal for twelve days straight, also popping 22 ‘blue sky’ ecstasy tablets.

James Gates was the first unfortunate soul to randomly cross the path of an amped-up Kyriakidis. On 2 July Gates was driving home from work along the Kingsway, a main road in the northern suburbs of Perth, when a bus pulled into the centre lane in front of him. To get clear of the bus, Gates swerved into the right-hand lane. In that lane was another car, driven by Jim Kyriakidis, who raced forward to squeeze ahead of Gates.

It was just a regular everyday episode of clumsily merging traffic. But Kyriakidis wasn’t a regular everyday driver doing his normal business; he was doing mountains of crystal methamphetamine. That day, worked up into a lather by the cycle of ice highs and crashes, he had burgled a workmate who he felt had wronged him. He was intensely paranoid and on a hair-trigger. Now, enraged by Gates’s driving, he stopped in front of Gates at the next intersection, a red traffic light at Wanneroo Road. Kyriakidis got out of his car and started marching back towards Gates, who could not believe his eyes. The man had a tomahawk in his hand.

It was all over so quickly, Gates hardly knew what had hit him. Kyriakidis strode up and thrust the tomahawk through the driver’s side window, cutting Gates between his nose and upper lip. Then Kyriakidis got back into his car and drove off.

After Kyriakidis had been to court over the incident, his lawyer advised him to get psychiatric help. He saw one of the state’s most eminent psychiatrists, Professor Peter Burvill at the University of Western Australia, but did not tell the professor about his drug use. He told him about his depression, paranoia, insomnia and anxiety, and he told him about his father’s death, but he didn’t tell him he was taking as much ice as he could lay his hands on. He was prescribed an antidepressant and went on his way.

His way, at this point, meant a steady diet of crystal meth with his girlfriend, Melissa Caldwell. Caldwell was just seventeen years old and very much under the influence of a boyfriend eleven years her senior. She had just fallen pregnant to him, although in October 2002, when they set off for a camping and fishing trip to Karratha in northern Western Australia, it is unlikely that the pregnancy was known to either of them.

What happened in the early morning of 19 October was, in the words of one judge, ‘bizarre’. Another judge called it a ‘senseless, unbelievable act of violence’.

Around dawn on the nineteenth, Kyriakidis and Caldwell were driving up the North West Coastal Highway. They had been camping, but packed up early to continue their journey. Just north of the Overlander Roadhouse, they saw a Mitsubishi Colt in the parking bay of a rest stop.

Kyriakidis pulled over and told Caldwell to videotape what he was about to do. She held the camera and Kyriakidis got out and walked towards the Colt. Wearing dark clothing, gloves, a hat and sunglasses, he had a crowbar in one hand and a can of pepper spray in the other.

He turned back to Caldwell’s camera and said: ‘Jim’s World dot com—Episode One. Madness.’

Andrew Hennessey was woken by a crowbar smashing through his driver’s side window. A dark figure outside reached in and, before Hennessey knew what was happening, his face was burning from a burst of pepper spray.

John Pestana piled out of the passenger’s side but fell over. Kyriakidis ran around the front of the Colt and pounced on him, smashing Pestana’s head and body with the crowbar.

Hennessey, while handicapped by the burst of pepper spray in his eyes, launched himself at Kyriakidis with a piece of wood. Caldwell, seeing Hennessey, warned her boyfriend and then threatened Hennessey with a knife.

Having been dealt a series of wounds that would require 60 stitches, Pestana managed to fight back and wrest the crowbar off the maddened Kyriakidis. At this point Kyriakidis made strange motions and noises as if he was the one being attacked. It was, literally, madness. He was squealing and yelping like a caricature of a bashing victim.

But then, disarmed of his crowbar, Kyriakidis switched roles again. He took a Glock pistol from his pocket. He pointed it at Pestana who, now that things looked a lot more serious, cowered by the car. Kyriakidis moved around, grunting and gesticulating like Bruce Lee in a kung-fu movie. Then he walked towards Hennessey and fired a shot into the air.

As the two victims huddled near the ground, fearing for their lives, Kyriakidis took the keys from the Colt’s ignition while Caldwell kept videotaping. He strode off towards his own car, then, remembering his crowbar, turned around and demanded it back from Pestana, who gave it to him.

Kyriakidis and Caldwell drove off. She had videotaped the entire attack. As they drove away, Kyriakidis smirked at the camera and said, ‘They’ll be there for days.’

They weren’t. They flagged down a truck that day and were taken to a hospital. Two days later, Kyriakidis’s car was tracked down in Carnarvon. Kyriakidis and Caldwell were arrested. Initially they denied any involvement in the assault of the two men, but the incriminating videotape was found in a sock secreted in the car’s air filter. Police also found the Glock pistol. Kyriakidis’s explanation for the attack? He wanted to start an internet site called ‘Jim’s World’ and all he was doing was performing stunts, ‘pretend assaults’, and turning them into a digital video that he could show on the website.

Of all the crimes committed under the influence of ice, the Kyriakidis outback attacks are a clear-cut instance of how the drug can intermesh with, and exacerbate, serious mental disorders. Several psychiatric evaluations were made of Kyriakidis after his arrest. One, from Dr James Fellows-Smith, said:

[Kyriakidis’s] anxiety is understandable based on the psychopathology that he was experiencing in the days preceding this offence. Furthermore, although it is likely that his use of amphetamines greatly exacerbated his condition[,] his symptoms, in particular his ‘fear of being attacked by people on the road’, were part of a recognisable psychiatric condition, temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) that Mr Kyriakidis has had since early childhood.

Kyriakidis told another psychiatrist, Dr Raymond Wu, that he had been in ‘a dream state’ after snorting crystal meth that morning and the subsequent events were ‘a blur’. He said he had been ‘hearing voices’ and ‘seeing spirits’ since the age of fourteen; under the influence of crystal meth he could ‘foretell the future’ and ‘sense things’. Television shows often spoke to him directly, sometimes telling him how to do his job and at other times delivering him messages from his dead father. He told Dr Fellows-Smith that he received signs from the spirit world and suffered seizures that gave an effect of deja vu and time distortion. Sometimes he hallucinated that he could smell vinegar strongly, or hear loud techno music in his head. He said he could only clear these sensations in two ways. One was by banging his head against a wall. The other was by using crystal methamphetamine, which seemed to clarify the world around him, sharpening his perception and steadying his concentration. But when the drug was wearing off, and indeed even when he was high after he had become a habitual user, he felt that people were watching him, that messages were coming at him through digital clocks and car registration numbers, and he felt that he had to ‘fix the wrongs of the world’.

Kyriakidis pleaded guilty to a number of charges. He was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison, which was later reduced by almost half on appeal.

In jail, once he was off crystal meth and taking antipsychotic medication, Kyriakidis resumed his lapsed school studies, repeatedly expressed remorse for his crimes, and became as good a father as he could to his and Caldwell’s baby daughter. If he could resist the pull of ice, examining psychiatrists expressed hope that he could start a productive life once he was released.

Through 2002 and into 2003, ice percolated steadily through Australian society. One steady, if imprecise, measure of this was the number of occasions law enforcement officials were coming across the drug. They were now fighting on two fronts: customs were trying to stop the importation of the drug across the borders, and police officers were battling the clandestine labs.

Stories emerged from both fronts. In February 2002, an unaccompanied parcel arrived at Sydney Airport on a flight from Hong Kong. Its documentation said it was a computer part, but customs officers found it weighed more than it should have. They cracked it open and found 1.67 kilos of crystal meth. Its addressee was a man living in Lennox Head, the noted surf spot near Byron Bay in northern New South Wales. He was located, arrested and convicted.

Customs intercepted 154 kilograms of ice in 2002, but the drug was increasingly being locally produced, rather than imported. A fortnight after the Lennox Head-bound ice was found coming in from Hong Kong, police in Brisbane raided a methamphetamine laboratory and arrested two 34-year-olds from the suburb of Wishart, Tony Paul Pavolvice and Melissa Gamblin. They were caught with ice to a street value of $35 000—not an extraordinarily large amount, but it was notable for having been produced locally, the second such find in six months in Queensland. Across the country, that number was about to leap: by the end of 2002, police were to dismantle 201 clandestine labs across all eight states and territories.

Ice had originated in East Asia, however, and the importation of the knowledge didn’t stop the importation of the finished drug. The biggest Australian ice bust on record occurred in May 2003, and it was an import job, not a clandestine lab.

Customs seized a record 233 kilograms of ice in the 2002/03 financial year, 98 per cent of it from Asia. Heroin seizures at the border were down by 27 per cent, and cocaine intecepts had plummeted dramatically, from 983 kilos to just 59 kilos.

Most of the intercepted ice, plus another 200-plus kilos captured by police, was seized in three separate operations within the space of five days in May 2003. The biggest was when 212 kilograms of crystal meth was found packed in boxes of rice noodle sticks and brown sugar in a shipment from China to Sydney. This one seizure was bigger than all previous cross-border captures put together.

Anna Zhang, born in 1956 and raised in Shanghai, had come to Australia in 1990. Having four elder brothers, she was the baby of a relatively poor family but had a happy childhood and married when she was 25. This marriage produced a son, but she and her husband divorced after a few years. She worked for fifteen years with a Shanghai food company, and after migrating to Australia she set up a food importing business, Eastern Trade and Import Pty Ltd. Among the items she was importing by 2003 were rice sticks and brown rock sugar which came in large chunks. She had also, since arriving in Australia, developed a costly addiction to gambling.

Tony Tu, 40, was a Canadian citizen who had flown into Australia from China in March 2003. Tu, like Zhang, was a gambler, and he moved into a hotel room at Star City Casino in Sydney, which provided him the free accommodation and other services that were offered to big-time players. He had carried $30 000 into Australia and deposited $9000 of it in a gambling account in the casino. When it fell low, he replenished it. He also rented a flat in Jones Bay Road, Ultimo. The courts were told that Tu and Zhang met shortly after Tu’s arrival in Sydney, in the VIP Lounge at Star City.

They were quickly a romantic item, but their dalliance was about to come to a not-very-happy ending.

Within weeks, on 2 May, the container ship Magnavia arrived at Port Botany from Guangzhou. It was carrying 401 cartons marked as containing rice sticks and brown rock sugar, addressed to Eastern Trade and Import.

Customs found about twenty of these cartons to be suspicious on first glance, with some inconsistencies in the way they were packed. They X-rayed some of them and found ice. They notified the Australian Federal Police, who replaced some of the drug with an inert substitute.

Eleven days later, on 13 May, the shipment was delivered to a warehouse leased by Zhang’s company at 39 Jones Street, Ultimo. Zhang watched as the truck was unloaded and the boxes, some of them broken, were taken inside unit LJ8.

A day later, Zhang and Tu went into the warehouse for a few hours, before emerging at 5 pm with a yellow plastic shopping bag and a green sports bag. Tu drove Zhang to her apartment at 288 Wattle Street, Ultimo, and she got out with both bags. As she arrived at her apartment, Federal Police officers approached her and escorted her inside, where they found a garbage bag in the bottom of her wardrobe containing about four kilograms of crystal methamphetamine. A further two kilograms were found inside boxes labelled brown rock sugar in pieces, People’s Republic of China.

In the green sports bag police found some of the inert substance they had substituted for the ice they’d earlier removed at Port Botany. Zhang’s bags also contained a set of scales, which bore traces of ice, and some mobile phones.

Caught, Zhang turned on her boyfriend. She said she hadn’t known anything about the drugs until Tu had told her that day that the boxes contained some ‘special sugar’ which helped to make ‘a tablet for dancing’. She said the garbage bags in her wardrobe had been given to her by Tu and she didn’t know what was in them. Why hadn’t she asked him what was inside? That would be against Chinese culture, she said.

Meanwhile, at 5.55 pm Tu was arrested at his apartment in Jones Bay Road, near the warehouse. He had a piece of paper in his pocket with a list of twenty numbers, variously circled or ticked, which corresponded with the box numbers of the cartons containing ice. In his laundry, police found 107 kilograms of ice in the same packaging, and of the same purity, as the drug found in Zhang’s apartment.

The courts didn’t believe Zhang’s story of innocence, and the pair were put away for periods approaching the maximum penalties available. Tu would receive a 25-year sentence with sixteen years non-parole, and Zhang twenty years with twelve years non-parole.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to calculate the real quantity of ice Zhang and Tu were caught bringing into Australia. The shipments of 212 kilograms (including that which had come on the Magnavia and that which was found in their apartments from an earlier shipment) were on average 70 per cent pure. At the time, the average purity of ice on Sydney streets was about half that. So let’s assume they sold the ice to dealers who eventually cut it down to 35 per cent purity. This makes their load effectively 424 kilograms of street ice, or 424 000 lots of one gram. But ice was very often sold, at the lowest level, in points of 0.1 grams. A point is enough to get most users high for several hours.

Zhang and Tu were caught with an amount that represented 4 240 000 occasions where an ice user would get high. If the ice eventually smoked or injected was less pure than 35 per cent, that means even more. The sheer bulk of the intercepted importation throws some stunning light on how big the market was.

The size of the Zhang–Tu shipments brought home the extent to which Sydney was the main entry point for Asian shabu. Police were still referring to crystal meth as a ‘new’ and ‘rare’ drug, but a co-commander of the Joint Asian Crime Group, AFP Senior Agent Rob Milner, said he was staggered and alarmed at the quantities.

‘We would like to think we are making a dent in it but it is difficult to say because of the increasing demand for this type of drug,’ he said.

His co-commander, NSW Police Detective Inspector John Lehmann, acknowledged ice’s popularity on the south-east Asian nightclub circuit. ‘Now we are seeing it here.’

‘Of course we are alarmed,’ he said. ‘We see it as basically the same type of criminal syndicates who have been traditionally involved in the importation of large quantities of other types of narcotics, just diversifying from heroin.

‘It is a new market that the syndicates have identified.’

For all the methamphetamine intercepted, many more times that amount got through. Thanks to the Zhang–Tu bust, four million hits of ice didn’t make it to the market. But their absence caused no change in price or purity. Wherever it came from, all that ice had to go somewhere, and as long as the majority of users were young men and women enhancing their weekend hedonism, the drug was going to remain widely used and safely beneath the radar. But ice is not ecstasy. It can induce violent actions, as a University of Newcastle researcher, Melissa Claire, found in a 2003 survey of 153 users, one in six of whom admitted to having committed violent acts. Most were relatively minor outbursts, flashes of temper that got a little out of control. None had escalated to the kind of bizarre behaviour ice produced in Mohammed Kerbatieh and Dimitrios ‘Jim’s World’ Kyriakidis.

But far worse was to come. The real impact of ice has always been at the user end of the chain, and the story was about to take a dramatic downward turn.

For Matthew Gagalowicz—the young Canberra man whose response to misfortune and death among his loved ones was a descent into habitual drug use—2002 hadn’t been the best of years.

Leaving school early in his HSC studies, Gagalowicz tried a number of manual jobs. He could only function while he was on speed. Without it, his concentration would jump about and he would sink into deep depressions. On it, though, he started to have paranoid delusions about his workmates. He would make accusations, get into verbal altercations, and storm out. He moved rapidly from one job to the next. He tried living with friends, but bounced back home to his parents’ house when things didn’t work out.

Ever since he had been diagnosed with diabetes, around the time of his grandmother’s death and his mother’s cancer, Gagalowicz had intentionally cut himself with razors and knives when he got angry. One night in July 2002, he took amphetamines and flew into a rage. To ‘release’ his anger, as he put it, he slashed his arms and neck. He was taken to Canberra Hospital, but refused to see the mental health crisis team.

Several weeks later, agitated and pale, again high on methamphetamine, he returned to the hospital to say he had run out of the glucometer strips he needed to monitor his blood sugar. He had swollen glands and a cold that wouldn’t go away. He was given the strips but refused the offer of diabetes education.

That same week, on 11 August 2002, the police brought him into Canberra Hospital after his parents had called, saying he had destroyed furniture in the family home in a fit of anger. Gagalowicz told a mental health team that he had been hearing voices, was unable to sleep, suffered from paranoid delusions, and his temper was on a short fuse. He was detained for three days and put on sedatives and anti-psychotic medication, but stopped taking both shortly after his release.

Three years later, Justice Michael Adams of the NSW Supreme Court would say of Gagalowicz:

The [illicit] drugs provided a way by which he could feel both better about himself and secure and hopeful about the future. Of course, such drug-induced feelings are a delusion, a delusion which becomes distressingly obvious as soon as the effect of the drug wears off. He did not commence drug-taking as a mature person, nor even as a young person approaching maturity. He was a child, a child who became addicted to a substance that enabled him, for a short time, to think that his life was or could be worthwhile. His ability to cope with the stresses in his life and his response to those stresses must be viewed in that context. To treat him as a recreational drug user would be not merely quite inaccurate but grossly unjust as well.

Nevertheless, it is also important to recognise that Gagalowicz viewed himself as a recreational drug user, even though it’s obvious to anyone from the outside that he was not. In Gagalowicz’s own mind, he was just a young man—with his troubles, for sure—out having fun with his drug buddies.

Drug buddies were never far away, even though their identities would change. After his hospitalisation in August 2002, Gagalowicz went to a rehab facility near Wollongong called Kedesh House for an eight-week course. For $160 a week the residential program provided ‘a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy-based treatment programme for substance abusers. Other treatment modules include relapse prevention, social skills, self-identity, health education and self-help groups.’

In his self-help group, Gagalowicz became friendly with a 21-year-old amphetamine user, David Farrington, and his 17-year-old girlfriend who we will call Alicia Lewis. Gagalowicz also had a teenage girlfriend of his own.

After seven of the proposed eight weeks, Gagalowicz broke a curfew and left the program. Every indication is that he was off drugs. He had neglected his cleaning chores and was put under restrictions; one day he thought, ‘Fuck it, I want to go to the shops.’ He was ejected from the course for breaking the rules.

After leaving Kedesh he stayed with his parents on the south coast of New South Wales for a short time before moving, with his girlfriend, Farrington and Lewis, into a Department of Housing cottage in Farrell Road, Bulli, in January 2003. When they moved in together to start a new adventure, the two couples were drug-free.

Bulli is a working-class coastal village with a mix of mining families, surfers, and commuters to Wollongong and Sydney. Also living nearby was a 41-year-old man named Rick Smith, the father of a four-month-old daughter. Rick Smith was a known drug dealer.

In the summer heat, the good intentions of Gagalowicz, Farrington and their girlfriends lasted little more than a week before they were buying a number of different substances from Smith, including cannabis and heroin—but Smith’s main attraction was that he could get them crystal methamphetamine. They pooled their Centrelink payments. Smith came every day or two to sell them ice, which they would sit around and inject.

The case of Matthew Gagalowicz would blow out of the water any idea that ice and ordinary speed are more or less the same thing. While it is true that his teenage years had hardly been a walk in the park, he had taken amphetamines throughout those years and had done no worse than break some furniture, shout at his parents, and harm himself. Living in the Bulli house with his friends, injecting ice most days, Matthew Gagalowicz went off the deep end.

Life in the house was, at least in the minds of the four occupants, a nonstop party. They listened to music and played cards with the tweaker’s obsessive concentration on inconsequential tasks and patterns, and ate infrequently. When they ran out of ice and were coming down, they used heroin to soften the crash. Gagalowicz lost track of his insulin injections and his blood sugar levels rose and fell like a yoyo. He experienced episodes of terrified paranoia, heard voices, and suffered visual distortions. Alicia Lewis would frequently hallucinate, seeing cockroaches running across the floor of the house.

So chaotic were events in the Farrell Road house that the date of Rick Smith’s death has never been ascertained. But sometime between 13 and 18 February 2003, Gagalowicz phoned Smith to ask him to bring some ice. The household had run out.

Unknown to Smith, they had also run out of money. But they were coming down hard, suffering the extreme depression, paranoia and psychotic effects of a meth crash. They were desperate.

When Smith arrived at the house in early afternoon, Gagalowicz, alone in the kitchen, said he had no money and wanted to buy some ice on credit. Smith—who was also high on crystal meth at the time—flew off the handle, refusing credit and saying Gagalowicz had wasted his time calling him over. Gagalowicz, feeling sick and with ‘the blood pounding in my head’, argued some more with Smith, then picked up a metal baseball bat, telling Smith to leave the drugs and go. Smith lunged at the bat to grab it, but Gagalowicz stepped clear, swung it and collected the drug dealer in the head. Gagalowicz would later say he only remembered hitting Smith twice—it felt, he said, like a dream.

For David Farrington, it was more like a nightmare. When Smith arrived, Farrington and Lewis had been sleeping in their bedroom at the back of the house. Farrington would tell a court he heard ‘sort of a high-pitched scream and then I just heard some more thudding, I’m not sure how long it went on for’.

After five or ten minutes, Gagalowicz came into the bedroom with a look on his face Farrington said he had never seen before.

‘I’ve killed Rick,’ Gagalowicz said, ‘and if you tell anyone I’m going to fuck you up.’

At this point, Farrington’s and Gagalowicz’s stories diverged. Farrington said he remained, scared, in his bedroom, and could hear a ‘sawing noise’ coming from the bathroom. Gagalowicz’s version, which a court found to be more convincing, was that, leaving Alicia Lewis asleep in the bedroom, the two young men went out into the kitchen to look at Smith’s body. Farrington asked where the drugs were. The clear plastic bag lay on the floor near the body. Gagalowicz and Farrington—their priorities undisturbed by what had just happened—took the ice into the living room and injected it. Then, energetic and motivated, they came back to the kitchen, picked up Smith’s body and carried it to the bathroom.

They discussed what to do with the body. Their first idea was to borrow a neighbour’s car and dump Smith somewhere, but first they had to cut him up. They got knives and gloves, but when Farrington made the first cut he said he felt sick and left the dismemberment to Gagalowicz.

When he’d finished, leaving the body parts in the bathtub, Gagalowicz bumped into Alicia Lewis, who had woken up, and told her what had happened. She reacted with numb shock, not prepared to believe him. He told her and Farrington to get out of the house.

Taking Gagalowicz’s mobile phone, they walked to the beach while he started to clean up the kitchen and bathroom and put Smith’s remains into a suitcase. He kept injecting ice to keep himself on track.

By then dusk was falling. Gagalowicz’s girlfriend, who had been sleeping off a binge all day, woke up and went to the bathroom but found a sign on the door telling her to keep out. She found Gagalowicz in another room.

‘Why can’t I go into the bathroom?’ she asked sleepily.

Gagalowicz told her to sit down while he gave her a shot of crystal meth. When he’d done it, he said: ‘I’ve killed Rick.’

‘What?’ she said, thinking she wasn’t hearing clearly.

‘I’ve killed Rick. Whatever you do, don’t go in the bathroom.’

He told her to go down to the beach to find Farrington and Lewis. She complied, pliable in her shock. The three talked with a mixture of panic and disbelief about what they were going to do. Then, after about 45 minutes, Gagalowicz called them on the mobile phone and they returned to Farrell Road.

At the house, they found kitty litter scattered across the still-bloody kitchen floor. Gagalowicz, all manic activity, told them not to tell a soul what had happened. He said he would take full responsibility for the consequences, and told his girlfriend (who, due to her age, could not be named in court proceedings) to get an alibi—‘Find someone who’ll say you were with them today.’

Gagalowicz returned to the bathroom while the other three sat, stunned and silent, in the lounge room. Eventually they started playing cards. They were all, throughout these events, high on ice.

Some time later, Gagalowicz came into the lounge room and said they had to get rid of the body. He drew a diagram to show where he’d cut off Smith’s head, arms and legs. His girlfriend phoned someone to ask to borrow their car, but was unsuccessful.

The ensuing days, which nobody has been able to recount with any accuracy, seem best described as a plunge into even deeper anarchy, with the quartet injecting ice frequently. It increased their energy and sense of invulnerability, eroding any conscience about what they had done and were doing. They were skidding along on the surface of events.

Gagalowicz put Smith’s body into the laundry, where it soon began, in the summer heat, to emit a smell. He and Farrington went to the shops to buy topsoil, lime, a trowel and seeds. Seduced by his own plans to escape punishment, Gagalowicz told his friends that nobody would find the body under his new vegetable patch.

At one point, Gagalowicz picked up a whiteboard texta and wrote I am God, as well as other gibberish, on the bathroom wall. He sprayed shaving cream, Jackson Pollock-style, all over the bathroom. When he had removed the body parts from the laundry and buried them in the garden—Farrington helping him dig the hole and throw grass clippings over the disturbed ground—Gagalowicz let off a cockroach bomb in the laundry to neutralise the smell of rotting flesh.

Two months were to pass before Smith’s remains came to light. Gagalowicz and his girlfriend had begun quarrelling, evidently wilting under the strain of what Gagalowicz had done and the knowledge of the body in the backyard. The couple moved out and went to Canberra, where they both checked into a seven-day detox clinic at Arcadia House. They left after three days, moving in with the girl’s parents in southern Sydney until Gagalowicz moved back to his parents’ house. About a fortnight after he killed Smith, Gagalowicz ‘celebrated’ his nineteenth birthday. He was still taking crystal meth, either from what remained of Smith’s stash or what he could buy with the proceeds of his latest Centrelink cheque.

Meanwhile Farrington and Lewis stayed at Farrell Road, where Farrington threw some broken doors and sticks and other rubbish onto the grave to keep covering it up.

It wasn’t until mid-April, nine weeks after the killing, that Gagalowicz’s now ex-girlfriend cleared her conscience and told her parents what she knew: there was a dismembered body buried in the yard of the Farrell Road house. Her parents took her to Sutherland police station in Sydney’s south on 16 April to make a statement, and police officers then drove to Bulli where they dug up Smith’s remains. The torso, arms and legs were wrapped in plastic garbage bags, which were in turn wrapped in a doona and stuffed into a suitcase. Smith’s wallet was with those parts. His head was in a garbage bag inside a pillowcase.

Matthew Gagalowicz was arrested on 19 April—suffering a psychotic episode and collapsing on the day of his arrest—and charged with murder. He pleaded not guilty to murder, saying he was impaired by his ice addiction and had not intended to kill Smith. After a four-day trial in April 2005, a jury acquitted him of murder but found him guilty of manslaughter.

In sentencing Gagalowicz to eight years’ imprisonment, with a non-parole period of four years, Justice Michael Adams pointed to a number of issues that would come to exercise courts when weighing up crimes committed by ice users having psychotic episodes. Was the drug’s effect—mirroring a mental illness such as paranoid schizophrenia—itself a kind of mental illness? Could a perpetrator on ice really know the difference between right and wrong, and could he have the ability to formulate an intent to kill?

And then there was the horrifically excessive violence of the crime itself. Though he could not remember more than one or two blows, Gagalowicz had hit Smith’s head with the baseball bat at least twelve times. Smith’s head was smashed in like an eggshell. Associate Professor Johan Duflou, the chief forensic pathologist who examined Smith, said the force with which Gagalowicz had attacked his victim was ‘well in excess of what I tend to usually see’. Then there was the focused, almost methodical manner with which Smith had been dismembered and buried, clearly showing a purposeful plan of cover-up. It appeared that the ice users—not only Gagalowicz but Farrington and possibly the girls—had the ability to detach themselves from what had happened and go about the business of concealing the crime with a degree of vigour and care that they applied to little else in their lives. Concentrating on disposing of the body pushed away the mayhem of their day-to-day lives, and gave them a purpose. If Gagalowicz’s girlfriend hadn’t later repented and told her parents, Smith’s body might never have been recovered.

How was a court to deal with what was in some ways a new order of crime? In Gagalowicz’s sentencing hearing on 8 July 2005, Justice Adams said that ‘both the character of this attack and the subsequent dismemberment are acts of such extraordinary violence that, although in one sense they are rationally connected to the intentional killing or causing of grievous bodily harm to the deceased and destroying the evidence, they in fact signify the effects of a severe mental illness’.

Mental illness can exonerate an accused person. Did this mean that Gagalowicz was legally incapable of committing murder?

Justice Adams went on:

In all the circumstances, having regard in particular to the extent of the violence with which the deceased was killed, I have concluded beyond reasonable doubt that the offender intended to kill the deceased. Whilst I think that the offender’s reasoning was very substantially distorted by his mental condition and that it was this condition which induced his loss of self-control, he was not acting as an automaton; to use the vernacular, although his intention to kill was ‘mad’, it was nevertheless present. I reject the reasonable possibility that the offender intended only to cause grievous bodily harm: the violence is simply too extensive for this possibility to be reasonably open. At the same time, had it not been for the psychosis which he was suffering at the time, I do not believe the offender would have committed this dreadful crime.

It was a subtle judgment, saying in effect that Gagalowicz was not mentally ill, but he acted like a mentally ill person. He was responsible for his actions, but he acted like someone who had no idea what he was doing. He was not so under the influence of the drug that his intoxication might have exonerated him, yet he wouldn’t have done what he had if he hadn’t been taking the drug.

The complexity of the judgment eluded Smith’s family and other victims of crime representatives, who reacted with dismay and outrage to what they saw as the leniency of the sentence.

Manslaughter attracted a maximum penalty of 25 years in New South Wales, and Gagalowicz, who had shown good prospects for rehabilitation and expressed genuine remorse and sorrow for Smith’s family, might be out in four. It was unacceptable to the Crown, which appealed to the Court of Criminal Appeal (CCA).

Passing its judgment on 22 December 2005, the CCA took a much harder line on Gagalowicz. Justice Adams had taken account of the effect of Gagalowicz’s missed insulin injections, but the CCA dismissed this as any kind of mitigation. More importantly, it refused to allow any mitigatory effect of Gagalowicz’s troubled childhood and adolescence:

There is nothing in his history that in our view gives rise to any mitigation of the respondent’s culpability due to his drug use at the time of the killing. The history does not suggest that the respondent became involved with amphetamine other than as a result of a choice he made albeit when he was a teenager. The history is not remarkably different to that of many drug users in the community.

In other words, he ‘chose’ to take drugs and becoming addicted to ice was no different from any other addiction. Finding Justice Adams’s sentence ‘manifestly inadequate’, the CCA added two years to Gagalowicz’s non-parole period. As we shall see, it also laid down a much harsher precedent for later courts to follow, and a philosophy on crystal meth that was, arguably, still to catch up with the reality of the drug.

It’s never entirely possible to establish a link between where methamphetamine originates and where it ends up. Unlike plant-based drugs such as cannabis, cocaine and heroin, methamphetamine is synthesised from more or less universal components. Yet it’s eminently plausible that the Wollongong area ice which Rick Smith bought, used and sold to Matthew Gagalowicz and his friends came from a supplier called John Anthony Hezemans.

The crystal meth wave had hit the Illawarra in 2002. A working-class industrial and rural area with high unemployment south of Sydney, the Illawarra shared some characteristics with those areas of the United States struck hardest by the crystal meth epidemic. From a user’s point of view, the first thing to understand about ice is its cost-effectiveness. It gets you higher for longer, for less money, than any other drug. It’s the cheap sherry, the Frigate overproof rum, of the drug world. If your sole concern was to get extremely high as cheaply as possible, ice would be your drug.

An Illawarra health worker, Mick Fernandez, had noted the advent of ice back in August 2001. Working for the Illawarra Area Health Service social health team’s First Step program, Fernandez said there had been a sharp rise in ice use due to the heroin drought. It took the Gagalowicz–Smith killing to bring home a full awareness of the presence of ice in the Illawarra, but although the crime was carried out in February 2003 the trial, and its publicity, didn’t take place until early 2005. By then the region was awash with the drug; indeed, one user told the Illawarra Mercury in April 2004 that he never came across ice until he moved from Sydney to Wollongong.

One of the first media reports of ice in Australia came from the Illawarra. Back in 1999, Allan James Wakeford of Mount Warrigal was on ice when his car veered to the wrong side of the Princes Highway near Dunmore, hitting two motorcyclists. Wakeford was jailed in October 2001 for two and a half years.

Then there were small-time users like 32-year-old Warilla man Jason Leslie Horne and his 23-year-old Dapto girlfriend Melissa Edwards. In 2002 the unemployed couple shared a costly ice habit. Horne was convicted for break and enter, and jailed in Tumbarumba, in the southern NSW alps. But Edwards was pregnant with their child and told him she would harm herself if he didn’t escape from jail.

‘She told me that her mum had kicked her out of home. She had nowhere to go and she more or less said that if I didn’t escape that night, she was going to kill herself and the baby,’ Horne told a court.

Edwards created a diversion during which Horne escaped, and they went on a drugs and crime spree for eight days before being arrested in the Illawarra, at an Albion Park service station, on 28 October 2002. They had broken into homes in Kiama, Gerringong and the Southern Highlands to steal goods which they would exchange for ice.

But they, like Matthew Gagalowicz, were at the end of the line. Much further up were dealers like John Anthony Hezemans.

Hezemans, who grew up around Warrawong, in the Port Kembla area, had used drugs since his mid-teens. He was smart enough not to addle his brain too badly, and like many users who keep their wits about them, he turned to part-time supply, generating enough income for his own drugs, eventually building up a full-time network with himself at the top. It is what can be called organised crime, but it doesn’t involve mafiosi or Triads or codes or secret societies; it’s just a matter of a user whose friends ask him to get drugs for them. He does so reliably, and then he starts doing it regularly, and to make his time worthwhile he skims off a cash margin between what he’s bought and what he’s sold. Then he sees the possibilities of selling larger amounts, not so much to individuals as to other users down the line who have the same idea that he started out with—to be the connected guy, the one who scores drugs to on-sell to all his friends for a big party—and suddenly our original man is a drug kingpin. Very often it is a low-key, suburban, hobby-like kind of business, more like tupperware parties than The Godfather.

Hezemans became a plumber, but by July 2003, when ice hit the Illawarra, Hezemans, then 41, was doing no more work with monkey wrenches. Instead he headed an Amway-style operation from his home in Bent Street, Warrawong, that generated more than $10 000 a week in commissions for himself. He used lower-level dealers who paid him their welfare money in exchange for drugs, which they could then run and sell at a profit. Among those dealers at the next rung was his de facto wife, Michelle Shaw, and his eldest son, as well as a 44-year-old named Neville Barry Maher, who drove up and down the south coast selling ice to people like Rick Smith, who sold it to people like Matthew Gagalowicz. In a three-month period when police had him under surveillance, Neville Maher conducted more than 1100 small ice deals, often no more than a point (0.1 gram) at a time, netting about $100 000 from desperate Illawarra users. Maher’s father had recently died, and while grieving he became addicted to crystal methamphetamine. To finance his habit, Maher was one of several distributors in Hezemans’s pyramid, which Wollongong District Court Judge Joe Phelan would liken to a cooperative. As an indicator of his greed—or perhaps his wish for a ‘cover’ of legitimate income—Hezemans also drew Commonwealth welfare payments for himself.

More than 150 police participated in Operation Motifs, the three-month surveillance offensive that ended with a sweep on Hezemans’s home and eight other addresses in southern Wollongong in July 2003. Hezemans pleaded guilty to a handful of methamphetamine supply charges. He was also caught harbouring a courthouse escapee, Maher’s brother Geoffrey, to which he pleaded guilty. Geoffrey Maher had escaped from Wollongong Court earlier that month. His four-day run ended with a seven-hour siege at Hezemans’s house. Hezemans also pleaded guilty to kidnapping a man who was believed to be involved in the murder of a Port Kembla prostitute, Maria Scott.

For all those convictions, Hezemans was sentenced to a total of four years in jail. (Neville Maher, who showed genuine contrition for his crimes, entered rehab and was top of his TAFE class in land management while in jail, ultimately received a suspended sentence plus time served.)

The rash of ice-related incidents and arrests in regional areas gave ample support to the police belief that, by the middle of 2003, ice was not just a city drug. As well as the wave from Sydney southwards to the Illawarra, it was also radiating north into the Hunter region, which has many socioeconomic similarities with the Wollongong area. In June 2003, Clinton Morgan, a 21-year-old from the Newcastle suburb of Blackalls Park, became possibly the first Australian to die from the direct toxicological effects of ice when he expired in John Hunter Hospital. The same year, a Newcastle gardener named Graham Lomas suffered an ice-related psychotic episode during which he believed he was being pursued by underworld figures. Fleeing his imaginary assailants, Lomas hijacked a car and injured its female occupant.

Meanwhile, the Sun-Herald newspaper did a report on the use of ice in the unemployment-stricken Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney. ‘Half the town is on it,’ a twenty-year-old Katoomba ice user, Emily, told the paper. A worker at the Upper Mountains Youth Service said, ‘I raised with police a few months ago that crystal meth was in high use here. There has been quite a lot of violence and robbery associated with it. That’s what we’ve heard on the street.’

It was in 2003 that the mainstream media woke up to ice. While the Sun-Herald was sending reporters to the Blue Mountains, the Daily Telegraph sent a journalist to Jindabyne during the ski season. More than Thredbo or Perisher, Jindabyne has a reputation as a hard-partying town, in part because it has a younger, more penurious and transient population, and it’s where the ‘lifties’ and other ski resort workers live. A professional snowboarder, Steve Milligan, had been murdered there earlier in the year, and police suspected it was due to Milligan’s sideline in methamphetamine dealing. Soon, the Telegraph’s Angela Kamper was trawling the Jindabyne nightclubs and was offered ice on numerous occasions.

Elsewhere in the countryside, Inspector Daryl Venables of the Wagga Wagga police said that ice had spread there by 2003.

Why was ice moving so swiftly into country towns? It had taken heroin decades to penetrate towns like Wagga and Jindabyne, yet ice had done it in a matter of months. One theory was that the cup was simply full in the cities and the drug had to find other places to go. Besides, ice was so cheap and so easily manufactured and trafficked that it had a natural head start over a drug like heroin. Another explanation for ice’s popularity is shockingly basic: people loved it. It made them feel great for a long time.

If the story of ice’s surge after the heroin drought could be told through a single human case study, Dudley Aslett would be the exemplar. There is a logical argument to say that the heroin drought, by leading to a switch of drug among injecting users, wreaked untold havoc: heroin users, who would have been happy to nod off and pursue their lives of petty crime, of greatest danger only to themselves, were now turned into crazed homicidal maniacs by their new addiction. Of course it’s never that simple. But Dudley Aslett showed how a devastating chain reaction, ruining the lives of epicircles of people around him, can start with a user’s switch from heroin to ice.

By the beginning of 2003, Dudley Mark Aslett was 31 years old and had spent most of his adulthood in jail. His rap sheet included 55 jailable offences, not to mention some other minor ones for which he escaped with a fine or a caution. Aslett was in more or less continuous custody between the ages of eleven and 33. As soon as he got out, he reoffended. He couldn’t help it.

The tabulation of Dudley Aslett’s offences does not portray an individual beyond the pale of civilisation. He was a career criminal, and as a criminal psychologist, Anna Robilliard, said of his record, it presented ‘a picture of wilful disobedience to the law, a complete failure on the Prisoner’s part to respond to any of the opportunities that have been provided for rehabilitation and for supervision, as well as an escalating pattern of criminality’.

Yet it also shows that he was aware of some boundaries. Aslett was a robber, a drug user and a master car thief. His jail sentences were short because his offences were not in the highest category of seriousness: he was not a murderer, he was not a deranged psychopath, he was not a rapist.

Or not yet.

He never had a job, though he started a course in welding and did some labouring while in custody. Quite a good-looking young man with dark eyes and a shaved head, he had a number of relationships with women that usually broke down when he went back into jail. His drug regime, by his own account, revolved mostly around heroin. He continued using heroin, while in and out of jail, until the last time he was released in early 2003.

Then Aslett took the step that tipped him over from minor to major criminality. He smoked ice, and he liked it.

Anna Robilliard would later say that as well as his preexisting antisocial characteristics, including paranoia and an inability to control his impulses, Aslett was feeling that his future was a ‘blank’. He was sad, pessimistic, apathetic and guilty, preoccupied with reflections on his own inadequacy. He could not unshackle himself from his past. His day-to-day life, then, reflected his wayward attempts to counter these feelings. He found a drug that, instead of plunging him into an introspective opiate dreamworld, lifted him out of himself. Heroin had helped him forget by taking him to another place. Ice left him in the same place, but made him feel good about himself. It was a direct antidote to his pessimism and apathy, a panacea for his self-pity and inwardness. It made him feel active, sexually potent and alive. It made him feel bulletproof.

After his release in 2003, Aslett was moving from house to house, among relatives and friends, including his girlfriend Linda Berry, in the Mount Druitt and Cabramatta areas in Sydney’s west. He was known as ‘Uncle’ to younger family members, among whom were his teenage nephew Steven, and Steven’s best friend Christopher Bonham. At some point, soon after he was released from jail, Uncle Dud was introduced to ice.

Among its other effects, ice can increase libido at the same time as it reduces impulse control. It submerges the user in a ‘flood of thought associations, so that the attention jumps rapidly and ineffectually from one thought to another’, according to Associate Professor Graham Starmer from Sydney University’s pharmacy department, in an assessment of Aslett that was later tendered to court. The crash is so severe, said Starmer, that anticipating the crash is itself a motive for the user to find more of the drug. In other words, the heavy user doesn’t wait to come down. He gets high again before the crash hits him. And he keeps on running, keeps getting high, because his dread of the crash is so intense.

Dudley Aslett didn’t want to come down, and he had no structured activities in his life that needed him to be straight and clear-headed. Nor did his young posse and Bonham, who saw Aslett as an experienced, confident, charismatic role model.

He did try to give up during the weeks after his release, he later said, but medical practitioners wouldn’t deal with him. He approached the Aboriginal Health Service and tried home detoxification, a regime that broke down under the stress of new assault charges that again threatened his freedom. And he preferred being high, anyway. It was the only time he was fully happy.

His problem was that, although crystal meth is a relatively cheap drug, he was using so much of it that he needed money he didn’t have. Meth addicts do not usually live in the criminal cycle of heroin addicts; a fortnightly dole cheque, and the proceeds of selling a little on the side, are usually enough to keep most meth users going. It is a cheap and long-lasting drug. But Aslett needed more, and he only knew one way to raise cash.

At around 9 pm on 3 May 2003, a young woman parked her red Mercedes coupe in the wash bay zone of the unit block where her sister lived in Newington, on Homebush Bay in Sydney’s mid-western suburbs. The housing development was only a few years old. Built to accommodate athletes and officials during the Sydney Olympic Games, Newington had been adapted into award-winning modern units and townhouses for mainly professional owners and tenants.

The young woman, known in the courts as ‘EC’, stayed in her sister’s unit for about two hours before taking her Maltese terrier outside for a walk. In the lane near where she had parked her car, she saw two male figures in the shadows. She waited until they had gone away before starting her walk. Then she noticed one of the men in an alley in front of her, and paused.

Dudley Aslett sprang out from behind a bush and stood in front of her. He said something indistinct; her dog barked; she picked it up and hurried towards her Mercedes, but decided not to get in yet, because the two other men had resurfaced near the car.

She walked around the carpark for a few minutes, her heart racing, hoping that they might simply go away. When she thought the men had gone, she went back to her car. As she opened it, she heard running footsteps. She jumped into the car and fumbled for the lock. Dudley Aslett sprinted around the front of her Mercedes, pulled open the passenger-side door, and got in. He pushed a gun against her temple. EC screamed, and Aslett told her to shut up. She noticed that he also had a 20-centimetre knife.

Aslett shifted her into the passenger seat and got into the driver’s seat. When he started to drive, EC screamed; Aslett shouted at her to shut up. The other men were left standing beside the car as Aslett drove off without them.

Newington is an enclosed community, off the main traffic circuit. Aslett drove EC’s Mercedes around the estate’s deserted streets.

‘What do you want?’ she asked, crying.

‘Nothing.’

Aslett found one of his accomplices walking around in the dark, stopped and let him in. EC was told to move into the back—Aslett nudged her with his knife. He started driving again, and the two men began chattering loudly, and laughing in a manic fashion. Suddenly Aslett said to EC: ‘You got a purse? Credit card?’

‘No,’ she said.

Aslett left the Newington estate and drove into Lidcombe, then south-west onto the Hume Highway before stopping near a service station by the intersection of the Hume with Woodville Road. When the other man took some coins out of the ashtray and went off towards the service station shop, Dudley Aslett got into the back seat with EC. The knife was still in his gloved hand.

She began to whimper.

‘Shut up and don’t look at me,’ Aslett barked.

EC screamed, and he pushed her face away. Then, pinning her against the upholstery, he began cutting at her underpants. She pushed him away repeatedly, but he shoved the fingers of his gloved right hand into her vagina. EC screamed in pain, but 123 Aslett, now excited and maddened into a state he said he could not later remember, punched and slapped her before pushing her down and forcing his penis into her vagina.

Soon the younger man returned. Aslett began going through EC’s possessions, and was furious to discover her wallet with her ATM card. He shouted at her to tell him her PIN—as if raping her was only a prelude, or an alternative, to the more pressing issue of robbing her—until she gave up her number.

While Aslett and his accomplice went to try the number with the card at an ATM (it didn’t work), EC ran away and knocked at the doors of several flats until she found someone who took her in and let her call her mother and the police.

Traumatised, EC was unable to provide a clear enough identification for police to find and arrest Dudley Aslett. This was to have tragic consequences in the coming weeks.

Between 4 May and 16 July, Aslett lay low. His chaotic lifestyle continued, however, as he bounced between houses near Mount Druitt and Cabramatta. He would try to clean himself up, then succumb again to the siren call of a crystal meth high. It wasn’t long before he needed more money to buy ice, which began a one-month crime spree of such mindless rapacity that it seemed to have no possible end except Aslett’s death or capture.

A criminal, like anyone else, can always rationalise his actions to himself, and it is conceivable that Aslett, accompanied by his awestruck teenage accomplices, pictured himself as a modern-day Ned Kelly, on a payback mission for the victimisation he believed he had suffered. It is a testament to the delusionary power of crystal methamphetamine that he could tell himself such a story, imagine himself in such a movie.

On the night of 16 July, two months after he raped EC, Aslett took his little gang back to Newington, looking for a home to burgle. He, his eighteen-year-old nephew Steven, and the seventeen-year-old, first went to the house of eighteen-year-old friend, Christopher Bonham, at around 7.30 pm. Bonham’s sister, Tara, was there. She told the visitors that Christopher was at a neighbour’s house. After they rounded him up, the three teenage boys and Uncle Dud stayed for about an hour in a sleep-out at the back of the Bonham house and took drugs. It’s unclear what the younger boys took, but Dudley Aslett smoked ice.

The four of them drove off. Following Dudley’s instruction to ‘Look for Asians’ as prospective victims, they picked out a first-floor home unit where they saw a dark-haired man standing on a balcony. They waited for the lights around the target unit to go out. Then, wearing gloves and masks and carrying knives, the four climbed up onto the balcony and broke in through an unlocked sliding door.

The Philippines-born resident, known to the courts as Mr A, had returned from work at around midnight. While the predators were waiting outside, Mr A fell asleep in a lounge chair. Dudley Aslett pounced on him and tied him up, warning him to keep silent or he would kill him with the knife he held to Mr A’s throat. Aslett cut the telephone cords and used them to tie Mr A’s wrists to his ankles.

Leaving Mr A bound on the floor, Aslett and one of his accomplices crept into the main bedroom, where they found Mrs A lying on the bed watching television and the couple’s sixteen-year-old daughter, SA, working at the computer.

Both mother and daughter were diminutive, the daughter less than 150 centimetres in height and slightly built. Aslett ordered them both to lie on the lounge room floor with Mr A, and the gang started ransacking the unit, filling plastic bags with computer equipment, jewellery, money, CDs and DVDs.

In his hyperactive state, Dudley Aslett shouted orders to his boys, seeing himself as the commander of the scene.

‘Where’s your pay?’ he barked at Mr A.

Mr and Mrs A replied that the intruders could have anything they want. ‘But please, just don’t hurt us.’

‘Stop looking up!’ Aslett shouted, waving his knife.

The intruders found a safe in a wardrobe in the bedroom and commanded Mrs A to help them open it. They stole some items from inside, while SA and her mother were brought in to be guarded. Mr A was still tied up in the lounge room.

Aslett ordered Mrs A out of the main bedroom and took SA into her smaller bedroom, announcing to everyone in a sarcastic tone he was going to conduct a ‘further search’. Shutting the girl’s bedroom door, he told the sixteen-year-old to pull down her underpants. He pressed the knife against her cheek to warn her against disobedience. He proceeded to rape her; when she cried out in pain, he told her, ‘Shut up or I’ll start on your mother.’ SA cried that she was a virgin.

Once he was finished, Aslett left the bedroom and Bonham entered it, also raping the girl. Steven Aslett was next, commanding her to fellate him. When SA begged him to stop, he said, ‘I’ll stop when you start enjoying yourself.’ She said she was going to vomit; Steven Aslett said if she did, he would stab her. She spat his semen into the bathroom sink, and he told her to brush her teeth. Later, she was showered and dressed again, and told to lie next to her parents on the lounge room floor but not to say anything to them. She complied, tearfully telling her parents that she was all right.

As the four men left, almost three hours after they had broken in, one of them told the victims that ‘next time you should keep your doors and windows locked’.

For this crime, a trial judge, Michael Finnane, would later describe Dudley Aslett as a ‘cold, callous, vicious and extremely dangerous criminal’. But Aslett was only just getting started.

Whereas the first Newington rape had been followed by a period of relative quiet, almost remorse—with Aslett returning to Linda Berry’s house at Tregear, near Mount Druitt, and trying to combat his ice addiction—the second sexual assault triggered a wild chain reaction.

Nine days after the second Newington rape, on 25 July, Steven Aslett and the seventeen-year-old were arrested and charged with the break and enter of the As’ unit. Some DVDs belonging to the As were found in the boys’ possession.

When the younger pair were arrested, Christopher Bonham’s mother, Joan, asked her son if he had been with Steven Aslett on the night in question. He admitted that he had. She and her husband tried to take him to the police, but he refused. They rang 000, but while they were waiting, Christopher broke free and ran away.

A recording of the emergency call was tendered to court.

000 OPERATOR: What’s going on there, ma’am?

MRS BONHAM: About the rape, we just found out our son did it. The rape—

000 OPERATOR: What rape? What rape?

MRS BONHAM: Those two boys. The two, seventeen- and eighteen-year-old, our son’s involved too. Our son’s here, he’s going to run.

Meanwhile Dudley Aslett had fled to Cabramatta West, where he sometimes stayed in a house with his sister Catherine. Bonham joined him there. Uncle Dud wanted to buy crystal methamphetamine and heroin, but was running out of money. He knew a convenience store in Canley Heights which he judged a promising target. It collected cash in the course of a normal day and was operated by two Vietnamese women, whom he saw as easy pickings. On 25 July he and Bonham followed one of the women, Thi Thanh Ho, after she locked up. Growing frightened, she ducked into another shop until she thought Aslett had left. She went to her car and drove to the carpark of the BKK supermarket in Cabramatta. When she got out of the car, Aslett was upon her, seizing her handbag, which contained $3000 in cash and three mobile phones.

Three days later, on 28 July, Aslett was back at the same convenience store. At about 6.30 pm, Ms Ho’s colleague, Hoang Thi Nguyen, was leaving to drive home. As she got into her car, Aslett pounced from the shadows with a 30-centimetre knife and pushed Ms Nguyen into the driver’s seat.

His knife at her throat, he hissed: ‘Where’s your money?’

‘I don’t have any, I just work there.’

‘You’re a liar!’

Ms Nguyen insisted she was telling the truth, but said Ms Ho had the cash takings from the shop and was waiting for her. Aslett told her to call out to her friend. Ms Nguyen said she couldn’t, because Ms Ho had a boyfriend with her. Aslett again accused her of lying, and told her to call out in English, not Vietnamese. He grabbed her by the hair and took her to the shop’s back door.

Inside, Aslett leapt onto the twice-unfortunate Ms Ho, pressing his knife to her neck. Bonham burst in from the back and forced Ms Nguyen to the ground. Aslett got up and took about $6000 in cash from Ms Ho’s handbag. It wasn’t enough for him. He barked: ‘Where’s the rest of the money?’

Ms Ho got up and opened the cash register, from which Aslett’s young accomplice took about $500 more.

Aslett took Ho into a back office and demanded more money, in vain. So he went into the shop and stocked up on phone cards and cigarettes. He and Bonham also took the women’s mobile phones. For the next few days he would use the handsets with SIM cards belonging to his sister, Amanda Aslett, and Linda Berry.

Aslett and his friend had worn masks throughout the Canley Vale robbery, and had still not been sufficiently identified by any of their victims to enable the police to link the arrests of Steven Aslett and the seventeen-year-old with all of Dudley Aslett’s crimes.

Two days later, on 30 July, Aslett decided he needed a new firearm. He knew that in Auburn, a suburb not far from Newington in Sydney’s middle west, there was an indoor shooting range from which sporting gun owners would come and go. At 8.10 pm—Aslett typically worked his crimes under cover of night—he lay in wait outside the Shooting Academy until a man named Eduardo Arbis came out. Arbis was carrying a green canvas bag, secured with a padlock. Inside the bag were a Smith & Wesson model 666 .357 calibre magnum six-shot revolver, a Colt model 1911 eight-shot semiautomatic pistol, ten rounds of .357 calibre ammunition, some earmuffs, a visor and a cleaning kit.

Arbis was placing the bag in the boot of his car when Aslett came out of nowhere, charging at him with a baseball bat. Aslett didn’t ask questions—he swung the bat at Arbis’s head. Arbis deflected it with his right hand. Aslett swung at him again. Arbis ducked away from the car.

Making an instant—and fortunate—decision that it wasn’t necessary to beat the daylights out of Arbis, Aslett told him to ‘back off’. He took the green bag and ran away. (For all of his offences during this spree, Aslett was ultimately another proof of the axiom that it is the dumb criminals who get caught: police would later find camera film with shots of Uncle Dud posing with the revolver.)

Twenty-four hours later, Aslett used the gun in his next robbery. Not far from the Shooting Academy, in Newton Street, South Auburn, a man named Jeky Li owned a shop called Mega Lighting. At around 9 pm on 31 July, Li locked up and walked from the store to his car, carrying the day’s cash takings of $800 and his laptop. He sat in the car, opened his window and started the ignition, only to look up and see a man at his window wearing a balaclava and holding a silver handgun in his gloved hands. A smaller man was with him, also in a black balaclava, wielding a 30-centimetre knife.

Aslett put the gun to Mr Li’s head, and his accomplice came close with the knife.

‘Get the money,’ Aslett said.

Mr Li replied that he had no cash on him, but when Aslett pushed the gun hard against his head he reconsidered, taking his wallet out of his laptop bag and handing it over.

‘There’s more,’ Aslett said. ‘There has to be more.’

He was right—Jeky Li had put the $800 not in his wallet but in the laptop bag. But Li wasn’t giving up easily. He tried to push the gun away. Aslett ordered him not to touch it again, and to prove his seriousness he opened the chamber and showed Li the six rounds loaded inside.

Aslett took about $200 from Li’s wallet and another $30 or so in change from the car, then dragged his victim back to the store, forced him to open the doors and disable the alarm, and then to open the cash register. It was empty.

‘Where’s the big money?’ Aslett demanded.

Li maintained that he had no more cash. Aslett, pressing the gun barrel to Li’s back, forced him into a rear storeroom and told him to lie on the ground.

‘We’re going to kill you,’ he told Li. ‘Tell us where the money is.’

Finally he seemed to run out of nerve, or believe Li’s protestations. Stealing Jeky Li’s mobile phone, Aslett ordered him into the toilet and said if he left he would be killed. Some time later, Li came out and called the police.

But the police still couldn’t find Aslett, or connect him with the other crimes. At 5 pm the next day, Aslett was working the same patch. He sneaked into the Bob Jane T-Mart in Auburn just before it closed. The last employee to leave, Mathew Ryder, was confronted by Aslett in a balaclava holding the Smith & Wesson handgun. Bonham put his knife to Ryder’s throat. They took a small amount of cash from the till and from Ryder’s pocket, then ordered him to open the safe. He couldn’t—he was only a low-level employee without access to the safe. Aslett, in a fury, stalked around the store smashing all the landline telephones. He and his accomplice tied Ryder up and left him on the floor, stealing some mobile phones and car keys as they went. Out back, they found Ryder’s Ford Falcon utility parked on the tarmac, and drove it away. Aslett was about to make his biggest mistake yet.

The first of August fell on a Friday in 2003. That week Uncle Dud and Christopher Bonham had already stolen more than $10 000 in cash, two guns and ammunition, several mobile phones and a car in five separate forays. Aslett wasn’t satisfied. He was having more fun than ever, and he believed he was somehow invisible, undetectable by the authorities. The extreme ice user knows no limits.

Emad Youssef owned a pharmacy in Canley Heights, close to the convenience store which Aslett had robbed twice that week. When he closed up his pharmacy at 6.30 pm on the Friday and left with a staff member, Eva Keovongsack, Youssef might have had reason to look over his shoulder.

Youssef and Keovongsack took their cars out of a locked yard. Youssef got out to relock the gate. As he was getting back into his car, he was set upon by Aslett, who had been lurking behind the shopping strip in Mathew Ryder’s Ford Falcon utility.

Aslett pulled at Emad Youssef’s car door, and the pharmacist fought back. In the struggle, Aslett took the magnum pistol from his pocket and fired at point-blank range.

Eva Keovongsack heard the shot as she was driving away down a service lane. In her rear-vision mirror she saw Emad Youssef staggering towards her, calling her name. She left her car and ran back to him; he collapsed on the roadway, bleeding steadily. Keovongsack ran into another shop to get someone to call the police and an ambulance. By the time the ambulance officers arrived, Emad Youssef had died from his wounds.

Aslett, meanwhile, had flipped open Youssef’s boot and stolen his suitcase, then sped off to his sister Catherine’s house in Cabramatta West and told her and a friend, Irene, that he’d tried to rob the pharmacist but it had gone wrong and he’d accidentally shot him. He believed he’d only wounded Youssef in the shoulder. But he was panicking now. Later that night, he told Bonham to throw Youssef’s briefcase into a creek behind the Mount Pritchard Community Club.

If Aslett was shaken by the shooting, he was not deterred. He did what he had always done when the situation got hot: he ran away.

Still with Bonham in tow, Aslett drove to the Central Coast north of Sydney.

At around 6 pm on Wednesday 6 August, less than a week after killing Emad Youssef, Aslett was driving past a Ford dealership, Grawill Ford, in Tuggerah. He liked the look of a 1987 turbo Holden Commodore sedan sitting in the service area. The theft was simple in the darkness. Dudley Aslett and Christopher Bonham simply walked up to the Commodore, found the keys inside, and drove it away.

Two hours later they bailed up Warren Richardson as he was closing up the Toowoon Bay Cellars bottle shop. Again wearing the balaclava and waving the gun, accompanied by his mate, Aslett said to Richardson: ‘We don’t want to hurt you. We want the money.’ But just to make sure Richardson got the message, Aslett aimed the magnum at his stomach and said: ‘It has hollow-nose bullets.’

Aslett and Bonham pointed Richardson back into the bottle shop and ordered him to empty the cash register into a plastic bag. There was almost $600 in the take.

‘Where’s the rest of the money?’ Aslett demanded.

‘There is none,’ Richardson said.

Bonham said: ‘I’ll have some cigarettes then.’

They ordered Richardson to fill two plastic bags with packs of Long Beach and Winfield cigarettes, and also took some alcohol and a sports bag containing his jacket and some personal effects.

The cigarettes and alcohol were for Bonham, not Aslett. Dudley Aslett never drank or smoked tobacco. He just took ice, day after day, and heroin to soften the landing. When he needed more money, he went out to steal it. To steel himself for stealing, he took a drug which had consequences that even he, a hardened drug user, did not understand or anticipate.

He knew, though, that ice gave him Dutch courage. Five days after arriving on the Central Coast, at around 4.40 pm on Monday 11 August, Aslett and Bonham parked near the Ourimbah Medical Centre and walked to the local post office. They slipped on balaclavas and went inside. Aslett waved the .357 magnum revolver at the post office’s owner, Shirley Ellis, then jumped over the counter and raided the wooden cash drawers. He and Bonham put $1840 into a backpack and ran outside again, where they bumped into Haley Kuhn. Bonham shouted at her to give them her car keys. She resisted, and the teenaged boy started wrenching at her hand.

‘Don’t take it out on her, come on!’ Dudley Aslett called, and the pair ran off.

At some point they took the stolen Holden Commodore to The Entrance, where Dudley Aslett had a friend to whom he could sell auto parts. He and Bonham removed the steering wheel, stereo and speakers, turbo pop-off valve, mats, wheels and tyres, and on-sold them. The dismantled car was found near the intersection of Bay Road and Ocean Parade on 21 August.

Two days after the Ourimbah post office robbery, Paul and Jennifer Marlow were locking up their newsagency in the Central Coast hamlet of Maidens Brush. The couple, in their fifties, went through the same routine every evening at around 6.30 pm. Paul took the rubbish out the rear door, before coming back inside and leaving with Jennifer.

On 13 August, Paul Marlow was being watched. When he went outside, Aslett and Bonham burst in with balaclavas and bailed up Jennifer Marlow.

‘Open the safe, you cunt,’ Aslett said.

Jennifer said: ‘I don’t know how.’

‘Yes you do, cunt. Lie on the floor. Look at the wall, don’t look at me.’

Jennifer lay down but couldn’t restrain a scream. Paul Marlow came to the back door to find Aslett pointing the gun at him. Paul was able to run away, though, and he got the owner of the next shop in the little mall to call the police.

Aslett snarled some more at Jennifer Marlow but, realising that her husband was getting help, he soon left, taking only a black briefcase with some personal papers inside. He threw it out the car window while driving away.

Things were fully out of control by now. The next afternoon, Aslett and Bonham drove the stolen Commodore to the Bateau Bay post office, donned balaclavas and bailed up the owners, Gary and Beryl Ives, and a customer, Gregory Culpan. They stole $4019 from behind the counter and Culpan’s wallet, which contained only $10.

It was six days before Aslett struck again. Bonham split for the north coast, hiding out in a caravan park in Lismore. Meanwhile the $4000 haul from Bateau Bay kept Aslett on a high, but running out of drugs gave him an unquenchable need to go out and steal again. This time, on 20 August, he netted his biggest cash haul yet—as well as two cars in one day.

On Wednesday 20 August, Aslett kicked off the day by stealing a 1985 maroon Holden Commodore from the Supa Centre at Tuggerah. He drove the maroon Commodore to the rooftop parking area at the Westfield shopping centre at Tuggerah and then stole another Commodore, a red 1989 model, which he drove down to the parking area at the back of the National Australia Bank. At about five minutes to four, just before the bank’s closing time, Aslett, wearing not his usual balaclava but a cap and sunglasses, strolled into the Westfield mall and made for the National Australia Bank branch, where he fronted up to Peter Sutherland, a young worker at an open inquiry desk.

Aslett threw a plastic bag at him. It fell to the floor. Sutherland bent down to pick it up. When he raised his eyes, he saw Aslett pointing the .357 magnum revolver at him, partially concealed by a leather holster.

‘Fill it up,’ Aslett hissed, motioning to the bag. ‘Do as I say and no one will get hurt.’

Sutherland pressed the entry code into the tellers’ area. Aslett followed him in, as if he was a client with a bank official going inside for a private meeting. Sutherland removed all of the cash from the top three drawers between the two female tellers who were working, and placed it in the plastic bag.

‘Where’s the rest?’ Aslett insisted.

Sutherland opened another drawer and put three bundles of $50 notes into Aslett’s bag.

‘Don’t look at me,’ Aslett warned him. ‘Give me that mobile phone.’

He pointed to a phone sitting on a counter. It belonged to one of the female tellers, Gillian Hickman. Sutherland put it in the bag. Aslett let himself out the back door and calmly, quietly, walked away with $28 075 in Australian currency, 20 pounds sterling, and 300 euros, as well as a mobile phone, in his bag. It was a handsome booty, and Aslett’s last cash theft.

He drove the stolen red Commodore back up to the roof, switched into the stolen maroon Commodore, and drove off to Long Jetty, where he dumped the car on Anzac Road.

Flush with the money from the NAB robbery, Aslett probably decided that he’d pushed his luck as far as it would go on the Central Coast. He bought a second-hand car and drove back down to Sydney. He was worried about Emad Youssef, who he’d heard had died. Aslett must have known the police would be on his trail, so he didn’t stay at his sister’s house in Cabramatta. Instead, he went to a friend’s home at Busby, near Liverpool, and hid out for another night.

Meanwhile, Bonham was arrested at the caravan park in Lismore. He admitted having broken into the As’ home in Newington, but denied having raped SA with the man they called Uncle.

‘What’s their uncle’s name?’ the police asked Bonham.

‘Dudley.’

‘What’s his surname?’

‘I don’t know, might be the same as my mates.’

‘Okay. What does Dudley look like?’

‘He’s Aboriginal, bald hair, sort of like . . . I think he had a goatee or somethin’, I dunno, sort of.’

‘How old is Dudley?’

‘He’s about 30, 30-something, maybe 28, 20, I dunno.’

‘Have you ever seen Dudley before?’

‘I seen him once.’

‘Where was that?’

‘At a mate’s house, at Steven’s house.’

‘What did Steven call him?’

‘Uncle.’

Bonham said that Dudley and Steven Aslett had had sex with SA, but he and the seventeen-year-old hadn’t. He named Dudley as the ringleader, but a year later, in court, he recanted on his Lismore confession and refused to give evidence against anyone else, including Uncle Dud.

It’s unclear if Bonham told the police during the Lismore interview where Dudley Aslett had gone, but within two days they had tracked him down to the house in Busby. At 10.50 pm on 22 August, members of the Tactical Operations Unit surrounded the house. Aslett saw them, and tried to escape through the backyard. He was spotted by two senior constables, who called out to him to stop. Ignoring them, he leapt the back fence and threw away a bag that contained the Smith & Wesson revolver. The two policemen quickly caught him and placed him under arrest, bringing to an end a singularly shocking spree, the ice-fuelled culmination of a lifetime of crime.

Four days later, while police interviewed him at Silverwater jail, Aslett broke down, crying and saying, ‘I can’t sleep, I’m thinking about the man I killed.’ In a later interview he revealed that a friend had shown him how Emad Youssef left his pharmacy every day. Aslett had watched and planned, cold-bloodedly. On the fatal day, he smoked ice and heroin before committing what he thought would be a simple robbery. He said he’d only used the gun to scare Youssef, and hadn’t meant to fire it at him. When he’d run away, he said, he thought he’d only wounded Youssef in the shoulder.

What is there to say about Dudley Aslett? He expressed some remorse over the death of Emad Youssef and the rape of the two young women, though this went no deeper than saying he ‘felt bad’ and had ‘bad dreams’ about what he’d done. In court his counsel detailed his drug use, his prior criminal history, and his truly appalling young life spent mostly in one form of detention or another. But while these factors were taken into account by successive trial and appeal judges, none gained Aslett any mercy or were seen to mitigate his crimes. In the NSW Supreme Court, Justice James Wood gave a succinct summary of Aslett’s life and crimes:

It is rare that one can say, with any confidence, that a Prisoner presents a very serious ongoing danger to the community, or that his rehabilitation prospects are negligible. The present however is a case where I am satisfied beyond any reasonable doubt . . .

The Prisoner has shown himself to have no regard for person or property, he has ignored the lessons which his prior sentences should have conveyed, and he has effectively placed himself outside all normal standards of behaviour or constraints of civilised living. The manner in which he posed with a fistful of bank notes and with a pistol on his hip in [a] photograph which was tendered, says much as to the way in which he regards himself.

The psychological profile similarly holds out very little hope of him ever being rehabilitated, or of controlling his aggressive and dangerous impulses. He came from a supportive family. While it was a big family which had its own problems, with the exception of the alleged sexual abuse by a stepbrother, of which no evidence came from the Prisoner or his mother, there is nothing to suggest that his early years were particularly dysfunctional.

His subsequent periods of custody either in boys’ homes, in detention centres or in adult prisons have, no doubt, hardened him to the point where, if he is not already institutionalised, he is very close to it. Again, his history of almost continuous detention away from his family, and the inevitable exposure to delinquent peer behaviour, almost certainly go a long way to explaining where he is today, and why he has chosen to continue offending.

On Aslett’s drug use at the time of the crimes, Justice Wood said: ‘[T]hey included “ice”; and . . . may also have included cannabis, heroin and cocaine.

‘The abuse of drugs by the Prisoner helps to explain his behaviour but it does not excuse it.’

Justice Wood applied the legal principles established in the case of R v Henry in 1999, which included:

(a) the need to acquire funds to support a drug habit, even a severe habit, is not an excuse to commit an armed robbery or any similar offence, and of itself is not a matter of mitigation;

(b) however the fact that an offence is motivated by such a need may be taken into account as a factor relevant to the objective criminality of the offence in so far as it may throw light on matters such as:

(i) the impulsivity of the offence and the extent of any planning for it;

(ii) the existence or non existence of any alternative reason that may have operated in aggravation of the offence, e.g. that it was motivated to fund some other serious criminal venture or to support a campaign of terrorism;

(iii) the state of mind or capacity of the offender to exercise judgment, e.g. if he or she was in the grips of an extreme state of withdrawal of the kind that may have led to a frank disorder of thought processes or to the act being other than a willed act;

(c) It may also be relevant as a subjective circumstance, in so far as the origin or extent of the addiction, and any attempts to overcome it, might:

(i) impact upon the prospects of recidivism/rehabilitation, in which respect it may on occasions prove to be a two-edged sword;

(ii) suggest that the addiction was not a matter of personal choice but was attributable to some other event for which the offender was not primarily responsible, for example where it arose as the result of the medical prescription of potentially addictive drugs following injury, illness, or surgery; or where it occurred at a very young age, or in a person whose mental or intellectual capacity was impaired, so that their ability to exercise appropriate judgment or choice was incomplete;

(iii) justify special consideration in the case of offenders judged to be at the ‘cross roads’.

Justice Wood said that giving Aslett any benefit of these mitigating circumstances would be an act of ‘irresponsibility’. He sentenced Aslett to life imprisonment for the murder and the sexual assaults, and a variety of long sentences for the other sixteen counts. In effect, he would have been eligible for parole on 21 August 2036, when he would be a 65-year-old man. On appeal, the Court of Criminal Appeal increased this term so that Aslett has no hope of parole until 2044, when he will be 73.

Without mitigating or excusing Aslett in any way, it is still possible to ask the question: Would Aslett have committed his crimes without the influence of ice? Legally and morally, it’s irresponsible to ‘blame’ the drug. Aslett deserved his long sentences. But in a study of crystal methamphetamine, it is instructive to remember that Aslett had previously been a smalltime crook with a staple cycle of break and enter, car theft and heroin use. He had been no more violent than threatening police or victims in the course of his usual robberies. He had no record of sexual violence. His accomplices had no prior criminal records. But Dudley Aslett had found ice, or ice had found him. Within weeks, he led robberies that turned into rape and murder.

There were many examples, in 2003 and 2004, of violent crimes occurring within weeks of the offender starting to use ice. Aslett was far from alone. At the time his August spree was taking place, in another part of Sydney a seventeen-year-old cannabis smoker and petty criminal—codenamed ‘SB’ in the courts—smoked ice for the first time. SB quickly became a daily user, and within four weeks he and a friend went to the Orchard Tavern in Chatswood, on Sydney’s north shore, and robbed the place, bailing up five staff members and ten customers with a gun. After his imprisonment and off crystal meth, SB’s behaviour was exemplary. SB was no angel, but he was a violent robber only during the month he was smoking ice every day.

Shane Martin, 26, was an ice user of a few months’ duration when in January 2004 he broke into a drug dealer’s house intending to steal some cannabis he knew was kept there. But, high on ice and the thrill of capturing the dealer and his wife and daughter, Martin grew sexually aroused and raped the two women in front of the man. Martin pleaded guilty and was given 25 years in jail to think about his moment of madness.

It’s extremely likely that, given his lifetime compulsion to steal, Dudley Aslett would have committed more robberies whatever happened. Robbery was his profession. Yet these small-time criminalities spiralled out of control when he and his little gang were overaroused, both sexually and in the violence they were prepared to enact. Without the stimulant of crystal meth, would they have been amped-up into a state of such libidinous excitement that they raped two young women? Without the jumbled mental state and excitability brought on by ice, would Aslett have fired the gun at Emad Youssef? Without the paranoia, would he even have thought it necessary to steal the gun in the first place?

Responsibility rests with the perpetrators of the crime. But it is fair to say that a pattern was emerging among criminals who used ice. The drug threw fuel onto highly combustible personalities. It didn’t change the intent or the clear-headedness of the perpetrators, but it did affect the degree of their actions. Under the influence of ice, simple violence became complicated. Small confrontations escalated. If Aslett hadn’t been unhinged by crystal meth, he wouldn’t have suddenly led a straight and law-abiding life, but Emad Youssef might still be alive and the two young women might be able to live free of those wounds they will bear for the rest of their lives.

The relationship between methamphetamine—particularly in its crystalline form—and violence is at the same time blindingly obvious and unproven. On the one hand, anyone who has experienced or seen an episode of the popularly termed ‘ice psychosis’ will know that violent behaviour can follow ice use as naturally as a hangover follows a drinking bout. Any reasonably perceptive person who has even taken ice will sense the potential that lies inside such a nervy, excitable state. And the Dudley Asletts, Mohammed Kerbatiehs and Dimitrios Kyriakidises of the world give a fair indication of what happens when this chemical unlatches the impulse-control mechanism inside certain vulnerable brains.

And yet, both scientifically and legally, proof is a much trickier matter. If ice triggers violent actions in some users, why not in others? If ice turned Aslett into a rapist one day, why not the day before, or the day after? Can ice be isolated as a violence-causing substance when most violent users are also taking other drugs and alcohol as well? If ice led automatically to violence, why can’t we trace a clear correlation between known ice use and acts of violent crime? And how much of ice-related violence is actually the turf-war criminality of rival drug gangs, such as the unfortunate shooting death of a man in Merrylands in December 2003, when passing gunmen were aiming at his ice-dealing son but shot the father by mistake?

Anecdotally, the causal link between ice and violence has long been acknowledged. In 2006, Robert Mittiga, the program director of South Australia’s Gambling and Addiction Treatment Service, put it neatly when he said meth users hurt far more people than themselves: ‘What concerns me is the consequences—violent crimes, serious domestic violence, road rage and violent brawls. These people are not normally aggressive but they can become total animals.’ A Melbourne youth worker, Les Twentyman, said at the same time, after eleven knife attacks in a week, that an estimate that 60 per cent of street crime was ice-related would be ‘very conservative’.

Yet the population-based measures of the ice–violence nexus have always been suggestive at best. One concerted effort to study the matter beyond the the realm of anecdote is the Drug Use Monitoring in Australia (DUMA) project, established in 1999 and modelled on the United States-originated International Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring program (I-ADAM). Under DUMA, people who have been arrested and taken into police custody are asked to give urine samples for drug testing. DUMA claims that 70 per cent of arrestees agree to the anonymous tests, from which the project compiles drug analysis.

DUMA tests all participating arrestees, whether they are in custody for violent or non-violent crimes (and, as they are arrestees rather than convicted criminals, it must be allowed that many of them have done nothing at all). But the studies do break down arrestees by the type of crime over which they have been charged, and in relation to methamphetamine, DUMA has found over the decade that ice is commonly but far from automatically connected with crimes of violence.

Over its eight-year lifespan, DUMA has been able to track drug use in one consistent cohort of male detainees in four sites around the country. The taking of any drug before an arrest is remarkably stable, between 70 and 78 per cent. Cannabis, the most frequently appearing drug, is also consistent in the 50–60 percentile. Methamphetamine was in the urine of 10 per cent of arrestees in 1999, rising to a peak of 31 per cent in 2001. From there it stabilised in the mid-twenties until 2005. In the 2006 survey, the most recent at the time of writing, DUMA found that the number of arrestees for violent crimes who tested positive to methamphetamine had fallen from 22 per cent to 18 per cent.

Peeling back the bulk numbers, however, shows something interesting. Users in 2006 were asked how the use of a particular drug affected their performance of a criminal act. The five drugs in the study were alcohol, cannabis, heroin, benzodiazepines and methamphetamine. The questions were:

Did you use the drug purposely to help you commit the crime? When using the drug at the time of offending, did the drug help you to:

Be more confident or have more courage?

Be more effective or more capable?

Get a rush of excitement or adrenalin?

Become erratic or unpredictable?

Have fun while committing the crime?

Feel less worried about your chances of being caught?

Feel less guilty about your offending?

To each of those questions, methamphetamine came out at or near the top. On making the offender more effective or capable, methamphetamine (72 per cent) gave double the positive response of other drugs. On giving the criminal a rush of excitement or adrenalin, methamphetamine (65 per cent) was the only one to register more than 33 per cent positive. On feelings of confidence, 76 per cent of methamphetamine users said yes. So while methamphetamine was not anywhere near as present in violent criminal activity as were alcohol and cannabis, meth seemed to have become accepted as a drug that specifically rewards and abets the kind of moods that surround violent crime. And among the meth users, 67 per cent said the form they had used before their arrest was crystal. Only 17 per cent named the next most prominent, the drug in its powder form—more indication that ice was having effects that were qualitatively different from old-style speed.

After eight years of DUMA, however, no self-respecting scientist would say that the urine sampling has shown a causal relationship between methamphetamine and violence.

Yet there is science and there is science. It must be remembered that science has yet to prove, irrefutably, that smoking causes lung cancer. Similarly, although no ‘proof’ has been established of a causal chain leading from ice use to violent acts, the association has been well known for decades.

As far back as 1971, an eminent American psychiatrist named Everett H. Ellinwood studied the pattern of amphetamine use and violence among thirteen convicted murderers. Of course, such a small sample cannot be taken as being in any way definitive. The possibilities for extrapolation are limited. But what Ellinwood, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Duke University, was doing was to ‘distinguish as clearly as possible the specific types of drugs associated with aggression and violence’.

Ellinwood had observed in the late 1960s something very similar to what was observed in Australia after 2000: ‘stories in the news media have linked the use of drugs with a series of bizarre murders’. First Ellinwood accounted for the low coincidence of opiates and sedatives with violent crime. Then he looked at ‘four persons who committed murder after taking large doses of amphetamines’.

His first case was a 27-year-old truck driver who ‘shot his boss in the back of the head because he thought the boss was trying to release poison gas into the back seat of the car in which he was riding’. In the previous twenty hours, the murderer, Mr A, had ingested 180 milligrams of amphetamines while doing a long-haul drive. He became suspicious that someone had planted drugs in his truck, and even called the police, who took him into a local jail cell for his safety. In the cell, Mr A thought he was being watched from across the street, and then that someone was gassing him. His boss came to pick him up, and showed no sympathy for Mr A’s ideas that he was being watched. Mr A then decided that his boss was in on it, and shot him on the way home. Even eighteen months later, Mr A still believed in his paranoid ideas.

Ellinwood’s second case was a 26-year-old daily amphetamine user who shot his neighbour after not sleeping for three days and becoming convinced that the neighbour was helping the FBI spy on him.

Mrs C, 32, the third case, had been prescribed amphetamines for weight loss. She found herself growing euphoric on the drug, and took more; then the paranoid delusions set in. She bought a gun because she thought someone would come to kidnap her or her children. Her husband was serving in Vietnam, and while he was away she had an affair. She became more and more suspicious of her lover, and anxious about her husband’s impending return. Then, on an amphetamine binge lasting four days, she calmly shot her lover in the stomach as he got out of his car. She followed him and said, ‘You wanted to die; I showed you.’ After shooting him two more times, she asked a bystander to ‘Turn him over and take a picture of his pretty face’. When she was arrested, she put her feet up on the back seat of the police patrol car and tickled the sheriff on the ear, asking him if it felt good. At her subsequent interrogation at police headquarters, Mrs C stood up and said, ‘Well, I’ve got to go, I’ve got a hair appointment.’

And so it went through Ellinwood’s thirteen killers. Most had some kind of personality disposition to violence, and some, though not all, were taking other drugs as well. A small few were involved in the drug trade. Five were diagnosed schizophrenic. Most lived isolated lives, where their delusions were able to flourish.

But Ellinwood was less concerned with sifting through the causes for a ‘silver bullet’, which he knew was not possible. His attention fell on describing a common pattern of behaviour in the lead-up to the murders. What he found was a three-step evolution:

1) chronic amphetamine abuse;

2) an acute change in the individual’s state of emotional arousal;

3) a situation that triggers the specific events leading to the act of violence.

The chronic abuse phase, Ellinwood wrote, ‘sets the stage’. The user gradually becomes more paranoid, and obtains a gun (easier in America but possible, as we have seen, in Australia) for self-protection.

The sudden change in emotional arousal can arise from a change in the user’s circumstances and an increase in amphetamine dosage. It usually culminates in a binge of wakefulness and a misinterpretation of ‘signals’ coming from the environment. The user develops an alternative reality in which he or she is being threatened.

Any minor incident can be the final trigger. ‘Often,’ Ellinwood wrote, ‘the threatening incident is half real and half misinterpreted.’ Mrs C, for instance, was clear-sighted about the impending threat of her husband coming home and discovering that she had a lover, but completely addled on the question of what threat the lover posed to her.

With his analysis of a three-phase pattern, Ellinwood provided a framework for differentiating between a chronic meth user who stopped short of violence, and one who took the extra step. It would always, he argued, be largely down to luck and circumstance. But in the chronic amphetamine user, the potential for step one to turn to step two, and thence to step three, was ever-present.

Three and a half decades later, Ellinwood’s study was read by Rebecca McKetin at NDARC. She had been commissioned to conduct another attempt to relate separate population figures on ice and violent crime, this time for the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR). Her study compared ‘methamphetamine arrests’ with arrests for assaults between 1995 and 2005. This report, when published, attracted a lot of media attention for its refusal to link ice directly with crime. The reason for this caution lay in the study’s methodology.

‘Methamphetamine arrests’, defined as arrests for possession, supply, trafficking, importation and so on of the drug, had risen threefold between 1997 and 2001, dropped by a quarter in 2002, then stabilised at a rate of a little more than double where they had been at the beginning of the decade. Assaults, meanwhile, had risen incrementally before stabilising around 2003. In other words, as McKetin wrote, ‘there is currently insufficient empirical data to estimate whether, or to what extent, metham-phetamine use has increased assaults in NSW. Existing evidence suggests that methamphetamine use is likely to have a relatively minor impact on the assault rate in NSW in comparison with other factors’.

The study, however, defined ‘methamphetamine arrests’ very narrowly. When Dudley Aslett and his accomplices were arrested, these were not ‘methamphetamine arrests’—they were arrests for murder, rape and robbery. Likewise, many of the worst methamphetamine-related crimes in the spate of 2003–04 would not have made any statistical register as being connected with the drug, because the accused often did not reveal that they had been taking ice; or if they did, they waited until a court hearing to reveal this information, in the hope of mitigation. The most common ice-related crimes—common assault, break and enter, domestic violence, armed robbery— were never recorded as ice-related. (Ellinwood, by the way, had noted the same information deficit in 1971: ‘We have no data showing the number of assaults and homicides committed by people under the influence of amphetamines or other drugs.’)

As the director of BOCSAR, Don Weatherburn, says, until such information was routinely gathered, attempts such as the BOCSAR study to examine a link between methamphetamine and violence are ‘a blunt instrument’, frustrating in their imprecision.

By 2003, with the girls at school and preschool, Vicki Wolf and Mark Thomas were well out of the child-rearing woods. They’d briefly considered having a third child, but had decided against it. Life was too good to go backwards.

Vicki was now an associate partner with her law firm. Mark had left his firm to work as an in-house lawyer with a multinational food concern. They worked long hours, but each was pulling down more than $200 000 a year and they’d been able to move into a spacious home in Waverley in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. In 2003, they were renovating it, adding a second storey which would have views to the Pacific Ocean.

Since that party in 2001 when they had taken crystal, they’d smoked the drug on average about once every two or three months. They still enjoyed the sex, which followed crystal-smoking, in Mark’s words, ‘as a shit follows a morning coffee’. And they still didn’t suffer any noticeable hangover or comedown. If they were sick the day after, they attributed it to the skinful of alcohol they’d drunk while they were ‘getting on it’.

They had nothing to worry about with the drug. They had long experience with various illicit substances, and drew careful boundaries around their ‘crystal nights’. They used it only when the children were staying over at a cousin’s house, and only on Friday nights, not Saturdays, so they had a two-day ‘clear-air’ period following it. Although there was no detectable hangover yet, they didn’t want it to cross over into their work lives, and that meant being strong and sober on Monday mornings. If anyone had warned them about crystal methamphetamine, or ‘ice’ as it was beginning to become known (although nobody Vicki and Mark knew called it ‘ice’), they had the answer. Scare campaigns against drugs had been a part of their landscape since adolescence. ‘Remember when one line of cocaine was enough to get you addicted, or one acid trip sent you crazy? Drug campaigns are a joke,’ Mark says. ‘Nobody took them seriously, and we knew we weren’t the type of people who were going to get into trouble. Nobody we knew who used crystal had anything remotely approaching a problem. They were all people like us.’

Mark and Vicki were parents, successful professionals with close links to their families in Melbourne—too strong a safety net to fall through. But they weren’t falling. They were rising. They each had the sense, in 2002 and 2003, of rising fast, not only in the material world, but in their journey through life: ‘We were in prime time,’ Mark says.

They found ways to loosen the hold parenthood had on their lifestyle; they had a teenage babysitter who lived with them on weekends and, if the party was at their house, as started to happen, they’d even invite her to get into the swing of things after the children had gone to bed. Vicki and Mark told themselves that after the responsibility of bringing two children through infancy, they had ‘earned the right’ to cut loose a little, let off a bit of steam. It was a phase.

The only cloud—and it has to be said that this is a cloud identified in retrospect, not at the time—was something about the sex Mark and Vicki were having on crystal.

‘Crystal was performance-enhancing in every way,’ he says significantly. ‘It made me feel like a porn star. But that was the thing about it that made it a bit weird, like I was watching myself doing it, and I could do it for hours and hours, and it was more like watching than doing. In a funny way that was arousing, watching yourselves in a porn video, but it also got in the way of a sort of satisfaction. When it was over, you didn’t just flop over on the bed and have a chat or go to sleep. You wanted to get up and watch TV, or go out, or do it again. It was kind of weird, because it was the best sex you could ever have and at the same time it was completely unsatisfying.’

The rules within which Mark and Vicki operated had another drawback: they were at the mercy of friends who were supplying them. Crystal was so cheap that nobody ever asked for money. The pipe was passed, and it was understood that they were getting high for a night on about fifty bucks’ worth. It wasn’t like coke, where you had to pitch in two or three hundred dollars for a big night. Crystal was free.

But there was also a powerlessness about the set-up that agitated both Mark and Vicki. They couldn’t decide to have a ‘crystal night’ off their own bat. They’d go to a party and hope they were included in the invitations to the bathroom. After one party, where for some reason their crystal friends didn’t show, Mark and Vicki left early and had a fight. The fight wasn’t about anything important, but they both knew, without confessing it to each other, that it grew out of disappointment at being wound up for a crystal night and it not happening.

That was the last such quarrel, because at a small party the following month (a certain type of party was becoming more regular, and smaller; instead of six or seven crystal users at a party of sixty or seventy people, they now went to parties of just fifteen or twenty, all crystal users), a dealer came along. Mark put down some money, he and Vicki smoked at the coffee table with everyone else, and the dealer said to Mark: ‘Can I have your wife’s mobile number?’ Mark looked at Vicki. They’d say yes to anything, in this mood, to this guy.

‘Why?’ Mark said.

‘You’ll see,’ the dealer said.

Vicki piped up, telling the dealer her number. Immediately the dealer called her and hung up. His number registered on Vicki’s ‘Received Calls’ list.

‘Now you have me,’ the dealer said, looking at Vicki.

She and Mark found it funny, and not the least bit sleazy, as the dealer was only about twenty and wore slightly ridiculous oversized clothes. What Vicki and Mark both saw was the main prize.

So a fortnight later, when they were going to a wedding on a Saturday night, they called him and he gave them two points of crystal for a hundred and twenty dollars. It wasn’t the usual crystal night: it was a dull family wedding, an excruciating prospect alleviated only by the promise of crystal enhancement. It was a Saturday night, not a Friday, but exceptions had to be made. Vicki and Mark had the overnight babysitting arranged.

The wedding was a riot, as enjoyable as any wedding they’d ever been to, but Vicki and Mark smoked the whole deal by midnight and had to call the dealer again. He turned up at the function centre within the hour and gave Vicki a kiss on the cheek as he handed over another two points.

‘That weekend was a kind of a breakthrough,’ Vicki says. She and Mark smoked a little on the Sunday morning, ‘just like a strong coffee to get through the day’, and then—‘only because we had some left’—they both had a smoke after dropping their daughters at school and preschool on the Monday morning. ‘We decided we couldn’t go back to work with some of it still in the house,’ Vicki says. ‘It’d be burning a hole in our heads while it sat there, so we thought it was best just to get rid of it, and make Monday bearable at the same time. Two birds with one stone kind of thing.’

Once they owned the direct line to the dealer, Vicki and Mark had the freedom to use crystal as and when they wanted. They bought their own ice pipe which they christened ‘Tax’, the nickname of one of their friends back in Thailand who’d introduced them to shabu. They loved the way the smoke curled up through Tax, and how bringing Tax out of his cubby-hole in the garage after the children had gone to bed was invariably a herald of good times.

Through 2003, life was still good; in fact, better than ever. They kept their crystal use within limits, though those limits were more rubbery than they used to be. Once Vicki had a smoke by herself—the first time—but it was when she’d landed after a red-eye trans-Pacific flight at 6 am, dropped in at home at 8.30, and had to get herself ready for a day at work. If that wasn’t a good reason to spark up, what was? And Mark had told her that he’d had a smoke one night while she was away, so he owed her one.

Not that she told him she’d had that pre-work smoke. In fact, not telling Mark was part of the buzz of it, she thought as she packed Tax away ‘exactly as I’d found him’. Some days, when Mark was giving her the shits on the phone, she’d pretend the line was bad and hang up. Sometimes she left her mobile switched off when she knew he’d be calling. There wasn’t any point to it; it was just for the sake of having that place for herself, to be somewhere no one, not even Mark, could go. She’d always had a secretive streak, and the longer she’d been married and a mother the more she craved this private place. Even though that place only belonged to her imagination—switching her phone off or pretending not to hear it wasn’t a real place—it was important to her. Increasingly important. One day Vicki told Mark she was going out to the shops. She got in the car, drove to a park, turned the car stereo to maximum volume, and had a ‘very, very, very small puff’. It wasn’t that she needed the high. She needed to be alone. She had read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which gave her little secret puffs an intellectual underpinning. ‘I wasn’t forming a drug habit; I was doing something that all married women need to do,’ she says. Then, drily, not believing herself for a moment: ‘Ha, ha, ha.’

Substance abuse has always been a consequence, as much as a cause, of family breakdown. Melbourne brickie Novica Jakimov, who we last saw separating from his wife in 2001 after three years of marriage, had for a long time been a casual, weekend drug user. Once he was single again, he dived headfirst into his version of the bachelor lifestyle.

Jakimov, now 34, was an experienced amphetamine user whose behaviour was taken to a new, supercharged level with ice. It revved him up, making him feel invincible. It cleared his head of the guilt he’d felt over how he’d treated his wife. It helped him forget the frustration of trying, so hard yet without success, to win her back. It also pumped up his sexual appetite.

His routine became Janus-faced: one day he would visit his wife to try to make up with her, and then he would go out and score some ice, roam the streets of St Kilda or the Crown Casino in search of a prostitute, and take his new friend home to smoke some more.

It was on one of these nocturnal roamings that Jakimov met Kelly Hodge. On 18 August 2003, a cold Melbourne winter’s night, he left his rented flat in Erinbank Crescent in the suburb of West Meadows and cruised the St Kilda area. He would later tell a court that he met Kelly Hodge while he was gambling at Crown Casino, but Hodge had been seen in St Kilda that night and Jakimov’s evidence in court was so inconsistent that his trial judge concluded that it was impossible to say exactly where Jakimov picked up Hodge.

Hodge, 26, was a heroin addict who lived with her grandmother. On 18 August, she said goodnight to her grandmother at about 10.30 pm and went out to work. She was a slim young woman with dyed blonde hair, going to work in tight-fitting black knitted tops and short skirts or jeans.

At around midnight, Hodge met a client and had sex with him. The assignation lasted about 45 minutes, and he left her back in St Kilda where he’d picked her up. Some time later that night, she met Novica Jakimov. It’s unknown whether or not this was the first time they had crossed paths.

Eight days later, a motorist spotted a bundle in a gully beside Old Sydney Road in Beveridge, just outside Melbourne. The police were called. Trussed up inside a black plastic sheet, further insulated by a red blanket, was the decomposing body of Kelly Hodge.

A police forensic pathologist performed a post-mortem examination on Hodge that day, finding some terrible injuries. Her right forehead had been punctured, leaving a bloody dent, ‘like something done by a cookie cutter’. Whatever had caused the injury had also punched into her temple and her nose. Her face bore other lacerations and bruises, including two black eyes and a cut in her left lower eyelid. The inside of her mouth was bruised and abraded, as was her right ear. There was a patterned graze on the right side of her face.

Her knees and hips were bruised, and there were tears inside her vagina, ‘implying blunt force, stretching’, which the pathologist thought could not have been the result of normal sexual intercourse but rather from a foreign object.

Her airways were clogged with vomit, which might, the doctor said, have resulted from the head trauma. She had received eleven blows to the head. The ‘punched-out’ wounds were unlike anything the doctor had seen before; ditto his colleagues. They might have been caused, the doctor said, by something like the shaft of a broken umbrella. The vaginal injuries might have been caused by wooden furniture.

All of these injuries appeared to have been sustained in a very short period of time, perhaps only minutes: an assault of pure frenzy.

It was only by accident that the police began to suspect that Novica Jakimov had anything to do with Kelly Hodge’s death. On 10 October, seven weeks after Kelly’s body was found, police had to interview Jakimov about a stolen mobile phone. The phone was in the possession of a man called Julio Gamo, who worked with Jakimov. Gamo told police that Jakimov had given it to him in late August. When the police caught up with Jakimov, he spilt out a story that he and another man, Pat Zaffina, had met Kelly Hodge on 19 August and had taken her to his house in West Meadows. He and Zaffina had both taken drugs with her and had consensual sex with her, he said, and then all three went their separate ways.

Because the murder was unsolved, the police tracked down Pat Zaffina, who told them that he’d been with neither Jakimov nor Hodge on 19 August.

When the police returned to Jakimov’s house in Erinbank Crescent, he’d cleared out, even though he was only three months into a twelve-month lease. After obtaining a warrant to search the house on 17 November, police found Kelly Hodge’s blood on the carpet in a bedroom and the hallway. They also found a smashed windowpane that might have caused some of her lacerations.

All they had to do now was find Novica Jakimov.

Everett Ellinwood had predicted the shortcoming of later studies of the methamphetamine–crime link. He predicted that information would be hard to come by because ‘amphetamine abuse [is] not even considered in the initial evaluation. One wonders whether the reported incidents of amphetamine-induced assault and homicide would not be much higher if physicians were more fully aware of the problem’.

In Australia by the beginning of the twenty-first century, it would be physicians, nurses and paramedics who were at the frontline, and consequently best able to illuminate the true extent of methamphetamine use and its consequences.

Beaver Hudson was a new arrival from Wales when he started work in the emergency department of St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney in 1998. A nurse, Hudson had the size and build of a back-row forward for one of the great Welsh rugby-playing provinces of Llanelli or Pontypridd. And he came with a rugby forward’s no-nonsense attitude, which he needed; emergency departments are no place for the faint-hearted at the best of times, and things at St Vincent’s emergency were about to turn rough.

‘When I first came here, the prominent drugs of abuse were alcohol and opiates,’ Hudson says. ‘Ecstasy was around, but crystal meth was not noticeable. We didn’t have a great need for mental health professionals, because they weren’t too involved in opiate cases.’

It was in 2002 and 2003 that Hudson and other nurses, as well as their department director, Dr Gordian Fulde, started talking among themselves about a new type of presentation that was becoming more and more prevalent.

‘The amount of agitated people requiring higher levels of sedation was increasing,’ Hudson remembers. ‘We began noticing bizarre side effects—the parasitation, feeling itchy under their skins, scratching until they had scabs. An Aboriginal girl who was frequently in here was digging into her temple with nail scissors, saying she had to get a worm that was in there.

‘There was all this new kind of physical damage. People with burns on their hands from smoking, sores, a man with an abscess in his penis who was trying to drain it by cutting it with a Stanley knife.’

Hudson’s initial guess was that these episodes were caused by cocaine. There was the agitation, the nervous energy, and sometimes the patients said they had smoked or snorted ‘crack’.

‘I thought it was cocaine, but how could these people get so much of it? Cocaine would have been too expensive for these people to take enough to produce these kinds of reactions.’

What was most worrying about these patients, for a nurse, was how resistant they were to sedation. Normally, sedatives are the emergency nurse’s best friend. But somehow, sedatives weren’t working as well.

‘People were presenting much more aggressive and agitated, and police presentations were on the increase, so they were more serious matters,’ Hudson says. ‘To sedate someone, 20 milligrams of intravenous Valium should be sufficient. Now we were needing 80–200 milligrams.’

The nurses and doctors discussed what was causing it.

‘We started thinking these people were totally barking. Why were they benzo-tolerant? There was no surefire, cost-effective, accurate way of finding out what they’d been taking, so we couldn’t develop responses.’

The incidents worsened; while the worst flare-ups of violence might usually have been restricted to Friday and Saturday nights, patients were now coming into the hospital every day and night of the week, throwing chairs, screaming at staff, launching themselves at walls. Stories of ‘Incredible Hulk’ episodes began to spread: patients displaying superhuman strength to break out of restraints or escape from the hospital. It wasn’t cocaine, and it certainly wasn’t heroin. Alcohol seemed to be playing some part in it, but it couldn’t be alcohol alone.

The users themselves, eventually, provided the key.

‘They told us they’d been smoking amphetamines in crystal form,’ Hudson says. ‘Smoking is an accessible way of getting it into your system. It’s socially acceptable, compared with injecting, and efficient, and not as painful as snorting can be. And it was a purer form. The purer forms last longer and hit harder. You can take either the expressway to destruction or the scenic route. They were all suddenly on the expressway.’

The resistance to sedatives, the hospital’s staff discovered, was both a consequence and part and parcel of the ice user’s routine.

‘Ice users are polydrug users. They use depressants to come down. Benzodiazepines. They develop a tolerance for that, and need higher doses. So this was why normal doses that we were giving them weren’t sedating them. But we had to be careful, because higher doses bring in a risk of respiratory arrest. We can’t dose people too highly, or we’ll kill them.’

The medical staff were walking a fine line, but circumstances were quickly spinning out of their control. Unsedated, uncontrolled ice users were going berserk in the ward.

‘We had a man come in suffering auditory hallucinations— he’d ploughed into a line outside a club. There were meth users who’d crashed their cars. They’d come in with ambulance officers and, even though they had head injuries, they’d be in a combative state.

‘There was a general concern, even alarm, among emergency staff about the amount of violence we were seeing,’ Hudson says.

‘At that time, staff were desensitised to violence—the name-calling and the destruction from the patients were seen as all part of being in emergency at St Vincent’s. I was absolutely appalled at what the staff had to put up with, and what they accepted.’

Hudson wasn’t the only medical worker in the country astonished by the upsurge in violence. St Vincent’s in Darlinghurst is at the epicentre of illicit drug use in Australia’s biggest city, but the emergency department’s concerns were by no means unique. Not only were other hospitals feeling the threat, but so were individual general practitioners. One, Dr Chris Towie, from the outer-Melbourne suburb of Broadmeadows, told the ABC that while alcoholics posed the most regular day-in, day-out problem with violence, ‘the severity of the violence with the ice users is the issue’.

‘Probably, at the moment, once every three months I get physically assaulted and have to take fairly drastic measures to defend myself. But I’m a fairly big fellow and I can deal with it. It really troubles me, what happens to other doctors who are less burly and self-confident. The level of violence is so terrifying. The worst attack I had, I really thought I was going to get killed. I was absolutely ready to die. And that was just in the waiting room, in the clinic. I shouldn’t be feeling like that. And so, [ice] takes on more importance than the alcoholics, who are rarely violent to that degree. But these people are on an adrenalin rush—it’s an adrenalin rush on steroids, if you like—they’re really souped up and they don’t stop.’

Awareness of the threat to frontline health workers was spreading. A well-known Victorian drug counsellor, Richard Smith from the Raymond Hader Clinic, said that whereas in sixteen years of counselling he had never been physically threatened, in 2003 and 2004 he was seriously menaced four times by violent ice users. Research at Monash University found that 39 per cent of GPs suffered work-related violence. In response, some had resorted to using security cameras, panic buttons, and even guard dogs and capsicum spray to protect themselves. The Australian Medical Association recommended that GPs install furniture that could not be easily thrown, and position their desks where they could make a quick escape from a violent patient. ‘We try to have the doctor sitting closer to the door than the patient so they can get out quicker if they need to,’ said AMA (NSW) vice-president Dr Brian Morton.

Police stations were also on alert for psychotic episodes, particularly after an incident at Wetherill Park, in Sydney’s south-west, in February 2006. Ngoc Qui ‘David’ Khuu, 33, arrived at the police station to complain that he was being followed and his family was being threatened by someone who claimed Khuu owed them money. Khuu arrived at the station at 3 am. Unbeknown to the police, he was a paranoid ice user who had taken to carrying knives to defend himself against his ghosts.

He had to wait three hours until the morning shift came on, and when Constable Elizabeth Roth arrived, Khuu jumped the desk and put her in a headlock. Roth fought free, but her belt and holstered gun had fallen to the floor. She picked them up and ran down a corridor, hoping to get inside a meal room. Khuu chased her, with his knife drawn. She swung her belt at him, but as she got to the meal room he lunged after her, stabbing her in the arm, and wrested her Glock pistol out of her belt. As she backed away, he shot her in the chest and ran off. By the time he was turned in by his brother two days later, Khuu had already sold the gun to pay for more drugs.

It was not an isolated incident, either within Sydney or outside. Newcastle police crime manager Gerard Lawson said two months after Khuu’s attack that the safety of police officers was under threat across the region. ‘One of the problems is that [ice users] are far more aggressive,’ he said. ‘And it’s a vastly different aggression. Their ability to see logic is very slim and it’s very hard to reason with them.’ On the night of 22 May 2004, a 27-year-old Melbourne ice user and dealer, Gregory Rama Biggs, was shot by police in Carlton after he lunged at them with two samurai swords in what was described as a ‘ninja’-style attack.

The secretary of the NSW police union, Bob Pritchard, said ice was creating a ‘perfect storm’ of violence that was threatening police and sucking resources away from their core functions. He asked officers to log all ice-related incidents and requested the state government to train specialised ‘ice’ teams.

On another frontline, ambulance officers and paramedics were dealing with the same issue: not just an upsurge in violence but an upsurge in incidents for which their training and equipment was not sufficient. Seven paramedics were forced to take time off work after being seriously assaulted in 2005–06. It wasn’t that paramedics were facing crazed ice users every day; it was that when they did, they had no protocols for controlling them.

Buck Reed, the chief executive of the first-aid officers’ organisation UniMed, says the problem worsened dramatically around 2003–04.

‘Meth first showed up in the dance party scene in the late 1990s. Not that many people took a lot of crystal meth at dance parties. But since 2000 we’ve been running into a lot more aggressive people. It’s the meth–alcohol combination. Ten beers and three lines in, the person becomes aggressive and unpleasant to everyone. Meth is the ingredient that’s associated with the aggression.’

While drunks still accounted for a majority of violent incidents, Reed says, dealing with drunks at least falls within the first-aiders’ knowledge and procedures.

‘With a drunken violent person, you can tell them to behave and eventually they’ll listen,’ Reed says. ‘It may take one or two people to bring them under control, whereas a person on methamphetamines has no sense of boundaries. A drunk will stop struggling when he realises there’s no use. Methamphetamine users don’t recognise the concept that they can be overwhelmed.

‘Capsicum spray doesn’t work on amphetamine users. They become half-blinded and angry, as opposed to just angry. A person going through a meth psychosis doesn’t care much for your safety either.

‘Meth frightens paramedics, it frightens police, it frightens the community. Cannabis, on the other hand, has bad effects but it never frightened anyone.’

Many paramedics started getting injured from 2002, he says. ‘Things like bruises from being thrown down staircases. It’s not that they’re angry at you as a first-aid officer. More that they think you’re a 15-foot-tall werewolf with blood dripping from your teeth. They attack you because they’re terrified.’

Allan Eade, an ambulance officer in Victoria, has collected a first-hand sample of these acts of violent paranoia at the cost of his personal safety.

Eade was working at a dance party in 2003 when he was called to the first-aid tent by St John Ambulance paramedics. There he found a 22-year-old man, who had been awake for five days, ‘destroying the first-aid facility. Police arrived, but he was going crazy. It took eight police, three cans of capsicum spray, a Taser and half an hour before they finally subdued him. The spray did nothing. He might as well have been chewing on peppermint mouthwash. That was my first “Incredible Hulk” experience.’

Previously, Eade says, there was a problem of misdiagnosis: ‘If we came across meth users, we might have just thought they were extremely angry drunks.’

But that changed when he was himself assaulted.

‘There was a guy who was punching the front of a bus, on Nicholson Street. We were called in—the description was: a bald man with no shirt was spotted screaming at traffic.’

Eade’s ambulance arrived, and the officers were trying to make a decision on how to control the bald man, when a passerby yelled abuse at him.

‘Suddenly he turned on me because I was the nearest person,’ Eade says. ‘It wasn’t at all directed personally at me. It felt different from a drunk. Drunks can get very personal. This guy just lashed out. The look in his eye was quite empty. I ended up with bruises and scrapes, and broke my glasses.

‘It’s scary when it happens. With drunks, it’s mostly interpersonal violence and it’s between two people. But with meth users, the patient, the police and the paramedics can all get hurt.’

Of 8000 ambulance calls each week in Victoria, the number of ice-related incidents has remained low. But, says Eade, they suck up a disproportionate amount of time and staff.

‘It’s the cases like these that require so many resources. Security staff and police are called in to sedate them, because they’re so powerful there’s always an element of risk.’

For every Damien Peters or Matthew Gagalowicz, whose ice use escalated run-of-the-mill violence into savage killings and crazily purposeful cover-ups, there were dozens of other acts of ice-triggered violence that didn’t go so far. For every out-of-control sexual attack like those of Mohammed Kerbatieh and Dudley Aslett, there were innumerable assaults by men on women, both reported and unreported. The world’s natural store of violence didn’t begin with crystal meth, and nor was it created by the drug. Violence was, is, and will remain a fact. But methamphetamine gave the monster a green light—to arise, and to build upon itself. By letting loose violent and libidinous impulses, and simultaneously disabling the brain’s control switches, ice acted as an accelerant to kinds of violence that already existed.

Sunia James Kafovalu was a born brawler who didn’t need methamphetamine to rev him up. Abandoned by his mother at the age of four, raised by a veritable rolodex of foster parents, expelled from school at fifteen, a weekly ecstasy user and daily drinker from his mid-teens, Kafovalu was simply a young man who never got over a bad start. He had a criminal record from the age of sixteen for a range of offences, including assault and armed robbery. He never held down a job and spent most of his time in south-western Sydney hanging around with his mates and, on weekend nights, venturing into the city to seek out trouble.

It was almost inevitable, in the early 2000s, that such a human tinderbox would catch the spark of crystal methamphetamine. Kafovalu became a regular smoker of the drug in 2003. On 26 February of that year, at 3.45 am, Kafovalu and a friend set upon a defenceless young waiter, Andrew O’Kane, as O’Kane got out of a taxi on King Street, Newtown. They robbed him of the $50 he had in his wallet, forced him to withdraw another $400 from an ATM, kicked and punched him and ran away.

A year later, at 3.10 am on 18 February 2004, Kafovalu and some of his friends, flying on ice, beat up an unknown man on the corner of George and Goulburn streets in the Sydney CBD. A security guard broke up the fight and the group went to a convenience store to eat some food. Still worked up by the first fight, they came out of the convenience store and set upon a group of male and female Irish tourists. Kafovalu stomped on one of the tourists, Phillip Fleming, and chased down and punched another, Ian Doyle. Two female police officers arrived and Kafovalu tried to run away from them. Unable to outpace either of the women, he turned and lashed out at them, pushing one to the ground. He could menace a thin, lone man and a group of harmless backpackers, but Kafovalu was no match for Constables Dumas and Gao. The policewomen cuffed and arrested him, and he was later sentenced to six years in jail.

Just a normal night in Sydney at the height of the ice age.

By the beginning of 2004, the courts and jails were filling up with ice criminals. Of course, there were the traffickers and manufacturers, but most of these would have been in the heroin trade a few years earlier and weren’t created out of anywhere but greed. Meanwhile there was a new breed of ice-fuelled thrillseekers who led police on high-speed car chases. South Australian police commissioner Mal Hyde reacted to a report showing a high percentage of police arrestees for driving misdemeanours testing positive for methamphetamine: ‘Quite a lot of them reported they had failed to stop when driving a car and directed to stop by police,’ Mr Hyde said. ‘And quite a number of them admitted having been involved in pursuits with police . . . the most common drug used before a police pursuit was methyamphetamine.’

There were also, however, the bashers and robbers, the thieves and rapists, who weren’t, like junkies, out on the rampage to obtain money to feed the habit; rather, it was their habit, and the effects of the drug itself, that got them into trouble.

The years 2002 and 2003 represent an inferno of ice-related crime. By May 2004, West Australian police superintendent Fred Gere was calling methamphetamine ‘the biggest threat to the nation after terrorism’. Yet terrorism in Australia has never approached ice in terms of personal trauma and body count.

There was John Andrew Seckold, a lifetime drug user and cast-off from a terrible abused childhood, who, on ice, ‘lost two weeks of [his] life’ in October and November 2003. Seckold lost more than that. He was sentenced to six years in jail for a spree of robbery and theft in Canberra covering twelve offences in twelve days, including stealing money from an 86-year-old man selling poppies for Legacy.

There was AB, a Filipino drug dealer who started taking ice in 2002. Working for his superior dealer, Yong Kee Tan, AB helped to organise a hit on an accountant named Dominic Li in December 2002. High on ice, AB and some other men attacked Li in front of his wife, in his suburban house, pouring acid down his throat. Li died three weeks later and AB is serving at least thirteen years behind bars.

There was Azzam Abdul Hamid, a Lebanese-Australian from the Wollongong area who tried to make a living by buying and selling mixed businesses. Hamid, a psychiatrist said, became ‘floridly psychotic’ under the influence of crystal meth. That didn’t stop him continuing to smoke it. Hamid went to jail for repeated assaults on his female partners. One after another, his de factos lined up to tell stories of how he’d punched them, kicked them and locked them up. On ice, Hamid couldn’t control his temper. He became acutely paranoid, accusing one of his victims of lacing his coffee and cigarettes with crystal meth. (Like Everett Ellinwood’s American truck driver who’d killed his boss 33 years previously, Hamid was so focused on methamphetamine that he believed others were trying to force it upon him, and he took it out on them in an ironic, and misguided, response.) Guilty on nine counts, Hamid was put behind bars for at least six years.

There was David Lawrence Morrison, who at four years of age had found his mother dead at home. Later in his childhood, he was regularly beaten by his father. Morrison used drugs from an early age and by sixteen was a break and enter merchant. Between 1997 and 2003 he stole more than $470 000 worth of goods from shops, individuals and houses. In the latter part of this period, as his burgling intensified, he was wearing the ice forcefield. He was sent to jail for a minimum of three years.

There was Adrian John Van Boxtel, a Melbourne man who became hooked on ice while undergoing an acrimonious split with his de facto partner, Simone Snowden. Van Boxtel was in some ways a typical embittered ex-husband: he was at war with Simone and her family over access to his infant children. But he was an embittered ex-husband on ice, which is an entirely different creature. On 27 April 2002, Van Boxtel took ice, which a court later agreed had a significant effect on his behaviour. He went to a friend’s house and stole a sawn-off shotgun along with some other possessions. At Snowden’s house, he shot her car. He then threatened an acquaintance for ‘causing trouble with’ Simone, even though this man had never met her. Under the influence of ice, Van Boxtel went on a rampage of offending, including threatening to kill, false imprisonment, aggravated burglary and intentionally causing injury. He was sentenced to eight and a half years in jail.

There was Justin John De Gruchy, a 34-year-old drug dealer who had delusions of grandeur about being the ‘saviour’ of St Kilda prostitutes. De Gruchy would drive from his rented unit in Tullamarine to St Kilda, take heroin-addicted prostitutes home and promise to wean them off the opiate. His cure? Give them ice. In June 2003, De Gruchy had two of his protegees with him. One was a 38-year-old named Christine Hammond, and the other was a fifteen-year-old girl. They picked up another prostitute, took her to Tullamarine, and tortured and humiliated her for several days, smoking ice throughout. They put a chain around her neck, sexually assaulted her with a rolling pin, and forced her to eat dog food and perform oral sex on a man who had come in to buy drugs. The fifteen-year-old girl kicked and punched the victim. De Gruchy, the ringmaster, was sentenced to a minimum of seven years after he pleaded guilty to six charges.

It was only thanks to blind luck that these offenders didn’t kill someone. The common characteristic of their crimes was the perpetrator’s complete lack of control over the consequences. Once crystal meth had taken hold, there was no such thing as calculating the effect of an assault. Ice erases the ability to calculate. In 2003, all across Australia there were lives being damaged forever, thanks to someone crossing a line while on ice. And there were also lives being ended. Matthew Gagalowicz lost his temper with his drug dealer, and killed him. Dudley Aslett lost control of his gun and shot dead a pharmacist he only wanted to rob. Damien Peters murdered and dismembered two of his lovers. In December 2003 two western Sydney ice users, John Hohaia and Mostafa Abdulkader, murdered their friend Alexander Szirt. Hohaia and Abdulkader had been on a binge for several hours when they called up Szirt, late at night, apparently to ask him to pick up some beer and snacks for them. Somewhere along the line, they decided that Szirt was ‘not like’ them. In the kitchen of Hohaia’s mother’s house, Hohaia made some remarks about Szirt, to which Szirt replied with the two-finger salute. Hohaia proceeded to choke him, growling, ‘Don’t ever disrespect me in my house.’

He didn’t kill Szirt then. That came a few hours later. Hohaia and Abdulkader worked themselves up into a lather of hatred for Szirt, and between 1.30 and 3 am on 3 December, they bashed him ferociously, punching and kicking him even as he lay unconscious on the ground outside the house. He was dead by sunrise. Why? As Justice David Kirby said in the NSW Supreme Court, where he sentenced the killers to two decades behind bars, ‘[Hohaia] said that Mr Szirt was not like them. He was right. Mr Szirt was not “like them”. He had a job. He had prospects. He was paying off his car. He came from a loving family. It appears, at least on the part of Mr Hohaia, that there was envy in respect of the advantages Alexander Szirt enjoyed.’

These were all deaths that arose from violent acts with specific contexts: arguments and robberies. The killers all had motivations that obeyed some kind of logic, however twisted. Ice was merely the accelerant that took simple conflicts to a higher level.

Trent Jennings was a different case, and an infinitely sad one for all concerned. Jennings’s crime showed a new side of crystal meth: when paranoia intensified into a cataclysmic kind of fear, and the terrified user, an otherwise peaceful individual, lashes out with terrible unintended consequences.

The night before New Year’s Eve 2003, Trent Jennings made a plan. At eighteen years of age, Jennings was a young gay man whose entry into the world was brimming with possibility. He’d only recently moved east from Perth, just that September. He was living in an apartment in Narwee, in the south-western suburbs of Sydney, but worked as a waiter in an inner-city hotel. He was taking his first steps on the trail from suburbia to a lifestyle that was cosmopolitan, rich with adventure, and salted with risk. Jennings, like many an eighteen-year-old, was an experimenter, a risk-taker.

On 30 December 2003, he was seeking out the thrill of the unknown. He’d done this before. He had his own little patterns and routines. He sat on the internet for a few hours, cruising for new friends. In a chat room he found Giuseppe Vitale, a 32-year-old man with whom he struck up an immediate rapport. They edged towards arranging a meeting. They agreed that they each liked being tied up while having fellatio performed on them. They agreed that they liked the buzz of doing it outside, in public places. They exchanged a series of messages negotiating an agreement on what they’d do.

Throughout the night, Jennings took ecstasy and ice. This was a part of his build-up to sexual encounters. He’d been a party ecstasy taker for a few years by then, and while his introduction to ice had been more recent, he’d taken to it like a duck to water. He enjoyed its libido-enhancing effects.

At 9.15 pm, Vitale emailed Jennings a photo of himself. They then swapped phone numbers, and at 9.35 pm spoke briefly by phone. Vitale agreed to come and meet Jennings outside his unit. Once the meeting had been established, Jennings took three or four ecstasy tablets and injected an eightball of crystal meth. It was a disastrously toxic dose. Possibly he had forgotten how much he had already taken. Whatever the cause, the high dose did far more than heighten Jennings’s sexual arousal.

The pair spoke again, by phone, at 10.20 pm as Vitale approached Narwee. When Vitale pulled up, Jennings came out of the apartment and got into the car, directing Vitale to a park about 200 metres away. Jennings, who knew the park well, had a backpack slung over his shoulder. Inside the backpack were condoms and lubricant, a length of rope he’d bought at Wool-worths, and a small bottle of amyl nitrate. He also had a serrated 11-centimetre kitchen knife, which he always carried with him on these nocturnal encounters, just in case. He’d never had cause to use it, but he knew that he was sailing close to the wind. The danger was half the attraction.

It was now close to 11 pm, and nobody else was around. Making small talk, the pair entered the bushy reserve and after a few minutes came to a dry creek bed which was crossed by a bridge about one metre wide with metal railings on each side.

As agreed, they stopped at the bridge and Jennings took out his rope. He stood with his back to the railing while Vitale tied his ankles and wrists together, then secured them both to the metal. With Jennings thus immobilised, Vitale performed oral sex on him.

It was now about an hour since he had taken the full load of ecstasy and ice, and Jennings felt their effects overwhelming him. Instead of just feeling horny, he was overloaded. He heard footsteps in the bushes. He looked across and saw a man and a wolf. The wolf told him to be careful, as Vitale was out to get him. Freaking out, Jennings asked Vitale to stop. Vitale carried on.

For a few minutes, Jennings breathed deeply and tried to banish the vision of the man and the wolf in the bushes. He’d had these hallucinations before, since he’d been taking ice. Often it was a black man with a green outline, issuing warnings to him. Jennings would creep up to corners and peer around them, expecting the man to jump out.

Vitale untied Jennings, and they talked for a little while. Jennings calmed down, and they agreed to swap roles. Jennings tied Vitale’s ankles together, then bound his hands behind his, Vitale’s, back. They didn’t say much. Jennings didn’t tie Vitale to the railing, but stood him in the creek bed.

Jennings started performing oral sex on Vitale. Then, according to Jennings, Vitale departed from the script.

‘He was trying to get me, like, grabbing and spinning me and stuff like that,’ Jennings later told police. ‘He was trying to, like, grab me and, like, grabbing my arms and stuff like that.’

It seems that Vitale, whose bindings were only loose, was so sexually aroused that he wanted to have intercourse with Jennings. But the eighteen-year-old, flying on ice and ecstasy, panicked, thinking Vitale was attacking him. He heard the voice of the man and the wolf in the bushes again. They were screaming, ‘I’m going to get you! I’m going to rape you!’ Dizzy and disoriented, Jennings broke away from Vitale. Vitale, who was unaffected by drugs, thought Jennings’s resistance was all part of the sexual play. But Jennings was terrified, convinced that Vitale was not an aroused sexual partner but a homicidal maniac, his worst nightmare. Jennings found his backpack and pulled his knife out. As Vitale closed on him, Jennings swung the knife in a round-armed sweep. There was only one connection: the knife dug eight centimetres into the left-hand side of Vitale’s neck, severing both the left external carotid artery and the left internal jugular vein.

Jennings threw the knife down, picked up his backpack and sprinted back to his unit, passing Vitale’s car along the way. Still ‘freaking out’, as he said, he went inside and logged back onto the internet.

Vitale, meanwhile, was fighting for his life. Blood was gushing out of the neck wound. Partially freeing himself from the ropes on his ankles and wrists, he staggered out of the reserve into a suburban street. He came to the front door of a house and yelled out for help. There was no one in the house, but neighbours heard him and called an ambulance. Within minutes, helpful neighbours, the police and ambulance officers were surrounding Vitale, who had collapsed and fallen unconscious. He died before he reached hospital.

Police had little trouble establishing that it was Trent Jennings who had inflicted the fatal wound upon Giuseppe Vitale. Jennings, it turned out, had stolen a car to drive from Perth to Sydney back in September, and when he was arrested for that in January 2004 he told the story of what had happened between himself and Vitale a few weeks earlier.

At this point, the story was a tragic example of what an ‘overdose’ of ice can do. It isn’t like heroin, where the user will pass out and is no threat to anyone other than himself. With ice, taking too much can lead to symptoms that replicate full-blown paranoid schizophrenia. If a mentally ill person kills someone during an episode of psychotic paranoia, then the mental illness can be a defence against a murder charge.

In court in August 2005, the Trent Jennings case took a significant twist. Before his trial, Jennings was facing a charge of murder. Through his solicitor, he said he would plead not guilty to murder, but would plead guilty to manslaughter if that was the charge. But the Crown declined to downgrade the indictment. Prosecutors wanted to put Jennings away for murder.

If he’d been charged with manslaughter, Jennings’s intoxication could not have been used as a defence. The NSW criminal code has a strange position on this. Intoxication is only a defence in ‘crimes of intent’. As manslaughter means that the perpetrator does not intend to kill the victim, it is not a ‘crime of intent’. So if the Crown had charged Jennings with manslaughter, he would have taken a guilty plea and served a number of years in jail.

Professor Mark Findlay, the director of the Australian Institute of Criminology, notes that the ‘Crimes Act doesn’t discriminate between the sources of intoxication. Many people criticise that because there are such different intoxicants, with such different effects, and they believe the law should take that into account.’

Findlay explains that the High Court authority behind this theory is the case of R v O’Connor:

‘If you couldn’t have the required mental state for intent, you could claim intoxication as a defence. But that’s politically unpalatable, because it might mean you could get as drunk as you like and have a defence against a criminal charge.

‘So in NSW, the crime requires specific intent. Intoxication can only be a defence if it is self-induced and to such an extent that it denies specific intent.

‘But if you’re charged with manslaughter you can’t use [the defence of intoxication], because manslaughter is not a crime of intent. We have the strange situation where if I commit a serious offence I can claim intoxication and get off, but if I’m charged with the lesser offence, I can’t claim intoxication. It’s a ludicrous situation, in that it’s the charge laid against you that determines whether you can use intoxication as a defence.’

With Trent Jennings, the Crown went for the higher-risk charge of murder. In doing so, it opened up the possibility that Jennings could say he was mentally impaired by his intoxication, and thus escape conviction completely.

In his trial, three forensic psychiatrists who had examined him, one for the Crown and two for the defence, agreed that the story he told them about his hallucinations was genuine. Furthermore, Jennings continued to suffer from these hallucinations after he was in jail and was no longer taking ice and ecstasy. The episodes abated when he took anti-psychotic medication. Therefore, the psychiatrists believed that he did suffer from an underlying mental condition.

Legally, this was all-important. Justice David Kirby of the NSW Supreme Court explained the mental illness defence, known as the McNaghten rule:

The McNaghten rule has two limbs. The accused must demonstrate either that he was labouring under such a defect of reason, from a disease of the mind, that he did not know the nature and quality of his act or, alternatively, if he did know, then he did not know that what he was doing was wrong. The first limb, in lay terms, requires that the accused did not know what he was doing, whereas the second deals with his appreciation of the morality of what he was doing, that is, whether it was right or wrong.

One forensic psychiatrist, Dr Bruce Westmore, said Jennings fitted within the McNaghten rule:

I believe he was suffering from a defect of reason caused by a disease of the mind which totally deprived him of the capacity to know, again in a moral sense, that what he did was wrong.

He had a psychotic illness which was precipitated or aggravated by illicit drug use.

Another psychiatrist, Dr Michael Giuffrida, agreed:

Mr Jennings was suffering from a psychotic illness at the time of the offence which was characterised by florid auditory and visual hallucinations and the consequent delusional ideas that constituted a disease of mind giving rise to defect of reason such that Mr Jennings did not know that what he was doing was wrong.

Dr Stephen Allnutt, on the other hand, said that Jennings was suffering from a ‘drug-induced psychosis’. The difference, in relation to McNaghten, was that in Dr Allnutt’s view Jennings would have realised that what he was doing was wrong, had he stopped and thought about it.

‘But how,’ counsel asked, ‘can a man who’s having acute delusional beliefs stop and think about them?’

‘Because as I said, they do it every day,’ Dr Allnutt said. ‘They stop and think about all kinds of things.’

Medically, there is no clear line between the two positions. As Allnutt said, his view and the view of Westmore and Giuffrida were ‘all on the same patch’, being different interpretations lying on the single spectrum of psychosis. Legally, however, the difference must be black and white: Jennings was either guilty or not guilty. As in so many cases where imprecise scientific evidence must submit to the binary logic of legal decision-making, the judge had to come down on one side or the other of what was, clearly, a very fine matter of interpretation.

He came down on the side of the accused.

‘I accept that it was probable that Mr Jennings, although understanding what he was doing, was so disabled by disease of the mind, that he did not know that what he was doing was wrong,’ Justice Kirby said. ‘I therefore find Mr Jennings not guilty of murder by reason of mental illness.’

The decision resulted in Trent Jennings going to a mental hospital rather than jail, his time inside to be determined by the Mental Health Review Tribunal rather than the terms of a prison sentence. More importantly, it opened up a fresh avenue for defence teams representing future accused who were on ice at the time of their deadly acts. And in the next two years, there would be no shortage of those.

PART THREE

COMING DOWN

2004–2008

By the beginning of 2004, much new knowledge was being accumulated about how ice was used in Australia. While attention was drawn to bizarre and horrific crimes, attacks on paramedics, wild behaviour in hospital emergency rooms, and police busts of meth labs and importation rings, surveys were showing that the vast majority of Australians smoking ice were doing it occasionally, with the purpose of enhancing their weekend party experience.

The Victorian Youth Alcohol and Drug Survey 2003 found that 52 per cent of under-25s had used cannabis at some time in their life, 18.6 per cent had used ecstasy or designer drugs and 16 per cent had used methamphetamine. Meth use was increasing most dramatically, but it’s likely that the figure was understated, as often young party-goers didn’t know what they were taking. At the Enchanted Forest rave at Angaston, South Australia, in December 2003, three hundred people who bought what they thought was ecstasy consented to having their pills tested. A majority contained methamphetamine, and six people at the rave were taken to hospital suffering its effects.

The Australian Drug Foundation reported that 60 per cent of Melbourne clubbers said they had recently taken some kind of party drug. An NDARC study found that ‘party drug’ users established a pattern of smoking the drug on Friday nights, staying up throughout Saturday, winding down on Sunday afternoons, and then crashing. These users didn’t like Mondays, sometimes known as ‘eccie Monday’ for the cause of the crash. And the NDARC report threw some more useful light on who the average ice user was. Contradicting the alarmist picture of a homeless junkie, the median clubbing user was 27 years old, male, employed, and with secondary qualifications.

Until he killed Giuseppe Vitale, Trent Jennings had been one of a large population of young adults who enjoyed dance parties and nightclubs with the help of ice and ecstasy. A British researcher, Gary Leigh, observed that ice was having an effect on dance-floor trends. He noted ‘darker, much more aggressive music’ between the hours of 2 and 6 am, when ‘the crystal vibe sets in’.

Among specific party subcultures, urban gay communities were at the leading edge of using crystal meth, the first cohort to discover its consequences and the first to take action to combat it. The commander of the NSW drug squad, David Laidlaw, believes members of the Australian gay community had been smoking crystal as early as 1998, ‘but they have now become aware of its highly addictive nature and impact due to the increased risk-taking behaviour associated with the drug, including the likelihood of contracting blood-borne viruses such as HIV and hepatitis C’.

In a Sydney Morning Herald article published on 12 January 2004, Jock Cheetham wrote that gay men were combining crystal with Viagra to produce ‘hypersexual activity’. One of his subjects, ‘Ricardo’, spoke of having been anally raped while on crystal meth. Meanwhile a central Sydney doctor, John Byrne, told me that his gay patients reported an overwhelming and sometimes out-of-character desire to be the ‘bottom’ in a sex act while on ice. The health risks are obvious. Perry Halkitis, from New York University, told Cheetham that this same tendency in the United States had led to a ‘triple epidemic—a drug epidemic, an HIV epidemic, and a mental health epidemic’.

‘It’s stressful enough being gay in this culture,’ Halkitis said. ‘Couple that with an HIV epidemic and you’ve got something like post-traumatic stress disorder. People lose hope in a state like that. Meth allows you to feel high, beautiful and relaxed.’

Greg Fisher no doubt felt high, beautiful and relaxed when he smoked crystal, but Fisher was to become Sydney’s highest-profile gay ice criminal. In the 1990s, Fisher had founded the ‘pink’ media firm, the Satellite Group, which he floated publicly in 1999. He eventually fell foul of financial regulators over a number of indiscretions, including using $220 000 of company funds for his personal benefit. To paper over his failing fortunes he dealt drugs from a unit in the Rex Apartments in Macleay Street, Potts Point.

With a secret camera, police filmed Fisher dealing cocaine, GHB, ecstasy and crystal meth from the unit. He had been charged previously with nineteen drug offences, but they had been dropped for lack of evidence. His narrow escape didn’t stop him dealing. His judgment was clearly clouded, as he was filmed smoking a white powder in a glass pipe during the surveillance operation.

But it was serious health problems, rather than jail, that posed the more immediate danger to gay crystal users. In 2004, the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research (NCHECR) found that ice use among urban gay men had gone from near zero to 21 per cent in five years. Sixteen per cent of gay men who had recently become HIV-positive reported having used ice at the event when they believed they contracted the virus. They ‘barebacked’, or had sex without condoms, or wanted to risk ‘bugging’ (spreading the virus). But on these occasions, ice was seldom used alone. Alcohol, Viagra, cocaine and other drugs were also usually taken. This made it impossible to say crystal taking led to HIV. Rather, it was ‘predictive’ of sero-conversion. Other research further complicates the picture, indicating that men who tend to engage in risky sex will do so regardless of whether or not they are taking crystal or any other drug.

While a persuasive story can be told of how gay individuals, feeling bulletproof on crystal meth, will then go out and have unsafe sex and contract HIV, there was little corresponding statistical evidence. At the time that ice use rocketed in the gay community, HIV infection rates did not go up in any commensurate way.

The AIDS Council of New South Wales (ACON) held its first forum on crystal meth in September 2004 and heard that the feared ‘triple epidemic’ hadn’t yet transpired. When researchers from the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society presented a paper saying there was no ‘causal link’ between crystal use and unsafe sex, community members responded with disbelief. Some said they had a number of friends who became HIV-positive after having unprotected sex while on crystal. While the ACON president, Adrian Lovney, said that ‘we shouldn’t be driving our response by anecdote’, a colourful community member and activist, Norrie May-Welby, responded: ‘Anecdotal evidence is a legitimate form of evidence . . . I say there’s enough smoke coming from the hills for us to call the fire brigade, without us doing a research project just to check no one is sending smoke signals.’

While this encounter may on one level seem the normal run of discussion when the convincing anecdote collides with the sober caution of scientific research, in the gay community it had a unique edge. One of the researchers, Garrett Prestage, encapsulated the concerns about contradictory responses within the community: ‘There’s a real reluctance to talk about recreational drugs in the community as a whole, because then what has to happen is you actually have to question your own usage,’ he said.

This was the bind that many gay community figures found themselves in. Drug-taking is not just a feature of urban gay life, but some would say it is a sine qua non. It is like any bohemian community being asked to confront sexually transmitted infections, or lung cancer, or alcoholism. If your behaviour is driven by the need to rebel against bourgeois conventions, what do you do when that behaviour starts to kill you? Which is more important— the lifestyle, and the statements it makes about self and community, or public health?

ACON became a focus for the debate when it set a policy of warning about crystal meth but stopping short of a ‘just say no’ campaign. It had plenty of supporters, such as Don Baxter, director of the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations (AFAO): ‘Crystal use is associated with increased HIV infection but it hasn’t been demonstrated as a causal thing [and] listening to claims that ACON should be saying “stop using crystal” is not good public health because you are alienating the people who are not going to stop.’

A former ACON board member, lawyer David Buchanan SC, said: ‘Ice users . . . are risk-takers . . . ACON’s (nuanced) approach . . . is eminently more sensible than alienating ice users and other risk-takers by telling them they’re all going to go to hell.’

One incident that threw the intricate politics of the gay community into relief was when a gay sauna and sex club decided to import American posters from anti-crystal campaigns, displaying slogans such as Meth=Death and Buy crystal, get HIV free.

ACON described the posters as ‘not terribly useful’. Explaining ACON’s stance, its director, Stevie Clayton, said: ‘What happens is people who don’t use crystal start thinking that crystal is the problem which is causing HIV transmission, and therefore if they don’t use it they’re not at risk, and people start thinking people who do use crystal are bad and are the people who are transmitting HIV.’

In other words, ACON felt, in a similar way to health professionals around the country addressing analogous issues, that focusing too intently on crystal meth would confuse the more essential message about unhealthy behaviour. Clayton has repeatedly opposed the diversion of resources to crystal meth programs at the expense of other health priorities, while pointing out that the dominant reason for crystal use is that young gay people are already trying to cope with feelings of stigmatisation or victimisation and the resultant depression, which all augment the appeal of a drug that makes them feel strong and confident.

Other groups, such as the Sydney-based CAAMA (Community Action Against Meth Amphetamine) take a more hardline stance. CAAMA criticises AIDS organisations for soft-pedalling; it only supports ‘established’ harm-minimisation strategies such as needle exchange, instead backing a twelve-step AA-style program for addicts as well as graphic advertising campaigns.

On the other hand, individual gay people with a lifelong experience of recreational drug use are the most likely to be self-educated on the subject. The majority of the gay community (as in the community at large) who use ice do so on special occasions, smoking a small amount before going out and dancing all night and having an enhanced sexual experience. This is followed by a short-lived but relatively nasty crash, and a vow not to touch the stuff again for a little while. With this kind of knowledge, acquired by individuals and shared among the community, a Meth=Death message would be greeted by a dangerous kind of derision. Not only would that message be seen as overblown and ridiculous, but by inference it would weaken all other drug education.

The politics of the gay community aren’t the subject of this book. And there are many aspects of the ice problem that are quite specific to the gay community, and therefore not a microcosm of what takes place in the wider world. One of these is the lethalness of HIV, and another is the traditional tolerance and even encouragement of drug use among gay and lesbian people.

Yet in tracing the evolution of ice in Australia, the gay community can be seen as a canary down the mineshaft. Gay groups were the first to band together and form support networks and address crystal use as a health problem, rather than a policing problem. Gay groups were the first to produce public awareness campaigns, the more graphic of which became the models for campaigns launched by the federal government for the entire country. Gay groups were watching developments in America far earlier than the wider community. Gay groups were the first to debate the contrasting merits of harm-reduction and zero-tolerance policies. And gay groups were the first to recognise and come to grips with the tendency of an ice-using population to sort itself into two tiers—those who use the drug safely, and those who get into trouble.

Novica Jakimov wasn’t gay, but he was surely in trouble.

By February 2004, Jakimov, the Melbourne brickie with a taste for ice and prostitutes, had been on the run for four and a half months. Police had established a likelihood that Kelly Hodge, the 26-year-old prostitute who worked the streets of St Kilda, had died in Jakimov’s house in West Meadows. Jakimov, having let slip that he had taken Hodge home on the last night she was seen alive, was now the prime suspect.

And he knew it. In October and November 2003 he drove north from Melbourne and put all of his furniture and most of his possessions in a storage unit in Ballarat. Living in his utility, he tried to manufacture a new passport and identity. The passport was amateurish, but the identity was good enough to trick a fish-and-chip-shop owner in the upmarket coastal resort town of Lorne, south-west of Melbourne, into giving Jakimov a job.

It was in this takeaway shop that police caught up with Jakimov in February 2004. He said he’d moved to Lorne ‘for a change of scenery’.

After arresting Jakimov and finding details of the storage unit, police went to Ballarat and found, in the unit, a blue couch stained with blood. DNA matching techniques showed that the blood, like that on the carpet of Jakimov’s house, was Kelly Hodge’s.

From the outset Jakimov stuck to his story from 10 October. Yes, he’d picked Hodge up and taken her home. Yes, he’d had sex with her, but it was consensual. Now he added more. Yes, he’d had a fight with her, but she’d started it. He had only acted in self-defence. Yes, she had died during the argument, but her death had been an accident, and when it happened Jakimov had panicked and covered it up.

He admitted that he’d emptied out his home and fled to Lorne because he was worried about being pinned for murdering her. He swore that it had all been an accident, and the worst he had done was to try to stop it being discovered. He said he regretted doing that now.

There were many holes in Jakimov’s story, but one simple fact was right in front of the police investigators’ eyes. Jakimov, a fit bricklayer and former sportsman, weighed 78 kilos and was about 175 centimetres tall. Kelly Hodge, a heroin addict so wasted by the drug that she was by the time of her death injecting it into the flesh between her fingers, weighed only 50 kilos.

Jakimov had nearly a year in remand to think about his upcoming trial. By the time he testified, he told a story that was much closer to the truth than any of his previous versions.

What was beyond dispute was that, since separating from his wife, Jakimov had given himself wholeheartedly to the thrills of crystal methamphetamine. He would get high and horny; he would go and find a prostitute to use the drug and have sex with.

On the night of 18 August 2003, he’d injected some ice and gone out. He said he went to Crown Casino. He had a bit of luck on the tables and spied Kelly Hodge, a slim 26-year-old. When they got talking, he said he had some drugs at home they could share. Kelly told him she was a smackie. Jakimov said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got some.’

For a few hours, as a prospective source of heroin, he’d won her heart. They arrived at his home at West Meadows at around 3.30 am. He drank beer, but Kelly only wanted a glass of water.

‘Where’s the smack?’ said Kelly, flopping onto the blue couch in the living room.

‘I’ve got better,’ said Jakimov.

Kelly was disappointed that he had ice, rather than heroin, but shared it with him anyway. They proceeded to have sex in the living room. Afterwards, Kelly said she was having stomach cramps and needed to score some heroin. Again, Jakimov said he only had stimulants. In the junkie’s mind, this was not acceptable: what Kelly felt she needed was not to get more worked up, but to wind down. But it’s also the junkie’s curse to be unable to say no to drugs, any drugs, and when Jakimov began to beg her to stay—offering her $200 plus as much crystal meth and cocaine as she wanted if she’d only stay the night—she relented. They injected some more ice, and Kelly performed oral sex on him.

It had only been two hours since the pair had come back to Jakimov’s home, but tensions were rising. Sex was just a brief interruption to the bickering: Kelly wanted heroin and accused him of tricking her into coming home with him. He talked her into using more ice with him. As its effects wore off, and her stomach cramps worsened, she resumed criticising him for not having the heroin he’d promised.

‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘It’s been a good night.’

‘A good night? You’re an arsehole, you didn’t have any smack, you prick, I’m going out to score. I shouldn’t have come here.’

‘Okay,’ he finally said, ‘if you want to go, then go.’

Kelly picked up her clothes and went to the bathroom for a shower. In the lounge room, Jakimov began to dress. Here his account, told to the courts, becomes less believable.

As he was putting his boots on, he said, he was hit from behind. He saw a ‘flash of yellow’ as something hit him in the right side of the head. As he fell to the floor, he said he saw his heavy builder’s spirit level lying on the carpet. He said that the prostitute picked it up and swung it at his head. Defending himself, he said, he picked up a vase and struck back with it.

‘It must have hit her,’ he said, as if he, a strong, ice-fuelled, well-built brickie was cowering from the attack of a 50-kilo junkie.

He said that she started looking through her handbag. He thought she was looking for a weapon. ‘I shit myself,’ he said, shortly before seeing a ‘flash of red’ and being hit on the head by a collapsible umbrella. They began wrestling, Jakimov trying to calm Kelly down, and he gained control of the umbrella. Somehow he hit her with it and she ‘dropped hard’, hitting the floor, facing upwards.

Jakimov said he then staggered to the kitchen and took some ice cubes out of the freezer for his sore hand, which he said had been struck by the spirit level. He said he passed out in his chair for some time. When he woke, he said, Kelly had rolled onto her front and had vomited and urinated. He checked her pulse: nothing.

‘I was just shattered,’ he said. Fearing shame and jail, sure that no one would believe his account of her death, he decided immediately to dispose of her body. He admitted undressing Kelly and wrapping her in the sheet and blanket, emptying the house of incriminating items, and driving them to a tip. He dumped the items there and Kelly’s body in the roadside ditch at Beveridge. He drove home and cleaned up some more.

In court, he admitted lying in his earlier police interviews to ‘get the spotlight off’ him. He also admitted moving to Lorne to avoid being connected with Kelly’s death. In fact, Jakimov admitted telling all the lies that he couldn’t now get away with. What he wouldn’t admit was what only he knew for certain: that he had murdered Kelly Hodge.

Having told his story of accidentally killing her in self-defence, Jakimov had the matter of Kelly’s shocking vaginal injuries presented to him. How had those happened? He said he was surprised, and had no idea how she’d sustained them. He said she’d been in no pain, and hadn’t bled, when they’d had sex. He said he should have locked himself in a room or run away while Kelly was attacking him, and he’d only acted to stop her hurting him.

He was lying. Carole and Nelson Ham, an elderly couple who were neighbours of Jakimov, had heard the fight from their flat. Both recalled hearing a woman’s voice cry out ‘Oh God, no!’ and ‘God, stop, no more!’

In May 2005, after a short period of deliberation, a jury convicted Novica Jakimov for the murder of Kelly Hodge. Some of her family, who were in the court for the verdict, gestured and cried out to Jakimov with the message that when he got out of jail he had better be looking out for them.

They will need to be patient. He was sentenced to nineteen years, ineligible for parole until 2019.

The years 2003 and 2004 saw a peak across Australia in police seizures of ice, admissions to hospital with amphetamine psychosis, and general usage. They were also the worst years for the criminal courts in terms of ice. But they were also the years when the fightback began. Pharmacists, hospitals and police developed strategies to combat the spread of ice—or if not its spread, to minimise the harmful consequences.

Tim Logan is an amiable and experienced chemist from Nambour, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. His pharmacy lies in the heart of the region of Australia most densely populated with small clandestine ice labs. He didn’t know that for a fact, back in the late 1990s, but he was growing suspicious that something was going on.

The pseud runners would park near Logan’s pharmacy in carloads of five. One by one they would come to the counter and ask for a packet of Sudafed, or Sinutab, or some other over-the-counter medication containing pseudoephedrine. Then they’d ask for a second packet, or a third.

‘It was always the same story,’ says Logan. ‘They’re going on a boat trip, or they’re going overseas, and they need to take a few boxes for their sinus problem. Then a few minutes later another one would come in with the same story.’

Police would later tell Logan that his pharmacy was situated on a ‘J-curve’ followed by pseud runners from Cairns down the east coast through Brisbane and Sydney to Melbourne, then up to Canberra. They had to spread their purchases over a wide geography, because a vigilant pharmacist might phone his colleagues in the local area to warn them against selling the pills to these particular people. They might even call the police.

‘They’d pick up a box here, a box there, until they had huge amounts,’ Logan says. ‘Sometimes they’d even recruit old ladies coming out of the RSL. They’d give them twenty dollars for coming across the road to buy a pack of cold and flu tablets.’

Pseudoephedrine, as we have seen, is the crucial precursor chemical for the manufacture of crystal methamphetamine. Pseud runners, many of them ice users, were paid by manufacturers, sometimes but not exclusively connected with bikie gangs, to drive immense distances gathering enough pseudoephedrine for a commercial-size ‘cook’. Police believed that ten packets of Sudafed would produce 10 grams of pseudo-ephedrine, which in turn could yield $20 000 worth of street methamphetamine.

Reports were trickling in from chemists around the country about these pseud runners. Some were worried that other chemists were turning a blind eye to what was surely an illicit-drug-manufacturing scam. Others argued that chemists had no legal right to refuse to sell cold tablets. The pharmaceutical companies argued, as they had in America, that it was only a tiny minority who were abusing Sudafed in this way, and a crackdown on the drug’s availability would penalise unduly the rest of the population, who needed simple pain relief from a cold or a flu.

‘Some reacted by going overboard and not stocking it, while others said they were not policemen and would not make value judgments about people, so they just went ahead and sold it,’ Logan says. ‘Pseudoephedrine is a useful drug for treating an annoying and very common symptom, so we didn’t want to have to ban it.’

By 2004, the momentum for change came from both the concerned pharmacists and police. Some pharmacies had been ‘ram-raided’ by pseud runners, who broke in to steal pseudo-ephedrine which was literally worth more than its weight in gold. Individual pharmacists had also been attacked.

‘We’d seen the effects on users—they were paranoid, violent, and a danger on the roads,’ Logan says. ‘And the pseud runners were coming in and harassing pharmacists with their insistent behaviour.

‘I was threatened once. I’d removed the tablets from the shelves, and told a guy I wasn’t able to just sell them to him like Panadol. He tried to get into the dispensary. I told him to leave. After creating some havoc, he ran outside and hid. When the police arrived, he hightailed it.’

Police could see the source of the problem when they’d break open a clandestine meth lab: thousands of blister packs of Sudafed or Codral Night and Day lying around. Also, it had been several years since pseudoephedrine had been identified and controlled in the United States. Australian authorities were able to ignore the cold and flu pills for only as long as ice seemed to be an overseas problem.

By mid-2004, they could no longer allow pseudoephedrine to be sold so easily. Police held forums around the country to educate and persuade pharmacists.

Wagga Wagga Detective Senior Constable Deborah O’Reilly, who helped organise the early forums, pinpointed the pseud-runner problem: ‘They don’t want to come under notice so they are prepared to travel enormous distances. They are very organised and a group of them might start in Queensland and map out a path, stopping at every town and all going into the chemists they see to buy a packet of tablets.’

In the forums, police told chemists that they had the right to refuse service to anyone. They were also required to record the details of sales.

‘We hope chemists will keep a close watch for these runners and if they see someone acting suspicious, will call police or phone another chemist and check whether the person has been there,’ Detective O’Reilly said.

By 2005, the Pharmacy Guild of Australia had introduced voluntary guidelines. They were:

• Store these products out of reach and out of sight of the public.

• Refer suspicious sales to the pharmacist in charge. Report any details to police.

• Reduce stock of pseudoephedrine/antihistamine to a week’s supply.

• No more than two packets for each customer.

• Product manufacturers to stop incentives to pharmacists to buy big amounts.

In May 2005, four NSW pharmacists were charged with breaching the Poisons and Therapeutic Goods Regulation, which echoed and stiffened the Pharmacy Guild guidelines. The pharmacists, in Beecroft, Waterloo, Epping and Ryde, had been the subject of police surveillance since 2004 for selling up to ten packets of the tablets at a time. They pleaded guilty to the charges. They were the first pharmacists to face police sanctions and deregistration, but as Detective Inspector Paul Willingham of the NSW drug squad said, ‘We’ve got to the stage where we thought we really need to make an example of some of these pharmacists to spread a message across the industry.’

An even clearer message was initiated by the Pharmacy Guild’s Queensland branch, of which Tim Logan became president. Project STOP was developed through 2005 by Shaun Singleton, the manager of innovation and development for the Queensland branch.

‘By 2005 there had been a lot of bad publicity about pseudoephedrine,’ Singleton says. ‘Pharmacists were contacting us about it being abused. We conducted an education program, doing seminars and putting out written information to pharmacists across the state about potential misuses of pseudoephedrine.

‘Pharmacists had been contacting police by fax or phone when someone suspicious came in asking for pseudoephedrine, but were becoming frustrated by the lack of response. Police would say they’d get back to them, but wouldn’t.

‘Then there’d be stories on A Current Affair or similar programs about pseudoephedrine, and they were blaming pharmacists for either being inattentive or having the wool pulled over their eyes.

‘So pharmacists were solving the problem by either not stocking pseudoephedrine medications at all—20 per cent were not stocking it, which was bad news for genuine sinus pain sufferers—or in other cases they were refusing to make value judgments about people coming into pharmacies. They thought it wasn’t fair to be judging people on their appearance to say whether or not this person was a pseud runner.’

The first version of Project STOP was launched in October 2005. It comprised an internet database that pharmacists could log into and share purchase information, with a search facility.

Queensland pharmacists would ask for the purchaser’s ID, then enter it into their database. Instantly, all other pharmacists in the state had access to that customer’s details and the time of purchase. Of course, the customer could get around this by presenting fake ID. But such are the economics of converting Sudafed to ice, the pseud runner would need dozens, or hundreds, of false IDs to avoid popping up on the pharmacists’ red-flag list.

Simultaneously, federal laws came in to tighten sales.

‘In 2005, packs of 60 to 90 tablets were moved to Schedule IV—prescription-only medicine,’ Tim Logan says. ‘In January 2006, pseudoephedrine packs of 12 tablets were changed from Schedule II (which can only be sold while a pharmacist is available, that is, not in supermarkets) to Schedule III (the pharmacist must be involved in the sale). You can’t put all pseudoephedrine onto Schedule IV—the symptoms are too common, and it would be too great a load on the federal government funding.’

Federal laws also threw new restrictions on the legal importation of pseudoephedrine-containing medications. Some, such as Dr Bill Kingswell, the head of the Queensland government’s Gold Coast mental health unit, said laws should go further and ban pseudoephedrine outright. ‘It’s still profitable for a person to drive from chemist to chemist buying pseudoephedrine,’ Dr Kingswell said in 2006. ‘There is a reasonable body of evidence that if you ban pseudoephedrine you decimate the methamphetamine market.’ By 2007, the federal parliamentary secretary for health, Christopher Pyne, echoed Kingswell’s call for a ban on all pseudoephedrine products. The idea was opposed by some unlikely bedfellows: the Pharmacy Guild and the NSW Business Chamber said a ban on pseudoephedrine would increase the number of days lost nationally to sickness, and Dr Alex Wodak criticised Pyne’s call as ‘gesture politics’ with ‘a huge economic cost’.

Project STOP, which was a world first, had immediate benefits for Queensland. According to the Australian Crime Commission, while clandestine lab seizures rose in all other states from 2005 to 2007, they dropped by 23 per cent in Queensland. Ram-raids of pharmacies virtually ceased.

The benefit for pharmacists was twofold—they could now sell what Singleton calls ‘the ultimate weapon against common sinus pain’ without having to guess whether the purchaser was going to misuse it, and they could avoid harassment.

‘It’s been tremendous in my pharmacy,’ Logan says. ‘It’s made our work environment much safer. In my experience, if pseud runners realise they can’t buy it, they just give up and go away.’

In mid-2007, the federal government funded a national rollout for Project STOP, and it was becoming the model for pseudoephedrine control in several US states.

The irony, says Tim Logan, is that Project STOP uses the same communications technology that gave crystal meth manufacturing its great leg-up a decade ago. ‘Ice really arrived with the start of the internet, by giving people access to recipes. Now, however, it’s the internet that is helping us to stop it spreading.’

No fightback against a problem of this scale can have instantaneous results, however. Project STOP arrived too late to save Banjo Band.

By early 2004, New Zealander Darren Jason Blackburn’s relationship with his older ‘mentor’ and drinking buddy, Graham ‘Banjo’ Band, had declined into its terminal phase. Blackburn had had a terrible life, as an unmedicated schizophrenic, an unemployable alcoholic, a failed husband and an ice user, yet Band was always there for him, ready to offer him accommodation or a meal. But primarily Band was there to drink with him.

Since 2001, Blackburn and his girlfriend, Lyn Henry, had been living on and off with Band. Sometimes they’d have a fight and the couple would move out. Band was mainly a drinker, while Blackburn was now dabbling in ecstasy, heroin, Rohypnol, Valium and crystal meth as well as his staples of cheap wine and cannabis.

According to accounts given by Blackburn and Henry at the subsequent trial, at one point they stayed with Band for a year, sleeping on the living room floor while Banjo occupied the single bedroom of his public housing flat at 127 Gordon Street, Footscray. Every night, Band and Blackburn would binge, with the younger man frequently passing out on the floor.

While they were all living in the flat, Henry fell pregnant. She and Blackburn went out to celebrate. As usual, Blackburn drank too much, and when they returned to the flat he fell unconscious on the couch. While Blackburn slept, Graham Band forced himself onto Henry and raped her. Upset and terrified, she didn’t tell Blackburn until two weeks later, after Band had tried to rape her again.

When she told Blackburn, he exploded, smashing Band, who was then 62 years old. There followed—born from desperation and the raging illogic of their lives—a kind of reconciliation, and the couple remained in Band’s flat until Henry was five months pregnant. Then the couple moved to Western Lodge, just up Gordon Street, for two and a half months. Shortly before Henry was due to deliver, she and Blackburn moved to a unit in Somerset Drive, Sunshine. It was there that Blackburn’s third child, Summa, was born.

Things were finally looking up for Darren Blackburn. He was out of Banjo’s flat. He now had a job as a sheet metal worker at an air-conditioning company. Maybe he could break out of the cycle that had had a grip on him since his childhood.

But he never slowed his drinking, and he was now fully into heroin, ice and other drugs. By early 2004 his relationship with Henry finally broke down. He was dangerous to Lyn and a poor father to Summa.

When he moved out, Blackburn went where he always went: back to his ‘uncle’, Banjo Band. He slept either on Band’s floor or in another flat in the same housing commission block, occupied by a tenant named David Armstrong. Band also had a nephew, Tasman ‘Taz’ O’Connor, who stayed with either Band or Armstrong. One of O’Connor’s most prized possessions was a replica samurai sword.

On 31 January, Blackburn was drinking with O’Connor. He told him about Band having raped Lyn Henry. They worked themselves up into a revenge fantasy and went to confront Band in his unit, where they gave him a solid thrashing. The 62-year-old ended up with bruises, lumps and cuts to the front and back of his head, and went to Western General Hospital for medical attention.

Whatever his other sins, Band was no squealer. In the hospital, he was interviewed by Victorian police constables Rooney and Gardiner.

After Band said he had been attacked from behind and hadn’t seen who hit him, Constable Rooney asked: ‘Are you telling us everything, Graham? Something seems to be missing.’

‘I’m telling you all I know,’ Band said.

Constable Gardiner said: ‘Graham, I think you might know who assaulted you. Is that the case?’

‘No.’

‘Did anyone else come out of the flats when it happened?’

‘No, I don’t squeal,’ Band said. ‘I’ve been hit heaps.’

‘Did you call out or yell when you got hit?’ Rooney asked.

‘No.’

‘Graham,’ Rooney said, ‘if you’re worried or someone is intimidating you, you can tell us, we can help you.’

‘I don’t know,’ Band rasped. ‘I told you.’

‘I think your nephew [O’Connor] did this to you,’ Rooney said. ‘Is that the case?’

‘You’re wrong, mate.’

Meanwhile, Blackburn had some more to drink in Armstrong’s flat that afternoon. Lyn Henry showed up, and Blackburn told her that he and Taz O’Connor had beaten up Band. Blackburn slept that night in Armstrong’s flat, and the next morning went to a nearby pub, the Albert Hotel, to start drinking. Late in the morning he bought three takeaway bottles of beer and carried them back to Gordon Street.

O’Connor, who had spent the night in Band’s flat, met Blackburn for another drink. It seemed that the two younger men weren’t satisfied with merely having bashed Band the day before. Around lunchtime, Blackburn and O’Connor went to Band’s flat, wishing to return to the matter of the rapes. All he wanted, Blackburn said, was for Band to go with him to Henry and apologise to her.

‘Fuck the bitch,’ Band said.

Those might have been Graham Band’s last coherent words. His defiance set off Blackburn, who started punching the old man, knocking him to the floor. Blackburn claims that O’Connor was also present, and also hit Band, but O’Connor denied this, saying he was outside the flat throughout the killing. Band was struck repeatedly with the samurai sword.

‘Then,’ Blackburn would later tell police, ‘he was just completely fucked and rooted. So I picked him up and threw him on his bed. He was choking on . . . on his blood and that, and gasping.’

In the mayhem that followed—blood pouring out of Band’s mouth as he gurgled for help—Blackburn, still enraged, said he was ‘sick of fucking listening to him . . . his choking and shit on his—whatever he’s choking on. His gasping was just—the noise was just unreal.’

Maddened by the sound, Blackburn picked up a pillow and put it over Band’s face. He said he had no intention of killing Band, ‘just shutting him up’. Band didn’t struggle, and passed out.

A short time later, O’Connor came into the bedroom and checked Band’s pulse. The old man was dead. O’Connor and Blackburn fled to Armstrong’s unit and called Lyn Henry in a panic, asking her to come over. Eventually someone called 000, but when the fire brigade and ambulance officers arrived, Band was beyond saving.

He had been killed by one of seven separate stab wounds penetrating his chest and heart. There was blood spattered throughout his flat, and a bloody mark on the ceiling from where the samurai sword had been dragged across it.

In the following two and a half years, Blackburn would plead guilty to murder, then withdraw that plea. He was kept in jail awaiting trial while Tasman O’Connor received a not guilty verdict. O’Connor denied having even been in the flat when Band was murdered. The Crown had relied on David Armstrong as a witness, but Armstrong proved less than reliable. Finally, in 2006, Blackburn pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

At his sentencing hearing, a battery of psychiatrists gave evidence on Darren Blackburn’s mental impairments. IQ tests placed him in the bottom 12 per cent of the population. His paranoid schizophrenia was real, and could be treated with medication. His consumption of drugs and alcohol contributed to his impairment, and his use of ice in particular took away his ability to control his impulses. He was profoundly depressed, telling a medical examiner that he did not like reality because ‘it’s depressing . . . I don’t want to be here, there’s nothing for me . . . the world seems fucked, there’s no reason I should be here.’ His response to depression had always been to do the thing that would make him feel better, then worse. By the time of Band’s death, that circular routine involved ice.

The judges of the Victorian Supreme Court took into account Blackburn’s state of mind, but decided that he was still able to tell the difference between right and wrong when he attacked Band. Moreover, the court regarded him as a danger to the community. It sentenced him to nine years in jail, with a non-parole period of six years.

For Beaver Hudson, the turning point came with a patient he saw at St Vincent’s in 2004. The ‘Incredible Hulks’ and other ‘meth freaks’, as they were now nicknamed, were flowing through the hospital at an ever-greater rate—meth-related admissions rising from 200 to 1600 per year between 1999 and 2004—and with ever-stranger stories.

‘A 24-year-old man had been using it for weeks on end, and he was hearing voices telling him his wife was having an affair. So he began using a webcam to spy on her,’ Hudson recalls.

St Vincent’s emergency care director Gordian Fulde was shocked, telling reporters at the time: ‘I have been emergency department director here for 25 years and nothing has scared me as much as these people. We see people who are totally disinhibited, totally violent and out of control.’

The problem was not isolated to inner-city Sydney hospitals like St Vincent’s. NDARC research published in the Medical Journal of Australia showed that national hospital databases recorded a fivefold upswing in drug-induced psychotic episodes between 1999 and 2004. Across the nation, 3190 meth users were taken to hospital for mental and behaviour disorders in the years 2003 and 2004. Demographically, the main driver of the increase was ice being injected by older users, in their thirties. A study released simultaneously, by Royal Perth Hospital’s registrar in emergency medicine, Suzanne Gray, found that 20 per cent of all amphetamine-related presentations at the hospital had required police assistance. ‘A third of patients required sedation, which correlated with a high pre-hospital, nursing, medical and security load to manage these patients safely,’ Dr Gray said. Gordian Fulde said: ‘The fact that Perth Hospital is having the same problem that we are in the east underscores that it really is a problem Australia-wide.’

At St Vincent’s, Beaver Hudson had been observing the change up close—‘The long-term users were very hard to differentiate from paranoid schizophrenics. The bad dental care, the terrible skin, the frightening ageing effects, are all similar’—but there was one patient who stood out.

‘There was a woman presenting here, totally manic. We thought she had a bipolar disorder. She was scattered. She was very concerned about her partner. She said she’d broken up with him because he was in a bikie gang. She’d heard a click on the phone when she was using it, and was sure it was bugged. She wouldn’t use her mobile. She got to the point where she was so scared she’d only make phone calls from a call box on the street corner. She said when she looked up from the call box, she saw someone in an apartment taking photographs of her.

‘I was thinking, “This poor woman, being menaced by a bikie gang” . . . She said she’d spent $25 000 having her apartment swept for bugs. I was sucked in.’

Then one day, Hudson asked her, ‘How much speed do you use?’

The patient said, ‘A little bit now and then.’

‘Do you inject?’

She said, ‘Not much. About two or three times a day.’

Hudson said the penny dropped. ‘I thought, Oh my god, she’s not bipolar, she’s having another form of speed psychosis I haven’t seen before. She was articulate, rational, credible. Her delusion was totally systematised. I was sucked in. But this was what it was doing to people.’

Health workers at St Vincent’s were not alone in making such observations. In the Victorian health system, patients asking to be treated for methamphetamine-related disorders doubled between 2001 and 2004. A psychiatrist at Royal Perth Hospital, Dr Nigel Armstrong, said his hospital’s emergency department had become a ‘de facto psychiatric clinic’, requiring extra psychiatric staff. This was on top of the police involvement noted at the same hospital by Suzanne Gray. ‘Clinically, we see a lot of people in [emergency] with drug-induced pathology and the ones that give us the most grief are those with amphetamine-induced psychoses because we have to find [secure] beds for them,’ Armstrong said.

North of Sydney, violent patients were putting hospital staff at risk. In four Hunter region hospitals in 2005, there were 94 aggressive incidents, including 50 assaults, 54 cases involving verbal aggression and fourteen bullying or intimidation. On 32 occasions, a staff member had needed to press an alarm signifying a ‘code black’ emergency, where help was needed to subdue a patient.

John Hunter Hospital clinical services and nursing director Chris Kewley said that staff had to deal with potentially aggressive patients on drugs such as ice on a daily basis.

‘There is absolutely no doubt that the violence we experience through the front door is related largely to the social issues, such as the high use of substances, ice and the other common drugs out there,’ he said.

At St Vincent’s, Hudson had long been concerned about violence against staff, and frustrated at the restrictions on staff either protecting themselves or otherwise improving the situation.

‘We couldn’t punch back,’ he says, almost ruefully. ‘And we can’t put up a Closed sign. But we could reject them from admission, or make them wait, or deny them pain relief. That turned out to be the way.’

St Vincent’s decided on a radical policy of zero tolerance.

‘Rather than medicalise that [violent] behaviour, we’d ask for the police to come,’ Hudson says. ‘If people were being violent, that was a police problem. It got around in the community that if you went to St Vincent’s and acted that way, you were handed to the police. People don’t like the men in blue. They want help, but if they realised they were going to be strong-armed out, they started to behave a bit better.’

And in October 2005, St Vincent’s opened a new facility in Hudson’s department: the Psychiatric Emergency Care Centre (PECC), a six-bed facility specifically for non-acute drug-affected patients.

Dr Peter McGeorge, director of mental health services at St Vincent’s, said PECC would accept patients who would usually have to sit in the emergency department while the broken legs and car accident victims were given priority.

‘What tends to happen at present is they get discharged without being sorted out as well as they could be,’ he said. ‘So they’ll get a better quality of management and they’re not occupying space that could be used by others.’

The PECC rooms are spartan, without anything that can be seriously damaged if patients lash out. The beds don’t have sharp edges and there is extra padding on hard surfaces. Duress alarms alert security staff, who sit next door. Each PECC room is monitored on closed-circuit TV. Almost immediately, 90 per cent of methamphetamine cases were put into the PECC rooms until the drug’s effects wore off.

The following year, at Gorman House at St Vincent’s and at John Hunter, twenty-bed detoxification wards were established to treat a problem that was not yet abating. Nurses at the James Fletcher Hospital in Newcastle had briefly refused to admit any more patients suffering from drug psychoses, so hard were they to handle. Other hospitals around the country, whether by setting up new units or re-purposing old ones, were learning that patients affected by ice needed a unique kind of treatment. South Australian hospitals, discovering that a quarter of all intoxicated emergency patients were on methamphetamine, segregated these patients from others in designated ‘quiet rooms’ away from public areas. The Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne used special rooms, which were empty but for a foam mattress, for young patients affected by drugs or alcohol, and Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital had since 2002 been using ‘behavioural assessment rooms’ to calm psychotic and other hard-to-handle patients. At the Gold Coast Hospital, where as many as five medical staff were needed at once to restrain patients having psychotic episodes on ice, specially designed rooms with foam furniture and reinforced walls were used from mid-2006.

David Spain, the deputy director of the hospital’s emergency department, said: ‘We have furniture which is made out of foam so they can’t throw it at people or at windows or the doors. There’s usually a chair and bed we have in there. The walls have been reinforced because they continually were smashed by fists or feet.

‘I’ve been here 25 years. We used to see drug-induced psychosis very rarely when I first graduated. They used to be a very small percentage but now 30 to 50 per cent of the people who present through the emergency department with psychiatric illness have drug-related problems. So it has been a dramatic and unexpected upswing.’

Along with the Pharmacy Guild’s Project STOP, the hospitals’ initiatives were Australia’s first concerted institutional response to the ice problem. Later, ambulance and paramedic services were to follow the same course, introducing ice-specific guidelines for officers, including the administration of the sedative Midazolam for ice-psychotics from September 2006.

‘This Midazolam is great stuff,’ one ambulance paramedic told the Australian. ‘All we need now is a better delivery system . . . like a shotgun. Daktari-style tranquilliser darts.’

Gallows humour aside, no longer was it acceptable to fob off crystal meth as the same old drug as speed. It wasn’t, and it never had been.

The criminal justice system, meanwhile, was having to make its own adjustments.

Real drug education is street drug education. Users get to know the effects of a drug before anyone else does, and the mythology of excess spreads quickly. In 2003 and 2004, the horror stories of ice hadn’t been broadcast to the extent that they have now; consequently, ice users didn’t often know what they were fooling with. When those incautious users were petty criminals, their crimes were soon far from petty.

CB and IM, two young men from New South Wales, hadn’t learnt yet. The consequences of their lack of education were tragic. CB had grown up in Murrurundi, the eldest of four children, and then in the Taree–Wingham area. He suffered from a reading disability that left him four or five years behind his schoolmates. Victimised, he found a ready recourse and sanctuary in drugs.

He was expelled from Chatham High School, in Taree, for possession of cannabis when he was in year seven. Through his early teens, CB was expelled from a further two high schools for disruptive behaviour, truancy and using drugs and alcohol.

When CB was around fifteen, his father noticed that he had some unexplained funds. CB said that he had been sexually molested by a male friend of the family, who had given him hush money. A fight ensued, and CB left home. His father seemed to take the side of the family friend, who accused CB of making his story up. It was at this point that the teenager graduated from alcohol and cannabis to harder drugs, including amphetamines. At sixteen, when he left home, he set off on a six-year collection of criminal convictions, mainly for stealing, break and enter, and larceny.

CB’s parents tried their best, but he was even less controllable after he left home, showing no sign of being able to live independently or hold a job. Several times his parents received calls from hospitals saying CB had been admitted for psychotic or suicidal incidents. He would be put in a hospital room where he would sing and dance one minute, and rage the next, smashing the walls with his hands. At his lowest, he would moan that he wished he had never been born. He tried to hang himself in 2000, when he was eighteen. His parents didn’t know with any certainty where he slept at night.

IM was a year older than CB, having been born in 1981 at Blacktown Hospital in Sydney’s west. IM’s father, a migrant from former Yugoslavia, was frequently unemployed and a violent alcoholic who beat his three children, of whom IM was the youngest. Like CB, IM was sexually abused by a male family friend; when he told his father about it, his father beat him, refusing to believe it. IM was placed in foster care as a young child, but at the age of seven was returned to his family when they moved from Sydney to the Newcastle area.

Nothing much improved for IM. He had no attention for his lessons and wagged school more often than not. The only time he received consistent schooling was while he was in juvenile detention centres. When he was eleven, his abuser tried to rape him in bushland but was interrupted by two passers-by. IM said he was happy to be sent away from his family, ‘to get away from the abuse’.

At twelve, IM left school and began supporting himself through crime. Over the next decade he picked up convictions for armed robbery, common assault, malicious damage, stealing cars, damaging property, break and enter, larceny, intimidating behaviour and assault occasioning actual bodily harm.

Like CB, IM used cannabis and alcohol from an early age and harder drugs from around thirteen. Heroin was his favourite; he said it made him ‘a nicer person’. After a prison stint in 2001, he became an addict, using as much as a gram a day.

On the mid-north coast of New South Wales, crystal meth was known as ‘gas’. IM had first taken gas at fourteen, and continued to use it whenever it was available. Unlike heroin, which brought him down with terrible flu-like withdrawal symptoms within a couple of days, gas would keep him up for two weeks at a time before he crashed. But he saw it as a nastier drug than heroin. The gas, he would tell a health worker, ‘eats me away’. He would forget meals, and become malnourished. He was also beset by a dark and violent paranoia.

This was a particular problem in his home life. From about the age of fourteen, IM had a girlfriend. Around 2003 they had a son. He alternated periods of loving-kindness with terrible neglect. For ten years he had suffered flashbacks to the sexual abuse, resulting in nightmares, poor sleep, anxiety, an inability to trust people, and a sense of despair about his future that amounted to depression.

IM and CB had a lot in common. Given their shared backgrounds, it was natural for the pair to become friends. They did crime together and drugs together. As horrendous as their lives may appear from the outside, to themselves they were cowboys, good-time guys who loved to get high and go out stealing. It was their way of life. The roller-coaster of moods was something they, like most drug users, accepted. In a terrible way, there is a stoic resilience to the addict’s life, a way of absorbing fate, and a discipline, knowing the ups and downs are tied to, and may be alleviated by, the use of a drug.

In 2004, CB and IM were living in Newcastle. IM was living at his mother’s house in Windale with his girlfriend and their baby son. He was using ice and heroin most days. CB was drifting from place to place.

IM’s dealer was a man named Gavin Atkin, who lived in a flat above a restaurant in Maitland Road, Mayfield. It’s a tough part of Newcastle. The back of the block shared a carpark with a tough pub, the Beauford Hotel. Atkin had been selling ice for a couple of years, and he took a shine to CB, inviting him to move into the flat. Atkin dealt mostly from home, though he also did deliveries to some of his clients. To prepare himself when buyers came to his flat, he had a floodlight and surveillance camera set up over his back stairs; he could watch a television monitor inside the flat to see who was coming up.

On the day of 9 August 2004, Atkin went fishing in his aluminium tinny. He arrived home at around 2.15 am, and sat down to watch television for a while.

CB wasn’t home. Things hadn’t been too good between him and Gavin Atkin. CB was constantly short of cash and buying his ice on tick, and Atkin had started leaning on him to pay up. Atkin had threatened to harm CB, and accused him of smashing the window of his car. They traded abusive text messages, CB calling Atkin a ‘paranoid cunt’.

The night of 9 August, CB was with IM at IM’s brother’s home in Gateshead. They were injecting ice and obsessing over how to clear the debt to Atkin while still keeping him open as their supplier. IM’s brother lent them $100 to pay Atkin, and a further $30 for a taxi, which they booked in a false name and caught to Mayfield at around 3.45 am. They got out at a BP service station within walking distance of Atkin’s flat.

CB entered via the back stairs while IM waited outside. They had injected up to three grams of ice in the previous 24 hours, and were raging.

Atkin was lying in front of the television, and blew up when he saw CB. In the heat of the moment, CB decided not to give him the $100 and instead just bash him and steal whatever drugs and money were in the flat. He hit Atkin with a steel bar and a pool cue, which broke as he swung it across the dealer’s head. He kept smashing Atkin until the older man fell to the floor, groaning. Atkin would suffer brain bruising and skull fractures, leaving him permanently impaired and unable to remember much about the night.

Hearing the commotion, IM went up into the flat. As Atkin lay there suffering, CB and IM ripped a safe out of the bedroom wardrobe and made to leave. But in a terrible twist of fate, at around 4.30 am a visitor arrived.

Garry Sansom, 33, was living with friends nearby in Dora Street, Mayfield. Sansom had hurt his left arm and shoulder in an accident, and was now surviving on a disability pension. He had a partner and child, but he and his partner had separated. He was an occasional methamphetamine user. His bad luck was that Gavin Atkin was his dealer, and that he really needed some drugs in the early hours of 10 August.

CB and IM were inside the flat, debating whether they would steal any more of Atkin’s things. They had Atkin’s car keys and would leave in his Ford Telstar. Atkin was lying on the floor, blood streaming from his head, groaning between bouts of unconsciousness.

Then CB glanced at the television monitor and saw someone coming up the back stairs. He raced to the door as it opened.

‘What’s going on here?’ Garry Sansom said, peering over CB’s shoulder at the havoc inside.

‘Nothing, Garry. It’s me,’ CB said.

Sansom kept trying to see inside the flat.

CB panicked. He grabbed Sansom by the neck and pulled him inside before throwing him down on the tiled floor. Picking up the metal bar with which he’d hit Atkin, he pounded Sansom around the head and face, hitting him five or six times. IM joined in with a Stilson wrench, pummelling Sansom, the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Later, both CB and IM would struggle to articulate why they had gone so far. ‘I just started freaking out,’ IM said. ‘I was scattered to the max,’ said CB. As we have seen, the influence of ice had the capacity to turn such common brawls murderous, depriving the user of any sense of limits. An act of violence while on crystal meth seems to burst boundaries; the perpetrator keeps on hitting and hitting, not knowing why, just going on beyond any purpose or restraint, repeating the action as mindlessly as playing cards or popping Sudafeds out of blister packs.

Another common feature of these crimes is the activity and sense of intent applied to the cover-up. After beating Sansom, IM and CB injected some of the ice they’d stolen, and left in Atkin’s Telstar. Some way down the road in Broadmeadow, they realised they had forgotten the stolen safe, so they drove back to the Mayfield flat. Stepping over Sansom, who by now was unconscious and almost certainly dead, and passing Atkin, who was either passed out or groaning incoherently, CB picked up the safe and left again.

The pair drove to the Charlestown area, where a friend lived in Warners Bay Road. They dropped off the safe and some fishing gear they’d stolen for good measure, and drove the Telstar out into bushland near Crescent Road, where they set it alight.

After walking back to Warners Bay Road, they set to work opening the safe with a grinder and an iron bar. CB said to one of the house’s occupants, ‘we did a rort’. The occupant noticed blood on CB’s clothes and gave him a wide berth.

After stealing two bracelets out of the safe and leaving the fishing gear in the house, CB and IM left. They separated, IM picking up his girlfriend and son and going down to Sydney, where he would move from place to place in the Mount Druitt area in the next three weeks. CB stayed in Newcastle, and later on 10 August returned to the house on Warners Bay Road. By this time, the police had linked the burnt-out car to that address, and were waiting for him. They arrested him as he arrived.

IM was arrested on 29 August, when he returned to Newcastle. Initially, he and CB would both deny any involvement in the attacks on Atkin and Sansom. CB said he was in his bedroom listening to music when he heard an intruder come in, and he’d run away after finding Atkin and Sansom beaten in the living room. IM maintained different stories in different interviews: he had never been there, he had been outside the flat but had no involvement in the attacks—in fact pulling CB away from his victims—and saying he was with CB when Sansom arrived but had nothing to do with the Atkin attack. He told police: ‘Oh, we, we did go there, not to rob anyone, I’ll be honest. I was going there to get gas, all right. I went in there and CB, they started punchin’ on, right, and, but the other poor bloke [Sansom], all right, little bit, all right. I, I, I didn’t go, I didn’t hit him, I swear, eh. But [CB] hit him with, with the chair, mate, I swear, the chair, right. There, there was a bar stool there, he wouldn’t leave the cunt alone, mate, wouldn’t leave it alone, you know, you know what I mean. I, I’m sorry I lied about fuckin’ gettin’ in that car, you know what I mean, I was scared, you know what I mean . . .’

In jail, though, IM boasted to other prisoners that he’d killed ‘two rock spiders’. He said that an informant, whose contact with police had led to the arrests, was ‘a dead man. I am going to cave his head in like I did the other two’.

Far from showing remorse, CB and IM were gloating about the attacks—unaware they were being recorded. Police taped a chilling phone conversation between the pair:

IM: . . . that’s where Gavin is, eh, down Fletcher [hospital], eh.

CB: Is he?

IM: Yeah, bro.

CB: How come?

IM: He’s got, like, a four-year-old, bro. I didn’t want to tell you that, eh.

CB: He what?

IM: I didn’t want to say that, eh. I was going to keep it in the dark, eh.

CB: What is he?

IM: He’s got a mind of a four-year-old, eh.

CB: Good. That’s good.

IM: Yeah, OK. Yeah. He’s suppose . . . but, you know what I mean, that’s where he is, James Fletcher.

CB: Yeah.

IM: Yeah, when me girl told me, you know what I mean?

CB: No, I feel sorry for the cunt, really man.

IM: So do I, bro, I wish the fuck we weren’t fuckin’ that scattered now, bro.

CB: I was fuckin’ off me head, wasn’t I?

IM: Yeah, that’s it, bro, you know, it took both of us . . . fuck.

CB: But he said, Gav rung us up and threatened us. You know what I mean?

IM: Yeah, yeah, he did, mate.

CB: That’s what I mean, mate . . . so what if I smash a drug dealer.

IM: Mm, that’s it—

CB: I’m doin’ society a favour.

IM: That’s it.

CB: Mate, that’s what I was saying . . . I should be given a medal for fuckin’, for knocking drug dealer scum up.

CB: Yeah, I’m fuckin’ deadset fuckin’ sorry, it’s my fault, man, this fuckin’, it all happened, brother, my fault, man, I instigated it, I fuckin’ premeditated it, you know.

IM: Don’t worry, mate. We’re in together, bro.

CB: Yeah.

IM: Yeah. Eh, I deadset . . . I deadset, didn’t want it to go down like that, eh, bro.

CB: What?

IM: I deadset didn’t want it to happen like that, eh.

CB: No, I didn’t want it to happen like that.

IM: That cunt, that was a mistake, that cunt, admit it, didn’t deserve to fuckin’ die for it.

CB: Just the wrong place at the wrong time.

IM: That’s it, man, fuck. Deadset, I fuckin’ pay for remorse, eh, I want remorse, mate, that, you know what I mean, that hurts me, brother.

CB: It does, man.

IM: All right. I’m tellin’ ya, eh, I don’t care if it’s recorded or not, you know but fuckin’, it hurts, bro. Eh. Takin’, takin’ a cunt’s life with fuckin’ two kids and, you know what I mean, bro?

CB: Did he have two kids?

IM: Yeah, he had two kids, eh.

CB: Poor cunt.

IM: Yeah, yeah.

IM (LAUGHING): Oi . . . yeah, eh, did they show you photos?

CB: Nah they don’t them . . .

IM: Yeah . . . Muxlow [a police officer] was sayin’ to me, that cunt’s face was fuckin’ deadset fucked up they couldn’t even get dental records, bro.

CB: Yeah.

IM: Yeah.

CB: It was more than twenty times, eh.

IM: Whooooo.

CB: It was like this, this is what it sounded like that first man, it sounded like first man (CLAPPING) and then it started going (MAKING SOUND WITH VOICE).

IM (LAUGHING)

CB (LAUGHING): . . . you could hear it breaking at first and then it was just slush man.

IM: That’s all right, he shouldn’t have rolled over on us.

CB (LAUGHING): He shouldn’t have come across two fuckin’ lunatics, mate.

IM: That’s it. Oi, deadset, oi, he yelled out your name.

CB: He yelled out my name.

IM: Yeah, he yelled and grabbed ya.

CB: Yeah.

IM: He said, ‘CB, it’s me.’

CB: Did he?

IM: Yeah.

CB: I don’t remember.

IM: That’s why I hit him, bro.

CB: Aw, true.

IM: Why do you think I hit the cunt?

The young men were examined for the courts by the forensic psychiatrist Dr Bruce Westmore. He said that CB was suffering a drug-induced psychosis at the time of the attacks, but his ice use had not left him with ‘delusional beliefs or hallucinations about his victims’. In other words, his actions were ‘essentially non-psychotic’. He had gone to the flat to rob Gavin Atkin of his drugs, and his judgment and impulse control in the course of that robbery were affected by the three grams of ice he had shot up with IM that day.

CB had told Dr Westmore that ‘at the time the current offences arose he was also breaking into shops. Later he would continue hearing alarm sounds in his head, the sound of screeching car brakes and breaking windows. He said he would also hear the shower running. He told me he was laughing and crying at the same time’.

Given everything that had happened to CB and IM through their young lives, and given the lethal (to others) mixture of ice, paranoia and violent tendencies in both men, it would have tested the court system severely had they contested the murder charges laid against them. Fortunately, they pleaded guilty both to the murder of Garry Sansom and the assault on Gavin Atkin. They anticipated, for their guilty pleas, discounts off their sentences. But in April 2006 Justice Buddin of the NSW Supreme Court said:

The crimes committed by the offenders were violent and callous. So much is apparent from the photographs which were tendered in evidence. Furthermore, the Stilson wrench which it can be inferred was used in the commission of the offences was also put into evidence. It is a substantial implement. The death of Mr Sansom was unwarranted, needless and entirely without justification. The community expects that the law will protect the sanctity of human life and that those who unlawfully take the life of another will be met with salutary penalties. Appropriate punishment must also be imposed upon persons who inflict vicious injuries of the kind which were sustained by Mr Atkin.

It didn’t matter at all to the judge that Atkin was an ice dealer and Sansom was a customer. These were brutal attacks. Justice Buddin sentenced CB to a total of twenty years behind bars, fifteen years without parole. IM, who had obstructed the investigation, received a total sentence of twenty-four years, with eighteen years of it non-parole. Sansom and Atkins were not the only ones whose lives were ruined.

By 2005, as we have seen, a number of sectors of the community affected by ice psychoses were developing strategies to fight back. General practitioners and ambulance officers were protecting themselves, and learning how to sedate people undergoing a psychotic episode triggered by ice. Hospitals were segregating the ‘Incredible Hulks’ from other patients. Pharmacists were banding together to dry up the flow of pseudoephedrine.

Yet the biggest counter-amphetamine effort, as always, was being run by law enforcement agencies, from customs officers and federal police intercepting imports to state police busting labs and traffickers. The best way to appreciate the size of the law enforcement effort is through statistics and a few representative examples.

The number of customs detections of methamphetamine in all forms was flat at around 70 per year until 2001. From there, annual detections were 203, 215, 141, 206 and 423 by 2006. With crystal methamphetamine, the number rose most dramatically in 2001 and 2002 and then hit a plateau. Purity varied hugely, from less than 1 per cent up to 86 per cent.

The number of arrests for methamphetamine offences showed a similar trend, rising steeply from 15 per 100 000 population in 1996 to 51 in 2001, then maintaining a plateau in the forties until 2006.

National detections of clandestine labs, which were around 50 a year before the advent of crystal meth, hit 200 a year by 2001, rose steadily to 358 by 2004, and then flattened somewhat, numbering 380 in 2005 and 390 in 2006. The overwhelming majority, each year, were methamphetamine labs in Queensland.

Police arrests and seizures for amphetamines, numbering fewer than 4000 at the start of the ice decade, hit 10 000 by 2006.

How, and where, was this law enforcement taking place?

The biggest lab bust in these years was offshore. In 2004, the AFP’s Operation Outrigger culminated in a raid on a warehouse outside Suva, Fiji, which shut down the largest lab ever found in the southern hemisphere. AFP and Fijian police found 1000 kilograms of precursor chemicals, and said the superlab had the potential to produce 500 kilograms of ice in a week.

State police departments were now addressing the clandestine laboratory problem specifically. In 2005 and 2006, NSW police found 55 methamphetamine labs, mostly on residential properties, but the labs being found were bigger and more efficient than in previous years. There had been a fear of ‘mum and dad’ operations posing a health threat to the inhabitants of houses—in 2003 half of lab detections were small operations inside family homes, requiring little more hardware than a hotplate and a few orange juice bottles. But by 2005–06, only two of the 55 detected labs were ‘box labs’ in the backs of cars; the others ranged up in size to major pill-pressing operations, one producing 28 kilograms of meth that was 60 per cent pure, valued at more than $2 million. In Victoria and Queensland, the number of lab seizures in the same period was up to four times greater than in New South Wales.

Aside from the challenge of cutting down supply, police were also concerned by lab accidents. On 20 December 2002, a meth lab in Bolton Point, Newcastle, had been raided after neighbours reported nasty-smelling fumes, and a six-month-old baby living next door had to be hospitalised after inhaling the chemicals. In July 2003, a St Marys man died from his burns when the flammable solvents from his meth lab caught fire in his home unit.

Some meth cooks saved themselves out of pure luck. In 2003, a 39-year-old cook phoned police when, after inhaling fumes, he began to think his lab was about to blow up. On 29 November 2002, Sydney meth cook Abdel Alameddine was serving home detention for driving offences when he was visited by a parole officer who found evidence of a meth-making operation. When the parole officer called police, Alameddine raced to his shed, where his lab was set up, and tried to smoke as much ice as he could before the police came. His butane lighter sparked an explosion in the shed, there was a fire, and Alameddine staggered out. He would be in hospital for three months and had to wear a burns suit for two years. A psychologist told the Court of Criminal Appeal that Alameddine was ‘in the bottom of the borderline mentally retarded region’.

In 2006, a national police database was set up in a similar vein to Project STOP. The National Clandestine Laboratory Database would identify and track meth cooks who moved between states. It would also log and disseminate information about seizures of precursor chemicals, equipment and recipes, and alert police across borders to new trends in production methods.

State police had been conducting training programs for their officers, to avert the consequences which might result should unprepared police stumble upon a meth lab that was emitting toxic fumes or about to explode. Peter Vallely, a Queensland forensic chemist, followed an American training model and actually cooked methamphetamine in front of police to show them how everyday kitchens could be turned into meth labs. Vallely was also investigating how meth cooks could stay ahead of legislative changes. As he said, ‘The scientific literature I use to understand these processes and identify where the next one is coming from is exactly the same literature I would use if I was a crook thinking, well I can’t buy that precursor, how can I make it . . . we could be sitting side by side in the uni library thumbing through the same journal.’

But Vallely also predicted that the restriction of pseudoephedrine supply would push meth-making away from the ‘Beavis and Butt-Head element’ towards the domain of serious organised crime.

‘The lack of access to pseudoephedrine, in my humble opinion, is going to reduce the number of (cooks) . . . a lot of these people are flat out writing their own name. They don’t have the capacity to import it . . . or the money links, and they don’t have the skill set to use some of the classical techniques.’

By February 2007, there was a new development, when NSW police proudly unveiled their ‘clan lab truck’, a high-tech vehicle containing decontamination and air-monitoring equipment, protective suits and breathing apparatus. Costing $250 000, the truck would be able to go into dangerous environments and protect police from injury. It would not, in itself, increase the number of detections, but it could reduce the cost and the peril of dismantling the labs.

At the Australian border, the biggest haul since the Anna Zhang/Tony Tu arrests was a 125-kilogram seizure in October 2004. Three Chinese nationals were charged after the ice was found inside candles in a shipping container unloaded from the Maltese-flagged container ship Kota Sejati at Port Botany on 9 October. The vessel had arrived from China. Custom officials found 624 hollowed-out candles, each containing 200 grams of the drug.

As public awareness of ice surged in 2005, so did the pace and profile of police operations. Keen to publicise their all-out endeavour against the drug, police across the nation released detailed reports of their operations. Here is a timeline illustrating arrests and seizures from 2005 to 2007:

January 2005: Joint Asian Crime Group detectives arrested four Chinese men in Sydney for importing 9 kilograms of ice.

January 2005: A Sydney man was arrested on a luxury boat on the Parramatta River after police found an ice laboratory on properties bordering the Hawkesbury River. They said the lab could make $15 million worth of ice.

February 2005: A man from Annandale, Sydney, was arrested and charged over an ice lab in Castle Hill, where 10 kilograms of the finished product were also found.

February 2005: A 45-year-old man, believed to be one of the biggest ice smugglers in the world, was arrested at Sydney Airport on his way to an address in Rooty Hill. He was wanted in the United States over a massive trans-Pacific importation racket. (Busts involving hundreds of kilograms of ice were carried out in China and Thailand in mid-2006, indicating that Australian ice was still a mixture of imported and locally made product.)

February 2005: A Melbourne company director, Scott McConnell, was convicted and fined for supplying ice pipes, the first such conviction since the Victorian government banned them in 2004.

May 2005: A Melbourne tobacconist was arrested when 2066 banned ice pipes were found behind a counter and in a back room of his shop.

June 2005: Hong Kong authorities arrested a man carrying 560 grams of ice as he prepared to board a flight to Cairns. The drugs were taped to his legs.

December 2005: Police arrested four middle-aged Melbourne men for possession of an undisclosed amount of ice and 8800 ecstasy tablets.

February 2006: Police arrested three Sydney men after a 6-metre Stingray speedboat was delivered from Canada containing 46 kilograms of ice. The ringleader, coffee shop manager Si Tanh Ho, would be sentenced to 25 years in jail.

April 2006: Chadi Sultan, from Warrawong, NSW, was arrested and charged with supplying a commercial quantity— three eightballs—of ice to an undercover police officer.

April 2006: A Qantas flight attendant from Bondi, 35-year-old Anthony William Dow, was charged with trafficking one to two kilograms of ice. Prosecutors said he used his position as a flight attendant to avoid security detectors. He was sacked by Qantas and jailed.

April 2006: Victorian real estate agents stumbled across a meth lab when they went to a house to evict the tenant, 31-year-old Peter Edward Laughton, for failing to pay the rent. Laughton claimed he’d been trying to make diesel fuel.

April 2006: Tasmanian police intercepted $500 000 worth of methamphetamine carried by a woman who was flying into Hobart from Sydney. It was Tasmania’s first major ice haul.

April 2006: Federal police arrested seven men after raiding a lab in a rainforest outside Murwillumbah, northern New South Wales.

May 2006: Two US navy sailors and a Canadian national, who tried to smuggle eleven kilograms of methamphetamine into Australia aboard an American warship, were jailed for up to fourteen years. The ringleader, Daniel Christopher Maio, 36, had tried to bring the drugs from Manila into Townsville on the USS Boxer. Maio flew ahead to Australia while his colleague Andrew Lester Labanon, 39, stashed the drugs in dirty laundry which he brought ashore. They put the drugs into a car, hiding them among children’s toys, planning to drive to Brisbane, but were pulled up by AFP officers in a dramatic arrest at a Townsville service station.

June 2006: Australian police were involved in busting a converted shampoo factory in Malaysia, a superlab using a new recipe of common industrial chemicals capable of making 60 kilograms of ice a day. Netting 500 kilograms of finished crystal meth, it was believed to be the biggest lab bust in south-east Asia.

June 2006: A man and woman in Prospect, western Sydney, were arrested in possession of 170 grams of methamphetamine.

June 2006: Two million pseudoephedrine tablets were discovered inside a shipping container filled with Indonesian furniture. Customs X-rays had picked up 139 boxes of Sudafed and Actafed behind the furniture in the dock at Port Botany. The seizure led to four arrests in Australia and two in Indonesia.

July 2006: A Sydney couple, trying to avoid a police car which had spotted them speeding on the Anzac Bridge, rammed a taxi, ran red lights and drove at two police officers. The couple were arrested with bags of ice and were evidently under the influence of the drug.

August 2006: An Irish backpacker was jailed for thirteen years for dealing and manufacturing ice. ‘Irish’ Paul McCormick, 40, lived in a million-dollar Sydney waterfront home, drove a gold Range Rover, wore a Rolex and used a yacht to entertain visiting family members. Police had found drugs and firearms in a flat McCormick rented, as well as a recipe for ice written on a beer coaster in his Alexander Street, Balmain home. He dealt drugs by cruising from bar to bar at night, supplying lower-level dealers locally and in Queensland.

October 2006: The NSW police commissioner, Ken Moroney, said ice was the biggest problem facing police. ‘The physical and mental manifestations of this drug are absolutely horrific,’ Moroney said. ‘It has the potential to destroy generations.’ NSW police announced they would rewrite their training manuals to teach officers how to deal with amphetamine-intoxicated people.

October 2006: A Melbourne policeman who sold drugs through Sexpo exhibits while on leave from Victoria Police’s sex offence and child abuse unit was one of six people arrested in drug raids. Paul Anthony Hatzakortzian, 36, was charged with 80 drug offences, including selling ice through Sexpo, which was attended by his prostitute partner, Suzanne Choppin, 44.

October 2006: Enough explosives to blow up several houses were seized from a home in Salisbury North, Adelaide, along with more than 100 ice pipes.

October 2006: An Ipswich, Queensland pharmacist was charged with trafficking pseudoephedrine in violation of Project STOP. He was the thirty-fourth person arrested on similar charges since the beginning of the project.

October 2006: Kylie Green, a nineteen-year-old pregnant Wollongong woman, was caught at home with bags of ice, cash, firearms and ammunition. Neighbours had alerted police to the large number of people visiting the house for only short periods of time.

October 2006: NSW police seized more than two kilograms of ice in a raid on a car in the Sydney CBD and from flats in Bondi and Maroubra. Two men were charged.

October 2006: In the space of one week, NSW south coast police seized more than $250 000 worth of ice in three different seizures.

November 2006: Police shut down two ice labs at Doonside, in western Sydney, charging a man who rented the premises.

March 2007: Victorian police, raiding a clandestine lab in Geelong, used Tasers to subdue an ice-using manufacturer who charged them with a baseball bat. Six other labs were raided on the same day.

April 2007: Another raid on tobacconists in Melbourne uncovered 925 ice pipes.

April 2007: A 37-year-old Melbourne man was charged over Australia’s biggest haul of a key amphetamine ingredient: 125 kilograms of phenylacetic acid found at a Thomastown factory.

May 2007: Police and customs officials broke open a temporary ice lab in a hotel in Hurstville, southern Sydney, arresting two Chinese nationals and impounding laboratory equipment and 25 litres of precursor chemicals.

May 2007: Danny Nguyen, 25, of Yagoona in western Sydney, was a learner driver pulled over in Riverwood. Police found almost a kilogram of ice in shoe boxes in the boot, another bag in Nguyen’s pocket, and a pipe in the passenger-side door pocket.

June 2007: After arresting fugitive crime boss Tony Mokbel in Greece, Victorian police raided 22 Melbourne homes, arresting fourteen people involved in ‘The Company’, a methamphetamine-manufacturing operation that had funded Mokbel.

August–September 2007: NSW and federal police busted two large meth syndicates in Queanbeyan and Canberra, arresting ten men and seizing more than a million dollars’ worth of the drug.

This brief digest of law enforcement action shows how active police became once they were alert to crystal meth and its dangers. It is the tip of an impressive iceberg. With so much interdiction in one form or another, it might be expected that ice would go the way of heroin, and a drought would follow.

So when NDARC compiled its summary of Australian drug trends in 2006, law enforcement specialists were hoping to see the first signs of drought: falling availability and purity, and rising prices.

Instead, the price—around $50 for a point—was stable across all the Australian states. Purity was stable to rising. Availability was, in the view of users, either the same or becoming easier. There was evidently a much larger iceberg down below, still finding its way to users. And the real story of ice, as always, is best told from the user’s end.

As the history of domestic violence shows, love and intoxicants are the worst marriage of all. Todd James Bookham was in love with Karen Lee Anne-Marie Fairbairn, but he was also in love with drugs.

Bookham, born in 1983, was atypical of some of the people we have seen committing crimes under the influence of ice, in that he came from a happy and stable home in northern Victoria, and most of his relatives and friends knew him as caring, fun-loving and loyal.

The second of three sons, Bookham started to struggle with school in his mid-teens. He dropped out after year ten and studied for an apprenticeship in welding, but he couldn’t hold down a job for long. For some reason, when he liked the company the work would end, and when the work was ongoing he couldn’t get on with the boss.

Throughout his employment ups and downs, he was living with his parents. His father seemed constantly disappointed in him, which led to Todd placing enormous pressure on himself.

Aside from some drink-driving infringements, Bookham had no criminal record. He wasn’t a criminal; he was a troubled young man who suffered from depressive episodes so severe that he once shaved all his hair off to stop himself from pulling it out in clumps.

At eighteen, Bookham fell in love with a fifteen-year-old girl who soon became pregnant. He was overjoyed. She wasn’t. When she suffered a miscarriage, Bookham was convinced that she had terminated the pregnancy. She broke up with him and he plunged into his worst suicidal depression, leading to a spell at the Baudinet Centre for treatment.

Around the time of his twenty-first birthday, Bookham finally moved out of his parents’ home, into a share house with some friends in Swan Hill. He was able to put aside his feelings of worthlessness and have a good time. Through his friends, he met Karen Fairbairn, a vivacious and spirited young local.

Drinking and drug-taking were the household’s chief bonding activities. Bookham threw himself into it, smoking cannabis and taking ecstasy and amphetamines, including ice. When his mother saw him, she was increasingly disturbed by his mood swings—weeping one moment, strutting around self-importantly the next. Sometimes he would come home, bury his head in his hands and gibber nonsense to her or to himself. One night he went to his car muttering about committing suicide by stabbing himself or smashing into a tree; his mother stood in front of the vehicle to stop him leaving.

He was, his mother said, ‘definitely out of control’ with his drug-taking. Unlike his previous girlfriend, Karen Fairbairn took drugs with Bookham, but she also had her limits. In the end what made her question Bookham’s sanity wasn’t the amount of drugs he was taking, but what they were doing to him.

He started to accuse her of having an affair with her stepsister, Annette Mary Jayne Elliott. Fairbairn told him he was being ridiculously paranoid. He backed off, but then accused her again. Their relationship turned into a running battle of suspicion and denial. Eventually she told him they needed to take a break from each other. Bookham, devastated, refused to accept it.

Gearing up for New Year’s Eve 2004, Bookham drank all day on 30 December, and smoked dope and ice. He had smoked marijuana for years. He’d started taking ice only recently.

He moved his belongings out of the Swan Hill house, but just before midnight he rang Fairbairn. Elliott, who worked at the Swan Hill Club, had come to visit her stepsister at 9.30 pm, bringing her six-year-old son Cody with her. When Bookham insisted on coming over to talk to Fairbairn, Elliott went and collected him.

Bookham and Fairbairn met outside her house. She said she would only give him five minutes. They sat side by side on a step, and Bookham said he loved her and wanted to work things out.

‘It’s too late,’ she said. ‘It’s over. I don’t love you anymore.’

Bookham put his left arm around her neck and his right around her waist. At first it seemed like an affectionate hug, but as he pulled her in she realised he was putting her in a headlock.

‘If you move,’ he said, ‘I’ll slit your throat.’

‘As if you’d do that,’ she said, holding her nerve.

But he would. He brought out a hunting knife and ran it across her throat, making a shallow fifteen-centimetre cut.

‘Fuck, you’ve cut me!’ she screamed, pulling away from him and pressing her hands to the wound.

Annette Elliott rushed to the door. Bookham stood and charged at her, tackling her backwards into the house, screaming accusations at Karen’s ‘lover’. He stabbed Elliott in the chest, rupturing her diaphragm and stomach.

Cody, the six-year-old boy, was standing watching, screaming and crying as his mother rolled around on the floor fighting Bookham.

Fairbairn came in and, ignoring the pain from her slit throat, jumped onto Bookham, trying to pull him away from her stepsister. As furniture was smashed around them, Bookham got up and ran out the door.

Fairbairn checked on Elliott, helping tend to her chest wound. Then she got up to see if Bookham had left.

He hadn’t. He was loitering outside. When he saw his ex-girlfriend at the door, he rushed back. She slammed it in his face, and he stabbed it with a knife, screaming out, then running away again.

In his disordered state, Bookham ran to a phone box and called for an ambulance. When help came, he said the women had attacked and stabbed him. He displayed some scratches on his legs. The knife was found rammed into a tree.

Karen Fairbairn’s injuries were easily treated, though the psychological scars would persist. Annette Elliott had to be airlifted to the cardiothoracic unit of St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, where her left lung, stomach and diaphragm were repaired. She suffered an infection and, later, anxiety and insomnia. She became morbidly protective of her son and suspicious of other people. Her little boy suffered nightmares and became very aggressive at times, knocked off-balance by what he had seen.

Once he was arrested, Bookham changed. Drug-free, he expressed deep contrition for what he’d done, and followed counselling programs diligently. It helped that most of his family and friends forgave and supported him.

He pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of Fairbairn, receiving an eight-year prison term, and guilty to intentionally causing serious injury to Elliott. He would have to serve seven and a half years before becoming eligible for parole; the courts believed he had every chance of rehabilitating himself. Seven years would be a good test of that.

In late 2005, Mark Thomas and Vicki Wolf were going through a temporary separation. Mark lived in the Waverley house, looking after their daughters, who were in grades four and two at a private school, while Vicki was renting a serviced apartment in the city. Mark wasn’t working; he was ‘on sabbatical’ from the food company where he was an in-house legal counsel. Vicki was still at the commercial law firm where she had started, and was still an associate partner. The jackpot of partnership was eluding her more stubbornly than she’d expected. Mark had given up crystal for a while; Vicki hadn’t.

They’d discovered, back at the end of 2003 and start of 2004, that they had different tolerances to crystal. Mark, usually an even-tempered man, had begun to suffer from sharp mood swings. ‘Driving the car to the shops could feel like I was in a NASCAR race,’ he says, ‘and I was a bad loser.’

He would scream at other drivers, cut them off intentionally, work himself into a lather of hatred looking at a neighbouring driver while waiting at a red light. When he let fly at them—or any stranger; once, in a supermarket, ‘I just went off my head at this woman because she didn’t say thank you to me when I let her into the queue’—he was flooded with relief, a delicious cascade of warmth from the top of his head down.

The rages, he soon identified, were at their worst on Mondays. Then, on Tuesdays, he’d spend the whole day wanting to kill himself.

‘My life was shit. I was a total failure. I kept just looking back over the whole thing, like I was stocktaking, and all I could see was where I’d come up short. It was relentless. I know that sounds nonsense to someone from the outside, who’s seeing me as this rich young lawyer with the beautiful wife and kids, the house and that, but I never believed in defining myself by the trappings, you know, not even at the best of times, and now it was more than just, “the trappings aren’t important”, it was, “I am shit and the trappings are just more proof that I am shit”. I wasn’t well. And this was always happening on Tuesdays.’

Vicki also had the bursts of rage, mainly at work, early in the week. Mondays and Tuesdays were the days when she and Mark would have quarrels that sent their daughters running to their bedrooms. But when Mark tried to connect the pattern of anger with the Friday–Saturday sessions, Vicki would have none of it.

‘She’d just say it was bullshit, that I was dodging the real issue, which was whatever I’d done that made her unhappy,’ he says.

Vicki says: ‘I didn’t want to make the connection.’

So in 2004 Mark took a break from crystal, and Vicki didn’t.

‘That was the worst decision,’ she says. ‘I thought he should have just grown up and stopped feeling sorry for himself. I was like, “Come on, a party’ll cheer you up”. I thought he did the damage to our marriage by giving up [crystal]. I still think that whatever we did, give up or keep smoking, we should have done it together. I’m not saying it was his fault that I didn’t give up. I’m just saying that’s how it was.’

They didn’t separate because of this decision. They separated because Vicki had an affair.

She was hanging out more with Peter, the colleague who had reintroduced her and Mark to shabu in 2001. Peter, by that time, had been smoking for a couple of years, and didn’t lose his head and go crazy when he was on crystal. He’d built up a tolerance; Vicki saw that as cool. She’d embarrass herself by dancing on tables and speaking too loudly and dragging Mark off to have sex, and meanwhile Peter was just grooving along, ‘like an adult’, as she put it.

She gravitated to Peter at work and began to have lunch with him. If Mark called, she’d ignore his number or pretend the reception was bad and call him back later. She was enjoying her secretiveness more than ever. She and Peter would go, on Thursdays, to meet the young dealer and his skater friends in a house they rented in Cronulla. She’d tell Mark she was working late, and duck away with the thrill of a teenage truant. And these kids were cool too. They were into BMX riding, and skateboarding, and surfing. When they did crystal, they’d go out and try new stunts. They weren’t like pathetic dope smokers; they used crystal for a purpose. When they smoked, they planned what they’d do with their bikes or boards. And then went out and did it.

While she was living with Mark, Vicki couldn’t go on big crystal blow-outs, so rather than quit smoking she found herself using the drug in a utilitarian way. She’d have a smoke and sit up all night doing her tax return. She’d smoke when she brought home repetitive work tasks, to catch up (she didn’t seem as productive in the office anymore, and her billable hours—the six-minute units into which she had to chop her working days— had been in a steady decline). Meanwhile she hated her job, and much of her conversation was a litany of complaint about the people she worked with, particularly the partners who had it in for her and wouldn’t promote her. There was an organised conspiracy to overlook her and other associates of her age, skip a generation and give partnerships to practitioners in their twenties. She couldn’t stand the bullshit, the politics, the campaigning. She wasn’t into it; she wouldn’t sell her soul for a crummy partnership. Why would she want to be a partner with those unreconstructed misogynist wankers anyway?

She would pour this out to Peter, who, like Vicki, had been overlooked. He said they were being ‘managed out’ of their jobs and he was planning to take a redundancy if, as was rumoured, they were offered. Peter had bought an investment unit in Chinatown and was renting it to the skateboarders, who had set up a meth-cooking facility to earn them all some money and keep him, Peter, in supply.

Which soon meant Vicki too. She had avoided smoking alone with Peter out of a self-created sense of ‘boundaries’—in other words, she knew what might happen. He was an attractive, unmarried guy, and she had a husband who was getting on her nerves. ‘Don’t go there,’ she told herself. But one day she had to drive to Newcastle to meet a group of important clients. She had a point in the glovebox to smoke before the meeting. Other staff from the law firm were going as well, but Vicki had intentionally missed their minibus so that she could travel alone. She couldn’t face these meetings without a smoke on the way.

But at the last minute, Peter called her: he’d missed the minibus too. Could she give him a lift?

They drove up the old Pacific Highway and pulled over at a waterside park in Belmont. They had a smoke. Vicki knew what would happen, and it did.

Telling Mark was the easy part; separating from the girls was harder. But there was no question about it. Mark was, at the moment, a better parent. He’d taken the break from his job so as to spend more time with the girls, and was taking it seriously, as if to make up for Vicki’s negligence. Mark had gone all square on her. He wanted to be a better father. Now that she’d told him about her ‘thing’ with Peter, he flaunted his commitment to fathering like a reproach.

It wasn’t that Vicki didn’t want to be a better mother—of course she did. But she also wanted to keep partying, she wanted to press ahead with her 60-hour-a-week career ‘even though it was killing me’, and she wanted to take some time away from Mark. Not all of these desires were compatible. She told herself that she’d had sex with Peter as a way of bringing things to a head, an avenue for telling Mark she wanted a separation. And maybe things would sort themselves out with a bit of space.

She was keenly aware that it was a bad look, however, for a mother to have left her children, even if temporarily. So guilty was she that Vicki dropped out of contact with her parents. A tight-knit family group, their interest in her circumstances offended her sense of privacy and alienated her from them. They talked a lot with Mark and swallowed his side of the story, which only made Vicki resent them and guard herself more zealously.

She knew she was messed up, but this was a necessary phase of self-discovery, she thought. She’d be better for it. She took out a short-term rental on a serviced apartment and saw the kids most weeks—during the week, rather than on weekends, which she spent with Peter and the young skateboarding guys.

By now, Vicki was only straightening out from the past weekend on Wednesday, and by Thursday she and Peter would be arranging deals. Sometimes they’d have an early start for the next weekend. Life was a weekend. Wednesday was her ‘CFD’—crystal-free day.

It sounds from this distance as if her life was spinning out of control. It didn’t seem like that to her at the time, though. ‘I was quite steady and rational, in my mind at least. I actually thought I was the only person who was being rational, and Mark and my family were the ones who were losing it.’

She and Peter didn’t go to parties as much. Vicki didn’t want to run into friends or acquaintances and face the relentless questioning over Mark and the girls. She really didn’t want to see anyone except Peter. When she smoked now, she liked to stay home and clean, or do paperwork, or watch television, or play the computer games on which Peter was hooked. More and more she saw crystal as an efficiency-assisting medication. She hated wasting her time. Getting high was not an escape from life’s mundane tasks, it was a way of making them tolerable and even enjoyable. It wasn’t about tuning in and dropping out, it was about work and usefulness. It was a drug of the age.

She liked that it helped her keep her weight down. She heard the stories of girls using it as a weight-control drug to counter the effects of alcohol, ‘and I guess I was seeing it the same way’, she says. ‘It was all bound up with me making the best of my life. I was drinking a huge amount, and the crystal was, you know, to offset the alcohol. Peter and I were smoking heaps of dope, too, to take the edge off the crystal and help us come down, but dope has its own after-effects and I’d smoke some crystal to clear my head of the herbal haze. That was how the logic worked. I know it sounds stupid, but everything made sense to us then, as if crystal was helping us on this sort of health kick.’

The initial rush of smoking crystal was still there, but the overall effect over the five or six hours of a high was to normalise her. She was no longer taking it to enhance her already good mood, as she had in the early days with Mark. Now she smoked to push away a negative mood: subdue the jitters, the anxiety, the anger, the self-recrimination. Crystal wasn’t making her manic anymore; it calmed her down. ‘It didn’t take me high; it straightened me out.’

She was using one to two grams a week. It wasn’t a big habit in the scheme of things, and the scheme of things was that she knew people who smoked or blasted five or ten grams (who was keeping count? Not her, not them). The scheme of things wasn’t as it used to be. Vicki’s entire settings of normality had shifted. She had a high-paying job, she had a nice apartment, she drove a Lexus, and she wasn’t doing anyone else any injury. She even rationalised her separation from Mark and the girls by this contorted logic of minimising harm. She would have been hurting them more by staying at home and growing increasingly unhappy. So she told herself.

But she also knew she wasn’t well. Every morning, the craving—a kind of hollowed-out stomach, and a headache followed by an intense burst of sadness—was what woke her. When she got out of bed, she felt thirty years older, bent by sickness and suffering. By the end of 2005 she was having ‘a very light smoke’ each day before work, preparing a pipe for later, and living for that moment when she could spark up again. The afternoons were a horror show of irritability, paranoia and wild tantrums. Once she caught herself just short of spitting in a workmate’s face. She had been reported for abusive language and had lost concentration in meetings, forgetting what had been said and trying to bluff her way through, to the point where questions were being asked about her fitness for a job she’d been doing competently for nearly ten years. They were saying she was ‘burnt out’, but they didn’t know the half of it. With Peter one night, she suffered an episode of hyperthermia, growing so hot from dancing repetitively to their home karaoke machine that he was on the brink of taking her to hospital.

He cooled her down with ice packs, and she didn’t go to hospital. In fact, Vicki was invisible to the health and justice systems. She was never detected by any kind of research, because she never presented herself for care to a doctor and was never caught in a criminal act and taken to court. Neither Mark nor her parents were among the thousands of Australians who by 2005 were flooding family advice services such as Tony Trimingham’s NSW Family Drug Support Service or the Victorian Family Drug Help helpline asking for support in dealing with their son’s, daughter’s, wife’s or husband’s ice habit. These services recorded a trebling in ice-related calls in the two years up to 2004 and a fivefold increase up to 2007. Ice had become a family problem.

But Vicki Wolf never came out into the open. Her problem was hers alone.

Then, at the end of 2005, she took redundancy from the law firm. She saw it as a smart move, jumping before she was pushed. Not only had she dropped out of the reckoning for a partnership, she was worried she might be sacked. So redundancy came as a lucrative relief.

None of her problems were her fault, of course. Mark says that this has always been the way with Vicki, even when she’s well. Everything is everyone else’s fault. But when things were good for them, he—and she—made a joke of it.

In December 2005 it was no joke. She told her colleagues that she was leaving work to spend more time with her daughters, to repair her marriage, to live healthier. She had been undermined at work—everyone else was wrong about her, she was the only one who told the truth. There were just too many hassles anyway. Her reasons were a contradictory mishmash which nobody listened to or took seriously. If she’d gone to her farewell party, hastily organised at a city pub, she might have made a speech that embarrassed herself and the firm. But she didn’t. The farewell party slipped her mind. She’d vaguely heard about a party that night, but assumed it had nothing to do with her. When she found out later that she’d snubbed her own farewell, ‘I blamed my assistant for not making the purpose of the party clearer to me. She told me to fuck off. I guess she was glad not to be my assistant anymore. She looked like she’d been wanting to tell me to fuck off for quite a long while.’

If the passage of ice through Australian society could be traced like a barium meal going through the X-rayed human body, here’s what it would look like.

It would start with users in their twenties and thirties—not simply the sentinel group of urban injecting drug users, but white-collar middle-class people like Vicki Wolf and Mark Thomas, who first used ice with contacts from south-east Asia, and gay users in the inner cities. It also had a strong foundation in bikie culture. Ice was never simply a blue-collar or a white-collar drug, straight or gay, dance-clubbing or pub-going. It found favour with all socioeconomic and age groups, male and female, urban, suburban and rural, which over time would converge and blur until 70 000 Australians were using it regularly.

But when it was still being used by the first subcultures, in the late 1990s, the next people who knew about it were health workers and law enforcement officials. They in turn passed on their knowledge to researchers like Rebecca McKetin and the other teams at NDARC, who disseminated information in their academic papers.

Wider public awareness didn’t automatically follow. The courts became aware of it, families of ice users were affected by it, and the victims of crimes, general practitioners, lawyers, ambulance officers, and unwitting participants in the pseudoephedrine trade like pharmacists were caught up in its side effects.

The mass media awoke in its usual fitful way, alternately asleep at the wheel and running around in a panic like Henny Penny. Media tend to go to the extremes to make a story, and with ice there were two opposing marginal positions: one, that ice was not a big deal, just speed by a new name; and the other, that ice was the new demon drug, a scourge, an epidemic, a threat to children and the future itself.

Mentions of ice, methamphetamine and methylamphetamine in Australian print media can be measured. Here is how our media woke up:

At the time Dudley Aslett or Matthew Gagalowicz or most of the most serious offenders detailed in these pages were committing their crimes, it was quite possible, even likely, that the average Australian had never heard of crystal methamphetamine. Only in 2006—ironically, when ice use and police seizures had flattened out or might even have been in decline—can it be said that ice denoted more, in the average household, than frozen water.

Inevitably, once the media woke up, so did the politicians. There had been one or two, such as NSW Premier Bob Carr back in 1998, who had displayed some prescience. But the story of ice, politically, is a good case study of how political action follows rather than leads the headlines. Some state premiers, like Peter Beattie in Queensland (with a typically catchily named ‘Ice-Breaker’ strategy) and Steve Bracks in Victoria, were taking action from 2002 and 2003. In Western Australia, where ice hit hardest, it was not until 2005 that the state government stirred itself to effective action. New South Wales only announced a coordinated $400 000 ice strategy, targeting young people, truck drivers, Aboriginal people and the mentally ill, as well as providing clinical guidelines for doctors and emergency departments, in November 2005. Federally, it was 2006 before the then parliamentary secretary for health, Christopher Pyne, made ice his personal hobbyhorse, although in October 2006 his leader, John Howard, rejected calls for a national summit on ice. The following year there was more action on the federal front. The chairman of the peak advisory body, the Australian National Council on Drugs, former Howard government minister Dr John Herron, confessed that ‘we didn’t realise the real problem’, and was soon allocated $150 million to deal specifically with ice. (All up, the Howard government spent $1.3 billion on its drug strategy from 1997 to 2007.) Another federal project appropriated $5.5 million from seized proceeds of crime to be redirected into rehabilitation programs for ice users. Howard himself used a newspaper column in April 2007 to say that the ‘zero tolerance’ approach to heroin, which had ‘worked so well’ in causing the drought, was the template for his government’s approach to ice. Meanwhile, the federal parliament, in the form of Senator Bronwyn Bishop’s standing committee on illicit drugs, made a priority of investigating the crystal methamphetamine problem and attacked any opponents of ‘zero tolerance’ (such as Alex Wodak). Again, political action seemed to be a dollar short and a day late, and, with a federal election approaching, appeared to have been designed to claim credit for what had already been achieved or to stir up outrage against the already condemned.

In this spread of awareness into the living rooms of suburban Australia, however, there was one particular catalyst, which also says much about the way we learn about ourselves in the twenty-first century: this catalyst was the celebrity ice user.

The first Australian celebrity to be caught using ice was a horse. The Tin Man was a West Australian galloper who tested positive for methamphetamine (most likely injected or ingested orally, rather than smoked) after winning a race at Ascot on 28 October 2000. A long stewards’ inquiry ensued, after which The Tin Man’s trainer, Hec McLaren, was suspended.

Jokes aside, methamphetamine first came to prominence in the sporting world through the racing industry. American jockey Chris Antley held several riding records and won two Kentucky Derbies, but also endured long struggles with alcohol and illicit drugs. He became a crystal methamphetamine addict in the late 1990s and died in December 2000. More recently, one of New Zealand’s top jockeys, Lisa Cropp, who was also successful in Australia, tested positive to methamphetamine after a meeting at the Te Rapa course in May 2005.

One of the oldest uses of amphetamines, as we have seen, was as an appetite suppressant. The drug had long been taken by jockeys to help control their weight, so it was not surprising that there would be some realisation of the potential euphoric properties, and hence its use for recreational purposes. In 2005, after horses tested positive to cocaine, trainer Gai Waterhouse said there was a thriving culture in illicit stimulants at some levels of the racing industry.

Celebrity magazines and tabloid television thrive on a drug scandal; in America, crystal meth addiction has had different celebrity figureheads over time. Comedian Richard Pryor, Britney Spears, singer Stacy ‘Fergie’ Ferguson of the Black Eyed Peas, Nicole Ritchie, Lindsay Lohan, Tom Sizemore and musician Rufus Wainwright have been associated with the drug either by being caught or coming out and admitting a habit.

Australia’s first attempt to fill its celebrity-ice deficit was in January 2004, when a contestant on the reality television show The Block, Dani Bacha, was dumped after it emerged that he had been busted in a drug-manufacturing operation involving ecstasy and methamphetamine.

In the fishpond of celebrity, however, Bacha was algae-grade. A better-known ice victim was Jason Bulgarelli, a rugby league footballer with the Canberra Raiders. Bulgarelli’s rise was an unusual story, in that he had come down from Queensland, signed with the Raiders and been rookie of the year in 2003 at the age of 26. In football terms, he was closer to retirement than rookiedom.

While he shot to prominence for his bustling running and hard tackling, Bulgarelli had a dark history. He had been involved in cannabis cultivation in Queensland, and when he’d arrived at the Raiders in late 2002 a routine urine test had found traces of methamphetamine. The club kept this secret, hoping to give him a second chance. He rewarded them with strong seasons in 2003 and 2004, but at the end of 2004 a package arrived at Raiders headquarters addressed to ‘Jason Brow’, from ‘N. Brow’ in Queensland. Officials opened the package and found pills. Initially the police believed they were ecstasy, but when tested they were found to be methamphetamine. Bulgarelli came to the club asking for the package. He was questioned, then sacked. His claim for unfair dismissal came to nothing.

For news editors, celebrity is itself a kind of performance-enhancing substance, boosting otherwise mundane stories into the pages of a newspaper or website or onto the television bulletin. In 2005, a 33-year-old ice user who lit a gas cylinder and left it in an elevator in his apartment block, would have remained below the media radar except for the fact that he had formerly been a manager of the upscale Sydney restaurant Forty One. The man who said he had taken ice since being traumatised by the death of his father, had intended to blow up the Darlinghurst building in which he lived. He also used a hammer to threaten police when they came to arrest him, and told them he would set alight a second gas cylinder and a molotov cocktail if they came any closer.

As a link between celebrity and ice, however, it was a long bow. Likewise, some interest was generated by Anthony William Dow, the Qantas steward who was caught trafficking ice across the country, because he had acted in the television shows All Saints and Love is a Four-Letter Word. But as star factor, these characters were low-wattage. So desperate were Australian media to have a home-grown Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan that in 2006 the Daily Telegraph created its own celebrity ice user. Her name was Sally Brennan.

The Telegraph had been campaigning to bring ice to greater public notice. On 20 October 2006, it repeated a well-worn tactic:

In a terrifying dose of reality, the first dealer approached by The Daily Telegraph on a busy Kings Cross street yesterday offered a hit of the frightening, mind-bending drug for $50.

It was lunchtime in the city, with hundreds of people around, and in just 15 seconds the dealer had secured the drug with a mobile phone call.

He produced 0.1g of ice crystals, which would have delivered an intoxicating array of delusions and, at worst, psychosis, in a seedy alley.

The Daily Telegraph did not buy the drug but the exercise proved how easy it is to get ice in a city where school children are being admitted to hospital suffering from its effects.

It is also abundantly available in outer suburbs and can be delivered to youngsters’ doorsteps.

The dealer yesterday was not shy, announcing after his brief call, ‘I can get six matchstick-sized crystals for $50.’

The drug was presented in a bag with Playboy bunnies on it, which the dealer said was used to differentiate ‘brands of ice’.

But all stories are more effective when personalised, and twenty-year-old Sally Brennan gave the Telegraph’s campaign its needed human face.

In an ‘exclusive interview’ with the Telegraph, published on 20 October, Brennan said she had been ‘out of control’ since first using ice at the age of seventeen. She had been a heroin user, but switched when ice became more easily available.

‘I was smoking heroin with friends one day and I said “fuck it”. Everyone else around me was using it so I may as well see what it’s like,’ she said.

‘It makes you not worry—you don’t care. You don’t worry about your problems, they just get put to one side.’

She supported herself through shoplifting, and was banned from all Westfield shopping centres. Her six-week-old son Jaydan had died from sudden infant death syndrome while in her care and her other son, Jordan, was taken away from her. In October 2006, ‘hallucinating from two days of smoking ice’, Brennan dragged a 49-year-old woman from her car in Miranda in an attempt to steal it. Brennan said she thought she’d seen her son Jordan in a passing taxi and wanted to steal the woman’s car to chase after him. She failed because she couldn’t drive the manual vehicle.

The day the Telegraph interviewed her didn’t turn out well. During the morning, Brennan told the newspaper she dreamt of being ‘a superstar’ in the fashion industry and owning an apartment at Cronulla Beach. Accompanied by her father Brett, she was bailed from Sutherland Local Court over the carjacking charge, and promised to seek treatment. Brett took her to the Gorman House rehab clinic in Darlinghurst that afternoon, but within an hour she had run away, presumably to go and buy more drugs. She met up with her former boyfriend, the father of her children, and woke the next day to read about herself on the Telegraph’s front page. ‘She woke up, saw it and said, “Shit, I’m on the run”,’ said Brennan’s friend with whom she’d stayed the night. ‘I think she’d just been in a daze—the ice does that.’ Later that day Brennan was found at a Surry Hills pub, the Royal Exhibition Hotel, playing poker machines.

While the Telegraph decided Brennan was ‘the face of the ice addiction sweeping Australia’, she remained a marginal figure, her celebrity of the paper’s own making. Brennan typified many ice users, but as a ‘celebrity’ she was unsuitable. She was Aboriginal, from the fringes of society, had been abandoned by her mother as a child, and led a life of addiction and crime which many readers must have assumed was doomed already. To give its planned ‘wake-up call’ to middle-class parents, the media would need a middle-class celebrity ice user, a boy or girl next door.

Brendan Francis McMahon nearly achieved that kind of status.

McMahon was another whose relationship with celebrity was at one removed. When he first appeared in court in October 2005, McMahon was described as having run ‘a financial and mortgage broking company, Meares-McMahon Capital, with Jason Meares, the brother of fashion designer Jodhi Meares, who was formerly married to James Packer’. It was another long stretch, but a Packer connection would suffice for newsworthiness until details of his crime emerged.

In mid-2005, police had received information that 40 to 50 dead rabbits had been found in a lane behind McMahon’s office in York Street, Sydney. A number of those rabbits had been interfered with sexually. Police traced McMahon through a corporate credit card with which he had bought the rabbits, and found on the card ‘excessive amounts of purchases from pet stores around Sydney’. They obtained a warrant and confronted McMahon, charging him with bestiality and the mutilation deaths of seventeen rabbits and a guinea pig. He had small scratches all over his face.

‘Since the time the investigation involving these offences commenced . . . it has become evident that the injuries to each animal has escalated in violence and ferocity,’ the police fact sheet tendered in evidence said.

McMahon, 36, was also charged with possession of cannabis, but when he gave evidence in court he spoke of having become addicted to crystal methamphetamine. Having dabbled in biblical and Eastern mysticism, McMahon believed he was ‘a tool for the universe’ who had a special ability to communicate with animals. He said he had been tasked with ‘rescuing animals from pet stores’ and creating ‘safe havens’ that were ‘free of predators’. McMahon denied having had sex with any of the animals, and prosecutors dropped the bestiality charge when they were unable to prove that he had penetrated a rabbit with his penis.

The forensic psychiatrist Dr Stephen Allnutt examined McMahon, and found that the New Zealand-born financier was not mentally ill. Dr Allnutt’s report said that McMahon had used cannabis since his teens and had a ‘lifelong love for nature’, but his ‘interest in nature, bird-watching and mysticism became distorted by the amphetamine use’ after McMahon began using ice to give him a ‘mental push’ at work and confidence in tense business negotiations. McMahon had ‘delusional’ beliefs that ‘were further complicated by his interest in mysticism, hence the development of his idea that he could communicate with animals through a third eye’, Dr Allnutt said. ‘At the time he really believed that he had been communicating with the rabbits, and that this interaction with the rabbits was of value to nature. He said that when this happened he would feel a “joy” in his heart.’

McMahon had told Dr Allnutt about three ‘significant’ experiences during the year or so when he had been smoking ice. Twice, in the outback, birds had followed his truck and communicated with him, and once he’d seen a cloud shaped like a wedgetail eagle.

‘During the period that he had these experiences he had also become contemplative about contributing more to nature,’ Dr Allnutt said.

McMahon, Dr Allnutt believed, had become ‘floridly psychotic’ during his ice use. He had asked Dr Allnutt: ‘I wonder if I made a mistake, because I never actually asked the rabbits if I could kill them.’

Dr Allnutt told the court:

I believe he was doing it in a deluded mental state in the belief that what he was doing was right.

He felt justified in doing something that he saw as morally right because he was delusional.

That was the degree of distortion of his capacity to reason about rightful and wrongful, significantly compromised by his delusional belief that he was placed on the earth for a special purpose and that purpose was to free the animals.

The Crown argued that McMahon’s mental state was self-induced, and the court agreed, sentencing him to sixteen months in jail with a twelve-month non-parole period. Magistrate Ian Barnett said: ‘There is community outrage at this matter and someone should not be allowed to commit such offences of aggravated cruelty upon animals and then say, “Well, I was using ice at the time. I have been taking cannabis for most of my life”.’

McMahon, however, believed he would not have committed his crimes without the influence of ice, and later his conviction was overturned by the District Court on technical grounds.

Outside the District Court, McMahon set himself up as a spokesman warning the public of the perils of ice: ‘If you use ice you’ll end up either in a mental institution, or in jail or dead,’ he said.

‘Anybody who hands someone an ice pipe and offers them the drug is not a friend of the person.

‘It always surprised me that you could get ice pipes in tobacconists and the state government collects GST on that . . . Ice is a problem that the government can fix.

‘Once you start playing around with the endocrine system there’s no turning back. When you’re addicted to it, it’s like the little entity in your brain saying, you know: “Smoke me, smoke me.”’

McMahon, who by his release in 2006 was drug-free and had no pets other than a family dog, could not remember the details of what he had done.

‘The weird thing is to look back and ask yourself why. There really are no valid reasons . . . I think I was burnt out and self-medicating. ‘When you experience psychosis and then you come out of psychosis you don’t really remember very much at all. It’s like it never happened or it happened to another person.’

(Following outrage over the McMahon case, New South Wales introduced tougher laws against animal cruelty. The first person convicted under them was also an ice user. Stephen John Clancy, of Blackett in western Sydney, had smoked ice before becoming angry with his pet kitten, Puddy, when she defecated in his house. Clancy, 45, had rubbed Puddy’s face in her faeces, thrown her out the back door, and kicked her before throwing her into a bin. He pleaded guilty to animal cruelty, and was banned from owning a pet again.)

Brendan McMahon had achieved what Dudley Aslett, Damien Peters, Mohammed Kerbatieh and the other offenders mentioned in these pages had failed to do: he had brought ice onto the front pages. This was due to a number of factors, not least of which was the strange horror of his crimes. But the undeniable currency, in media terms, of Brendan McMahon was that he was a well-paid financier with connections to the Packer family. He was middle class and prosperous. And ice had brought him undone. But it wasn’t until early 2007 that the Australian media, at least, had the celebrity factor it had been craving.

Ben Cousins, the Australian Rules footballer from Perth, is mentioned in connection with ice more than any other Australian. Cousins, who was suspended from the West Coast Eagles and later sacked because of drug use, was a hero to children and therefore a poster boy for the evils of drugs. He was friends with bikies and criminal underworld figures, and his career went off the rails when he could not control his drug habit. His friend, former Eagles star Chris Mainwaring, died in late 2007 from the toxicity of a number of legal and illegal drugs. Later, Cousins was reported to suffer an episode of severe cocaine intoxication while on holidays in Los Angeles.

Yet Cousins did not speak publicly about ice, or even admit that it was the drug with which he had his greatest problems. Indeed, Cousins didn’t admit to much at all. It was through ‘sources’ that Cousins was connected to ice, at a time when the drug was at the front of the public mind. Cousins’s drug use appears to be a complex of ice, cocaine, alcohol and other substances, but until more is known about his use patterns, he remains a symbolic rather than instructive example of the perils of ice. Because of his fame, Cousins levered open a long-running public debate about ice. That is what fame does, and what the media had been looking for to refresh a story that had been bubbling along at a lower level of interest. It is largely thanks to Cousins that the number of times ice was mentioned in the media tripled in 2007.

But due to the player’s lack of candour, the Cousins–ice story is incomplete. A more useful, and revealing, story of a prominent person falling for the drug was told by Phil Jamieson.

Jamieson’s ice problem first received a public airing on 17 February 2007, when the Daily Telegraph revealed that he had been in an Odyssey House detoxification unit in Sydney. Jamieson, the frontman and songwriter for the band Grinspoon, had admitted himself for treatment. He entered a six-week rehab program at a time when his wife Julie Fitzgerald was eight months pregnant with their second child.

Grinspoon had never hidden their liking for drugs. They were named after the Harvard Medical School professor and marijuana supporter Dr Lester Grinspoon, and their songs included a paean to drugs called ‘Chemical Heart’. More revealing was the name of the album they were recording when Jamieson went into treatment: Alibis and Other Lies.

By the middle of 2007, when his daughter Evita had been born and the album was ready for release, Jamieson was giving interviews about his experience with ice. He was most candid with Andrew Denton on ABC-TV’s Enough Rope.

Jamieson told Denton how he’d grown up in Hornsby, north of Sydney, singing in a travelling Christian rock band called Good Grief with his Baptist parents. They moved to Bourke, where Jamieson’s father built a mud-brick house, and joined the charismatic Cornerstone Church. Banned from watching films by his strict parents, Jamieson built a make-believe video shop out of pieces of wood, ‘renting out’ his ‘videos’ to his siblings.

His parents were also teetotallers. Jamieson’s first taste of alcohol was from a half-case of warm VB beer, an unwanted gift that his father had shoved in the laundry. Soon, he said, he was trying all kinds of liquor surreptitiously. The family moved to Lismore and Jamieson first tried marijuana at fifteen: ‘That was really, really fun for about ten years.

‘Unbeknownst to me all the popular sport/surfing kids at school were all smoking pot, like it was part of the thing. So once I became able to smoke pot then I was kind of a little bit more accepted . . .’

Jamieson formed Grinspoon with some Lismore friends, and they won the Triple J Unearthed contest in 1995 after hocking his guitar to pay for their demo tape. They had been playing together for about two months. After winning Unearthed, they toured regional Australia for the best part of two years. Jamieson was nineteen when they started; his bandmates were mostly older.

‘It’s really hard to remember exactly how full-on it got, but we had a lot of fun. It wasn’t necessarily all bad, and we still delivered in playing good shows. So um . . . I don’t know, lots of drugs really. Lots of beer; lots of alcohol. ’Cos you get paid in alcohol.’

For Jamieson, drugs and alcohol weren’t necessarily a way of switching off. He saw the potential for using an altered state as inspiration.

‘Whenever I’d indulge or do anything like that, I’d always want to get a song out of it. I was quite particular about this. So I’d get kind of really bent or whatever, and then go, “Oh, I’ve got to do something with this x-amount of dollars we spent on this, ’cos otherwise what’s the point of doing it?” It was kind of the way I’d always thought about things, ’cos a lot of my heroes in the past had written under certain substances and I was just like, let’s use this for its advantages or try to, at least, explore what we can make out of this.’

The band toured America, where Jamieson disgraced himself more than once under the influence of alcohol and drugs, then came back to Australia to write their album Easy, mostly in a marijuana haze.

Drug users, as has been pointed out, settle over time on their favourites. Jamieson liked marijuana, but among harder drugs he preferred stimulants. During the late 1990s he developed a distaste for ecstasy, and a clear predilection for cocaine.

‘Cocaine gave me self-confidence; gave me the ability to write a tune and have a bit of a safety net so I could write and think it’s great, whether it was crap or not, and just think, “Well, if I wake up in the morning and it is bad, then I was high so it doesn’t matter.” So the coke gave me an ability to [do that] and also it’s a party drug, so it’s very social and a lot of people were using it at the time, so it was a social thing as well.’

He met Julie in 2002, by which time Grinspoon were travelling well, with a solid Australian audience. By 2004 Julie was pregnant with their first daughter, and Jamieson tried ice while staying in Melbourne. It was the same year, as we have seen, that thousands of other Australians were also trying it for the first time.

‘I’d moved to Melbourne and around that time someone offered me some crystal and it was pretty good.’

His friend called it ‘pookey’, and Jamieson found that it dovetailed perfectly with his ‘Protestant drug ethic’ of getting high and writing songs.

Jamieson found that pookey was Melbourne’s substitute for cocaine.

‘Melbourne was different in its drug-taking culture to Sydney, I found. There was very little cocaine there, and if it was, it was horribly overpriced and pretty bad but they had more kind of amphetamine-style drugs.’

Crystal made him ‘go fast’, heightening his concentration levels. He wrote in a frenzy, up to four songs a night. Within two years, he was taking crystal every day and needed it, he said, to ‘feel normal’. Yet it wasn’t accepted among many of his social circle when he moved back to Sydney, so he retreated into doing it on his own, isolating himself from his partner and band. His routine was to stay awake for four days working in his home studio, then crash for two, before starting again. He lied to Julie and covered up after himself—becoming, in her words, ‘somebody I just didn’t know anymore’.

Jamieson said he had become a ‘monster’ of obsession: ‘I’d just be obsessed with writing, just trying to write better songs, and then I figured that I was just using the songs as an excuse to take more drugs.’

He became morbidly paranoid: ‘I’d be paranoid about walking, being in public, going to the bank, going to buy food, going to the corner shop, driving. Everything . . . I’d become a junkie. It was horrible. It’d actually beaten me. I’d used up all my chips.’

Jamieson had an affair, and also withdrew from his non-ice-using bandmates, thinking ‘I was a lot better than them’.

‘Rock bottom’, Jamieson said, was stealing from the band and then having to tell them.

‘I don’t think any of my family or even Julie realised how bad it had gotten . . . I was good at lying, really good at lying, so I hocked a guitar and got rid of stuff and stole money from other people’s accounts and yeah, it was all pretty dodgy.’

Julie left him and went to live with her parents in Queensland; his habit worsened, until he confessed everything to her. She returned and in December 2006 they began to talk about counselling—marriage, not drug, counselling.

Jamieson recalled a meeting they had with the counsellor, when he revealed his drug problem.

‘I don’t know anything about this,’ the counsellor said. ‘Are you high now?’

‘Yep.’

‘What do you want me to do about this? I think you need rehab.’

‘OK,’ Jamieson replied. ‘How do I do that?’

‘I don’t know.’

For five days in February 2007, Jamieson detoxed at Odyssey House in Minto. But then came the Daily Telegraph story and the hellfire of public exposure. ‘On the news that night, when I’m in rehab and I really don’t know many people there, there’s two TVs. One TV in the big room, a little TV in the little recreation room. Channel 7 had “From Chemical Heart to Chemical Dependency”. You know, big story, and MySpace stuff and how I was leaving disturbing messages and I couldn’t believe it was actually me . . . Yeah, it was pretty strange.’

The rehab routine was a numbing grind of group therapy and household chores. ‘Like Big Brother but with really ugly people,’ Jamieson joked. Later, when he left rehab, he was at the supermarket with his daughter and people would ask, ‘How’s the ice going?’ Paranoia set in again, almost as bad as when he was on the drug, and tempted him to relapse. On top of that, he believed the media wanted him to relapse.

In the second half of 2007, Grinspoon went touring again. Jamieson, beset by anxiety and paranoia, fought off temptation but still struggled to write songs.

‘Immediately I’ll start a song and get maybe a minute and a half in [and think] that’s shit. I start again, and just can’t actually will myself to finish a song yet.’

Jamieson’s greatest fear, after fifteen years of taking drugs, was that he wouldn’t like himself straight and sober—wouldn’t find himself interesting. That recovery of self, by the end of 2007, was still a work in progress.

Paul Hogan once said that being rich and famous was all right, but being poor and famous was pure hell. Phil Jamieson was almost broke when he came out as a crystal meth addict, and he had the integrity not to sell his confession to a commercial enterprise. He didn’t have the material means to insulate himself from the public gaze, and so the bogey of paranoia would follow him around.

Yet although much of Jamieson’s addiction to crystal had a common tawdriness to it, in the eyes of the world celebrity lacquers a kind of protective gloss onto the individual. The narrative of Jamieson would have an uptilted ending, for the time being at least.

Yet just as ice was beginning to dominate the headlines, something was changing under the surface. In 2007, the researchers at NDARC discovered that the overall use of methamphetamines, and of ice in particular, among injecting drug users was declining for the first time since 1996. The number of daily users was down (6 per cent to 5 per cent), as was the number who had used it in the previous six months (57 per cent to 47 per cent). The percentage who nominated meth as their drug of first choice fell from 23 per cent to 21 per cent. This decline was consistent across all states. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, meanwhile, measuring the entire population, had methamphetamine use steady at around 4 per cent.

What, then, was the sentinel group trying to tell us? It was too soon to say. There were previous years (2002 and 2005) when a slight decline in ice use preceded a jump, the next year, to a new peak.

But we could say what the apparent decline was not telling us. The fall was not due to an interruption of supply. Availability, price and purity of crystal meth remained steady. There was no ‘ice drought’ pushing users away.

Ice use, among injectors, has always been best viewed in the context of the availability of other drugs. Even when recent ice use was up to 70 per cent among drug injectors, only 20 to 25 per cent said it was their favourite drug. They were blasting ice because their favourite—usually heroin—was not available. Interestingly, then, the 2007 NDARC Illicit Drug Reporting System bulletin indicated that heroin was again becoming more easily available, and junkies were gravitating back towards it. There was also an uptick in the use of heroin alternatives like morphine and ‘homebake heroin’. Among injecting drug users, there can be a zero-sum game at play, and ice’s popularity or decline is only a counterweight to heroin’s.

Government officials, both state and federal, claimed some credit for the decline in ice use, pointing to graphic television and print advertising campaigns showing the dark side of crystal meth. Louisa Degenhardt, the NDARC lead researcher, said that without a drop in availability or purity or a rise in price, the best explanation of ice’s falling popularity would be its growing stigma as a dangerous drug.

A drug’s reputation, both good and bad, flows from many places. It defies belief that an advertising campaign can change attitudes. The year the frightening ice ads appeared, 2007, the federal government spent more than $100 million on promoting the virtues of WorkChoices. The results of the 2007 election suggest that the advertising made no impact.

I have argued throughout this book that the true source of a drug’s reputation is word of mouth. Drug users talk about other drug users. Matthew Gagalowicz had friends who heard about what he’d done, and who would consequently never touch ice with a bargepole. And they would tell others. All of the terrible crimes or personal collapses detailed in these pages are not stories that exist in isolation. Every victim has acquaintances, and every disaster ripples outwards. If there can be any benefit in an atrocity such as what CB and IM did to Garry Sansom, it would be that other ice users in the Newcastle area heard about it, and decided that if ice made you that ‘scattered’, then it was not the drug for them.

The Turning Point Drug and Alcohol Centre, in Fitzroy, Melbourne, interviews users about their attitudes towards certain drugs each year. It found that crystal meth use declined between 2003 and 2005. In 2003, two-thirds of ecstasy users had recently used crystal, but by 2005 fewer than half had. ‘People see the harmful effects in their friends, or they may experience it themselves,’ says the lead researcher, Jennifer Johnstone. American psychiatrist epidemiologist Ernest Drucker backed up this idea of drug education, telling a conference in Melbourne that ‘most [users] get the hell scared out of them and don’t come back to the drug’.

Vicki Wolf and her boyfriend Peter had moved up to Queensland in 2006. They both had taken six-figure redundancy payouts from the Sydney legal firm where they’d worked, and were able to rent a handsome apartment overlooking Broad-beach. Peter had friends on the Gold Coast, and Vicki wanted to get away from the niggling and guilt trips laid on her by her husband Mark. She would miss her daughters, but she saw this trip up north as a ‘sabbatical’ to freshen herself up and get a new outlook on life. She convinced herself that she was moving a thousand kilometres away for her children.

She wasn’t slowing down on the crystal. Queensland had a claim to being the methamphetamine capital of Australia, with 212 clandestine labs found in 2004 and amphetamines being the primary drug of choice for 40 per cent of drug rehab patients. Sean Cousins, president of the Gold Coast Drug Council, said in 2006 that ‘there is nowhere else in the Western world that has a worse problem of amphetamines than south-east Queensland’. It may have been a hyperbolic claim, but for Vicki and her well-connected boyfriend the Gold Coast had it all: sun, beaches, nightclubs—and crystal on tap.

Peter had been ‘blasting’ or injecting since 2002 or 2003. Vicki was scared of needles, and put up with the ragging from him and his blaster friends; yet she also envied them. Smoking was fine, but she could see that it was the blast of the spike that took Peter back to the thrill of the first use, something she herself had lost. He didn’t push her to inject, or chastise her for wasting the drug. He just said, once, what she’d never forget: ‘It’s like everything good that’s ever happened in my life is all happening at once.’

In 2006, in their Gold Coast apartment, she asked him to do it. He complied without a word.

‘It felt like a thousand orgasms,’ she says now. ‘That’s all I can say. I thought it was so good, I’m never going to do that again.’

Even at this point, Vicki was scared of becoming ‘addicted’. What she was already, she had another name for. She liked her lifestyle, and she liked what crystal did for her. But she didn’t want to go down the road of ‘addiction’, which for her—in another hasty reconfiguration of her internal rules and parameters—meant being an addicted injecting drug user, a junkie.

Peter, though, was feeling the pinch. Unlike Vicki, who still maintained the fig leaf of her CFD, or crystal-free day, Wednesday, Peter blasted crystal every day. He would stay awake for up to five days on end, much of it playing video games. He didn’t seem to suffer from paranoia or depression, and his hygiene did not slide downhill towards the notorious ulcerated ‘meth mouth’ of many habitual ice users. Neither Peter nor Vicki would ever develop the bugs-under-the-skin syndrome in which meth users scratch or dig holes in their arms and legs searching for imaginary insects. In fact, Vicki and Peter both made sure they looked quite acceptable—tanned, if thin.

But when he came down, Peter began to suffer. He would smoke a lot of dope and drink a lot of vodka, then lie down to sleep, and his senses would keep racing. The inundation of neurotransmitters into his synapses couldn’t stop, even with the hammer-blow of prescription tranquillisers. He would puff and pant and thrash about in bed, get up and watch more television, go for a walk, but nothing would work. Sometimes he lay beside Vicki masturbating, mechanically and without pause or end in sight. It didn’t shock her; sex between them, by this stage, was often a similar affair, both of them on parallel tracks trying desperately to get themselves off. It was exhausting.

Yet it didn’t exhaust Peter when he was hit by the insomnia. He couldn’t come and he couldn’t stop.

The episode ended with him blasting some more crystal, slipping off to someone else’s place and bashing up a friend, who Peter thought, bizarrely, had laced his coffee with meth. Vicki didn’t see this happen and couldn’t believe Peter would act violently. But when she was woken by a phone call from one of his friends and went to the other apartment, Peter acted as if he was terrified of her.

‘He scrambled across the floor on his bum, you know, backwards, and kicked furniture towards me,’ she says. ‘He was so scared, I just burst into tears. It wasn’t him. It was like he had Alzheimer’s or something. If he lashed out at someone, it was only because he was so terrified.’

The friend who had called Vicki over said Peter had injected some ‘psychosis in a satchel’—crystal that was 80 per cent pure. What they’d been taking, all these years, probably varied in purity from 15 to 70 per cent. He’d been awake for days and had gone through an extended insomniac horror. If he was ever ripe for a psychotic reaction, it was now.

Vicki didn’t know what to do with Peter. Neither did the other people in the flat, except to tell her to ‘get rid of him’. She had a small smoke to settle herself down and helped Peter out into the lift. ‘He was gibbering about killing himself, it wasn’t like him. I mean, I was looking at him and thinking he’s turned into someone else.’

When they got outside, Peter ran away from her. Vicki chased him, but couldn’t keep up. She returned to their apartment and watched television. She smoked some dope to bring herself down—the ice she’d smoked in the other flat had indeed been stronger than she really wanted or needed.

She waited for Peter to come back.

Some time in the next few days, he turned himself into a police station 20 kilometres north of the Gold Coast and confessed to a robbery and murder which he hadn’t committed. He said he’d robbed and killed Vicki. She found out where he was when the police knocked at her door.

‘They were not especially pleased to see I was alive,’ she said. ‘They could see the state of the place and probably smell the dope smoke. They took one look at me, and looked at each other, and thought yep, Pete was having a psychotic episode but he wasn’t a murderer. It was like they were so over him, over crystal users, that they’d have preferred I was dead so they’d have a real case to deal with.’

When he straightened up, Peter decided never to do crystal again—‘Just like that,’ Vicki says, snapping her fingers. He took treatment at a $600-a-day private hospital and discovered that he might have had a pre-existing mental health problem. Vicki never discovered exactly what his problem was, but she learnt that 80 per cent of patients in the rehab clinic had a ‘dual diagnosis’. That is, they suffered from a combination of anxiety, depression, insomnia and other disorders exacerbated by drug use. ‘As far as we knew, it could have been the dope and alcohol as much as the crystal that was fucking him up.’ She still didn’t want to pin the blame on crystal meth.

When she visited him, ‘he was polite but didn’t want anything really to do with me. It was like he’d ruled a line under that period, and now he was going to start a new life.’

Vicki didn’t give up immediately. ‘No, I just networked with some of the users who were in rehab and lined up a new dealer.’ But when Peter moved back to Sydney a few weeks later, she discovered she was too lonely to go on.

‘There wasn’t really a turning point, except for Pete’s psychosis thing, but that happened to him, not me. I think I was just tired of it all, and when he wasn’t with me I couldn’t pretend I was up there because I was in love, or having a wild adventure, or finding my lost youth, or whatever ridiculous story I’d been telling myself.’

She simply couldn’t tell herself any more stories. So she, too, gave up. She did it without any other drugs, or any rehabilitation, or any visit to a doctor. She just stopped. She suffered terribly for a fortnight, but disciplined herself with yoga and gym.

‘Everyone has their own rock bottom,’ she says. ‘Mine was kind of personal. I wasn’t going through the worst of it as a crystal user, a lot of people go through much worse than me, [mine] was kind of a middle-class rock bottom. I just started to think I’d wasted a lot of great opportunities with my career and I’d fucked up my relationship with my husband, my kids and my parents. I mean, on the one hand it’s not too bad, but on the other hand, what can be worse than that?’

The rising and falling tide of methamphetamine use is increasingly patchy across Australia. Victorian meth has always been of low purity—some experts say it should never be called ‘ice’. In New South Wales, injecting drug users respond elastically to the availability of heroin; when heroin is around, ice use drops. Western Australia, relatively isolated from the heroin trade, has always shown a disproportionate taste for crystal meth. It is to Western Australia that we turn for a story that has surely radiated outwards among teenagers and young adults as the most effective form of advertising for what crystal meth can do.

The Collie murder has a special horror probably because the killers were girls. Most of the perpetrators of crimes we have seen were men. Even though ice is unusual for a hard illicit drug in that numbers of male and female users are roughly on parity, violent crime statistics are skewed heavily towards male offenders. The Collie murder is an exception for that reason, and also for its absolute callousness.

In June 2006, three teenage girls went to a party together in the coal-mining town south of Perth. Two of them had just turned sixteen and the third, Eliza Jane Davis, was still fifteen.

The two sixteen-year-olds, C and B, had a complex history both together and apart. C’s father had died from a drug overdose when she was four, something she didn’t find out about until her teens. She was raised by her mother and stepfather, but in 2002 her mother died when their car smashed into a tree.

C was observed to be cold and detached at the funeral, unable to cry. She apparently blamed her stepfather, and fantasised about taking vicious and sadistic revenge on him, which she wrote on a computer. When he found these writings and confronted her, C ran away from home. She negotiated herself a series of foster-home arrangements in Collie, but could settle in none of them until, around her fourteenth birthday, she moved in with B.

B lived with her single mother, who worked as a disability carer, and three siblings. C and B had already become best friends: born four days apart, both slim and frail-looking, they saw themselves as ‘twins’, their destinies locked together. They both adopted the Goth/emo subculture, romanticising death and headlong substance abuse. They ganged up on B’s elder sister, and soon B’s mother was coming home to find large groups of teenagers playing music and taking drugs, her house in mayhem.

B and C were soon part of a roaming population of truant teenagers, going to derelict party houses for weekends of music, drinking and drug-taking. In 2004 and 2005, the illicit drugs tended to be cannabis and sometimes ecstasy.

B’s mother would later tell the Australian that she tried to take the girls to her church, but the minister ‘did not have God in his heart’ and provided no counsel other than to say blithely that the girls ‘would find their own way’.

‘I took C to see a counsellor at the family centre and the chaplain at the high school, because I could see she was in trouble,’ B’s mother said. ‘One day we were sitting in the front bedroom and C turned to me and said, “I wonder what it would be like to kill someone”. And then she said, “B and I are going to be together for life”. I thought, “That’s a weird thing for her to say”.’

Both girls experimented with self-harm, particularly after they were separated again when B’s mother asked C to leave the house and find somewhere else to live. The pair told friends they were going to catch a bus to Perth and jump together off the highest building they could find.

After B’s mother declined to take another truant teenage girl into her care, B walked out, living in friends’ houses for some months until early 2006, when she moved into a caravan with another school friend, Eliza Davis.

Eliza was, like B and C, a fan of the emo subculture but was more motivated by her studies. She moved into the caravan because her separated parents’ homes were both too far from Collie High School. Soon B was kicked out of the caravan, but she and Eliza found rooms at a nearby house and moved in. B’s mother, who moved to Perth, sent B money to enrol in a TAFE course, but the girl’s behaviour was growing more erratic: one day she found a homeless kitten and took it in, but when it grew sick she killed it and left it on the kitchen table.

C, meanwhile, was apparently growing jealous of B’s new friendship with Eliza. C had moved to Perth to live with a godmother, and then a foster brother, but was invited to a party in Collie in mid-June 2006. When she came to B’s house, she found Eliza cutting and dyeing B’s hair. ‘I think C walked into the house and she sees B and Eliza having a pal-sy time together, and I think C was very jealous,’ B’s mother speculated. ‘I have this vision of C walking in and going, “Hello, she’s taken my spot and she’s got to go”.’

At the party that night, all three girls drank, smoked marijuana, and snorted or smoked crystal methamphetamine. Ice had recently arrived on the Collie scene, and was proving a popular diversion. The party kicked on to the house where B and Eliza were living. Before dawn the guests left and the girls went to bed.

B and C woke up together and began talking. Eliza was still asleep.

‘Sunday morning me and C just woke up and we were just talking and then for some reason we just decided to kill her,’ B would tell police.

C said: ‘We just did it because we felt like it, it is hard to explain. I knew we had wanted to kill someone before.’

They made plans, and when Eliza woke up they were ready.

They changed into old clothes. Eliza came into their bedroom and turned away from them while she was reading a yearbook from Collie High School. C jumped on her, pressing a chemical-soaked cloth to her mouth. B wrapped speaker wire in two loops around Eliza’s neck. She struggled, screaming: ‘What are you doing?’ . . . ‘Oh you freaks, what’s wrong with you psychos?’

B said she saw Eliza’s emotions shifting from anger, to fear, to the realisation she was going to die.

‘She was face up to me as I was doing it. She started to get scared, she started to cry. It was all blood coming out of her mouth.’

When Eliza was dead, B and C carried her roughly downstairs to the dirt-floor cellar. They sat and had a drink, and smoked some dope before digging a 40-centimetre-deep grave in which they buried Eliza. They threw her handbag, clothes and mobile phone away, rang Eliza’s and B’s mothers to say she was missing, and helped police in the search.

C returned to Perth, but by the Wednesday, three days after the murder, she told B that the grave was too shallow and they were bound to be caught; consequently, she was going to turn herself in to a city police station. That day, B also surrendered and confessed to Collie police.

B and C pleaded guilty to murder. At their sentencing hearing in Perth Children’s Court in April 2007, the dominant reaction was bafflement. The girls expressed no remorse, detailing the crime in a matter-of-fact way, emphasising that they did it purely out of curiosity. They had chosen strangulation because they wanted it to be ‘non-messy’, C told police. ‘As our friend, we did not really want her to suffer. We knew it was wrong but it didn’t feel wrong at all, it just felt right. We were willing to take the risk. We said if we did get caught, shit happens, and we will deal with it.’

The prosecutor, Simon Stone, said the lack of reason for the murder or remorse afterwards were the most disturbing factors in the case. Eliza’s family believed the girls treated both the murder and the sentencing as ‘a joke’.

Perth Children’s Court president Denis Reynolds sentenced them to life imprisonment, describing the murder as ‘gruesome and merciless in the extreme’.

Judge Reynolds told the court that while drugs ‘formed an integral part of their lifestyle and psychological health’, they were not the ‘catalyst’ for the murder.

‘The facts of this case put it in the worst category of the most serious offence in the criminal code. It was planned,’ he said.

‘I think it fair to say that none of the professionals, the psychiatrist and psychologists . . . have been able to fully explain [the pair] committing the offence.’

Defence lawyers agreed. ‘In more than ten years in the law I’ve never come across anything remotely like this,’ criminal lawyer Michael Clarke, who defended B, told the Australian. ‘When I got the material facts and read through, it all seemed fine until I got to the part where they got up and decided to kill their friend. There was something clearly missing there as to how we made that jump. It’s one thing to wake up and decide that—to actually do it is another thing altogether.’

Clarke said the hearing was ‘thorough and fair’ but ‘it just didn’t provide an answer . . . It bothered me that I couldn’t find the golden key.’

There was much in the girls’ psychological histories and conduct to suggest a homicide/suicide pact, an emotional attachment to each other that could only be sealed in blood, a kind of Heavenly Creatures obsession with each other and with death. Yet although Judge Reynolds was duty-bound to assign the girls total responsibility for their actions, and deny that ice was a ‘catalyst’ for the murder, anyone who has read these pages will see the common thread running through other killings to this one. At the party, these girls were high, with dopamine and serotonin released into their synapses in an overwhelming flood. Their pulses were quickened, their libido was aroused, their blood pressure was up, they felt sharp, alert, alive, and fully concentrated on the moment. Just as their impulses were loosened, the safety catch in their brains had been switched off. There seemed no reason for them to say no to any action, no matter how stupid or bizarre or cruel. Such concepts didn’t exist for them. They were racing along a free, cold, nerveless highway where everything was permitted. And when they were finished, they did what Matthew Gagalowicz, Novica Jakimov, Justin De Gruchy and others did: they covered it up with the utmost care and concentration, as if they were soldiers at war.

This is not to mitigate their actions at all, but the brain’s chemistry is undeniable; there are rock-solid rules that every ice user’s brain chemistry follows. Ice users are all on essentially the same trip. The differences between one user and another are in their individual circumstances. In some very rare cases, those circumstances lead to murder. There is no single golden key, but ice, in this case as in so many others, was an essential ingredient. It was not as crucial, as a cause of the murder, as the terrible instability of B’s and C’s childhoods, or the morbid codependency of their friendship. But it was more crucial than, say, the wire used as the murder weapon. The role of ice has become clear in this pattern of crimes committed over the years 2000 to 2006; it was, with all due respect to Judge Reynolds, precisely the word he chose. It was the catalyst.

Not every story about an ice-related crime ends in ruined lives. A great many of the ice users who committed the crimes that are detailed in these pages were career criminals, and it can be argued that although crystal methamphetamine accelerated the timing and escalated the violence of the crimes, the perpetrators were in large part an embodiment of criminality merely seeking its opportunity. There are also cases, however, of ordinary individuals with no criminal records whose only contact with the justice system came after an isolated incident involving ice. And there are cases where it ended well: where recovery, once ice was removed from the equation, was not only possible but likely. Daniel Paul Lidonnici was one of those cases.

In October 2005, Lidonnici was a 21-year-old who liked a good time and had done a few drugs over the years. An only child, he had enjoyed a relatively happy childhood in Melbourne and studied marketing at TAFE after finishing year twelve. He dropped out of the course after six months and worked in various office jobs while studying accountancy and business. He had a steady girlfriend, Hayley di Cecco, and worked with her at her father’s flower stall on Wednesday evenings and in the kitchen at Seaford RSL on Sundays.

On weekends, Lidonnici did drugs—pot, speed, ecstasy, special K and eventually ice—as well as binge drinking. He didn’t touch hard drugs during the week. It was a nightclub, partying thing, kept within the weekend waster’s boundaries.

Over the second-last weekend of October 2005, Lidonnici, di Cecco and some friends were up for two days, going to dance clubs and taking ecstasy, ketamine, cannabis and ice. On Sunday afternoon, Lidonnici drove di Cecco to St Kilda to collect her bag from a friend’s flat. On the way, they picked up a friend, Ayla Ramsay. The three were going to go to another recovery session in Heidelberg.

Inside the St Kilda flat, however, Lidonnici started acting strangely. He made some irrational comments and stared blankly at the walls. His girlfriend told him to snap out of it. Lidonnici reacted angrily, closing the flat’s door and locking them all inside.

The girls tried to calm him down, but his replies made no sense. Ayla Ramsay grabbed his car keys and offered to trade them for the keys to the flat. Di Cecco, concerned, said, ‘I’ve never seen you like this before.’ She tried to phone Lidonnici’s friend Nathan to get him to calm her boyfriend down. Lidonnici lunged at her and wrestled her to the floor. To Nathan on the phone, he said there were people in the flat trying to get him. After the call, Lidonnici dialled emergency 000 and some other friends saying someone was trying to kill him.

Lidonnici, terrified and terrifying at the same time, took a carving knife from the kitchen and held it to his own throat. Di Cecco got it off him while he was calling the police, but he went after her and grabbed another knife, pointing it at her and telling her that if she moved he’d stab her.

‘What’s the address of this flat?’ he said urgently.

‘I don’t know,’ di Cecco wept.

‘Tell me or I’ll kill you!’

When the police arrived (at Lidonnici’s request), he yelled out: ‘If you come in, I’ll kill her.’

The police broke in and hauled di Cecco out. Lidonnici was holding her around the legs, stabbing her with the knife. Lidonnici let go and the police cornered him. He threatened to kill himself. The police tried to disarm him with a shot from a Taser. Lidonnici, impervious to the charge of the gun, rammed the knife into his own chest. The police came at him but he fended them off with another knife. Eventually they subdued him with several Taser shots.

The remarkable thing about Lidonnici’s psychotic event was how isolated it was. He and di Cecco were in hospital for more than a week (Lidonnici’s wounds were life-threatening and he lost his gall bladder as a result); when they were discharged, they got back together. Lidonnici had only sketchy memories of the afternoon, but said he thought di Cecco and Ramsay were conspiring with other people to kill him. He didn’t believe the police were really police; instead, in his mind, they were players in the conspiracy.

A psychiatrist, Dr Nicholas Owens, reported that Lidonnici’s actions were caused by acute amphetamine intoxication ‘which resulted in your experiencing acute paranoid delusions of a persecutory nature (namely that you were going to be harmed by someone attempting to get into the flat), together with confusion and misidentification about the police and the phone calls you were making’.

Lidonnici’s disturbed state only lasted as long as he was drug-affected.

He pleaded guilty to a number of charges. At his sentencing hearing, the court was told that di Cecco was living with him at his parents’ house and envisaged a long-term future with him. He had no previous criminal record or anger-management problems. He was shocked and remorseful about what he had done, and stopped taking drugs or going to nightclubs.

Justice Hollingworth of the Victorian Supreme Court said:

I accept that your behaviour at the flat was totally out of character for you and would not have occurred but for your drug consumption. Nevertheless, your significant drug consumption over that weekend was entirely voluntary and was part of regular weekend drug usage at the time . . .

No long-term harm has been caused by your actions and the principal victim is fully supportive of you. You are remorseful, have co-operated with the police and pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity. I am satisfied that there is little risk of you repeating your stupid and dangerous youthful drug-taking. In my opinion, the interests of the community will not be served by your being sent to an adult prison, even for a short time . . .

I think you deserve to be given a chance. I will not send you to jail. Do not let the court or yourself down, Mr Lidonnici.

Daniel Lidonnici was sentenced to community service and fined for drug possession. His ice-using days were, he believed, firmly behind him.

By the mid-2000s, courts around the country were developing a new sensitivity to the properties of ice and its relationship with crime. In December 2006 NSW District Court Judge Michael

Finnane sentenced a man named Matt Loria to home detention rather than jail after Loria’s ‘mental processes were disordered’ when he threatened to rob a Bondi pokie den with a toy pistol. Loria, a surf instructor and father, and a friend had stayed up throughout the previous night using ice to watch cricket on television from England. ‘I can’t believe I did that,’ Loria said of the attempted robbery. ‘That was just so stupid I don’t know what I was thinking.’

Courts were showing a greater understanding in isolated cases, but were still grappling with the question of whether drug use amounting to a mental illness could be used as a defence against a criminal charge.

One case that tested this was that of Andrew Kastrappis, a 43-year-old Adelaide man who was charged with criminal trespass and indecent assault after an incident on the night of 17 June 2005.

Kastrappis lived on his own in a unit block in Pooraka, a working-class suburb north of Adelaide. His mother had died when he was twelve, but through adulthood he enjoyed a supportive relationship with his father and stepmother, and from his mid-thirties he had a girlfriend.

Kastrappis had left school after year ten and worked in a paint factory for twenty years, from 1980 till 2000, when he suffered a back injury and left work to live on a disability pension.

He used cannabis and speed from his early twenties, and had a few drug and driving-related offences on his record, but nothing remotely close to assault or trespass until 2005. That was the year he started smoking ice.

As we have seen in so many other cases, the introduction of ice to a drug user’s regime precipitated an act that was entirely out of character.

On the night of 16 June 2005, Kastrappis forced open the back door of a neighbouring unit. The resident, Ms Matthews, was asleep, but woke with a jolt when she felt something brushing her lips. She sat up to see Kastrappis, naked beneath a coat, waving his penis close to her face.

‘You have to sleep with me,’ Kastrappis said urgently. When Ms Matthews refused, he grabbed her by the pyjama pants and, pulling them down, said: ‘If you don’t, I know 200 guys who are going to come over here and they’ll give you trouble.’

Ms Matthews fought him off—Kastrappis was acting as if he was more scared than she was—and asked him what he was talking about.

‘Your boyfriend’s here, isn’t he?’ Kastrappis said.

There were so many sexual assaults by men high on ice in recent years, it’s hard to know where to place Kastrappis. He wasn’t a violent and manipulative rapist in the vein of Mohammed Kerbatieh. He was not an opportunistic lifetime criminal, like Dudley Aslett, Shane Martin or Michael Scott Wald, a 21-year-old Victorian who robbed, bashed and raped a seventeen-year-old boy one night in 2006 purely because he crossed paths with him on the street in Frankston. Ice did not, for Kastrappis, unleash a burst of sadism such as affected Lindsay Michael Hearn, a 30-year-old non-violent petty criminal from the Central Coast of NSW who impersonated a police officer and forced an autistic man to pull over on the F3 freeway in mid-2006, then kidnapped, robbed and raped him in a sexual crime that a judge said had ‘a degree of depravity and callousness . . . the likes of which I’ve not encountered before’. Nor was Kastrappis a vindictive sociopath like Canan Eken, the 28-year-old Sydney man who was jailed for fourteen years after ordering his flatmates to rape a young woman at his flat in Rosebery in 2004, as punishment for her not having sex with him. Eken, a schizophrenic, tried what sceptics were by the time of his sentencing in 2006 calling ‘the ice excuse’, testifying that he became violent after smoking a gram a day for six months. District Court Judge Anthony Puckeridge would not have it: ‘By deliberately choosing to abuse illegal substances the prisoner should be treated as choosing the consequences of his behaviour,’ he said.

There were so many sexual crimes triggered by crystal meth. But Andrew Kastrappis was different. He was unhinged and scared, and his sexual assault on Ms Matthews seemed less a result of a clear-headed plan than another facet of his general confusion. Rebuffed by her, redirecting his paranoia, he searched the unit for Ms Matthews’s boyfriend (who wasn’t there). Still apparently fearful, Kastrappis left the unit a short time later. Ms Matthews went to her boyfriend’s home and phoned the police, who arrested Kastrappis the next morning. He hadn’t left his unit.

In the South Australian Supreme Court the next year, two psychologists and the judge agreed with the defence’s submission that Kastrappis was not guilty on the ground of mental incompetence. The finer points of the psychiatric reports differed—one diagnosed the incident as a first onset of bipolar disorder, another saw it as paranoid schizophrenia triggered by the ice and cannabis use, and another diagnosed a drug-induced psychosis—but the overall agreement was that Kastrappis was, for legal purposes, mentally ill at the time he entered Ms Matthews’s flat. He was hearing voices telling him to go in, and was genuinely scared of the ‘trouble’ that unknown men were going to cause. He was placed under a supervision order with a number of tight conditions, but wasn’t considered to be a threat to the community; indeed, he stopped using ice and cannabis after the incident and, under a low dose of anti-psychotic medication, his mental health issues were held by the court to be ‘resolved’.

In March 2006, the United Nations’ International Narcotics Board declared methamphetamine to be ‘a major drug pandemic’. At the same time, there was evidence in Australia that the drug was less used, and less of a threat, than it had been in five years. Is the current lull in methamphetamine use a dip in an inexorable increase, or the first sign of a cyclical abatement? It is too soon to know the truth, but one thing is sure: crystal methamphetamine has changed not only individual lives; it has changed Australian society. It has altered the public’s disposition towards illicit drugs, and it has revolutionised the way a number of professions do their work. Hospitals, doctors’ surgeries, rehab centres, ambulances and other paramedics, pharmacies, police and customs services, schools, prisons, sporting bodies, governments, the media and the criminal courts all conduct their business differently as a result of this drug.

So much change has happened in a remarkably short time. There will always be criticisms of institutions’ slow reaction, but considering that this drug, in this form, only appeared in Australia a decade ago, the changes that have occurred are a testament to the suppleness and adaptability of our institutions.

Police in different states have dedicated clandestine laboratory squads now, with millions of dollars assigned to the specific task of locating and dismantling methamphetamine-making facilities and purpose-built trucks for reducing the harm to officers.

Police stations instruct officers in self-defence and restraint guidelines to deal specifically with suspects suffering ice-induced psychoses. In New South Wales and Victoria, programs have been developed allowing ice users to lecture police about the drug and attendant mental illnesses, to avoid attacks and shootings such as those which wounded Constable Elizabeth Roth and led to the death of ice user Gregory Rama Biggs.

Customs have new detection procedures targeted specifically at finding ice, and the Australian Federal Police allocates a large chunk of its resources to tracking ice importers in Australia and forging ties with Asian police in shutting down ice manufacturers and exporters there. Ice has been responsible for a greatly improved relationship between law enforcement officials across the region. Unlike counter-terrorism, combating crystal meth across borders has been politically and culturally uncontroversial.

The federal government has permeated every television-watching household with its ‘Tough On Drugs’ advertisements showing a man throwing a bin at a window in a hospital ward, a son knocking over his mother, and a young girl scratching ulcers into her arms. Millions of tax dollars have been spent on illustrating for every parent and child the most extreme effects of crystal meth.

Higher courts have had to adjust the common law to take into account the horrific crimes catalysed by ice. The very notion of mental illness, in a criminal context, is undergoing a reassessment across Australia.

Local courts are changing their processes to deal with an explosion of defendants showing signs of mental illness. Self-control, even in courts, can be relied on less than ever. This is not simply a matter of more guards; programs are in place around the country to divert defendants away from prison and into treatment, with clinical nurse consultants assessing defendants’ mental health needs now a fixture in the court system.

Hospitals have Psychiatric Emergency Care Centre rooms or other dedicated facilities to separate acute ice users from other patients and to treat the needs that are specific to users of the drug. Doctors’ surgeries have been reconfigured with security as a paramount concern. No longer is the threat a junkie breaking in and raiding the medicine cabinet; it is an ice user attacking the doctor, or someone else, and tearing the place down.

Rehab and detox centres, as well as having tailored therapeutic programs for ice users, now have family rooms to protect the children and spouses of recovering users.

Project STOP has changed the way pharmacists do their business, as have legislative changes to cut down on pseudo-ephedrine sales. A by-product of this has affected all Australians suffering a cold or flu: they can no longer buy apparently harmless medicines over the counter, and for many this has incurred a degree of suffering.

Treatment options still lag—there is no accepted or widely used pharmacological treatment for methamphetamine addiction. Methadone is entrenched in the treatment regime for heroin addicts, but there is still no methadone-equivalent for ice users. Behavioural therapy is still the most common approach to ice users, but there are currently about 15 000 treatment episodes a year taking place in Australia, fewer than half of the National Drug Strategy’s target of treating 70 per cent of dependent users. While most heroin addicts know of the methadone option, even if they don’t take it up, the lack of a recognised pharmacological treatment for methamphetamine addiction is seen as an influential factor in keeping heavy users away from treatment. A decade since Alex Wodak thought of prescribed dexamphetamine as a way of countering withdrawal, there is no proven pharmacotherapy for meth users. Most health professionals involved with ice say that the consequences of this will be felt in the long term: the debilitating depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses resulting from crystal methamphetamine use are a long way from being known.

Nicole Lee has surveyed treatment outcomes for the past eight years at the Melbourne clinic Turning Point. She says that the ‘natural history’ for meth users is to go from first use to regular use within a year, to suffer from mental health problems, or dependence, or a criminal act within another year, but for a staggering five years to then go by before the user seeks treatment.

‘There are lots of reasons for this,’ she says. ‘They’re reluctant to attend treatment programs that are geared for opiate users. They don’t see themselves as having that kind of hard-drug problem, and don’t want to be hanging around waiting rooms with heroin users. Also, they tend to want a response on the same day, immediately, and if we don’t give them that we lose them.’

The most effective treatment, when it happens, is a combination of cognitive behaviour therapy and drug Modafinil, which is still being trialled. Dr Lee says Modafinil is a drug to counter narcolepsy, a ‘wakefulness-promoting drug’; ‘It lifts the user’s mood during withdrawal,’ she says, ‘though we don’t know exactly how it works.’

Dr Lee thinks the time bomb on methamphetamine use is not psychosis but depression. ‘Only 10 percent of users experience psychosis, but 60 to 80 percent experience depression,’ she says. ‘It’s a quiet disorder, and the user often doesn’t link it to drug use, especially when they’ve stopped. But a debilitating depression can go on for years and years.’

In 2007, the Australian Federal Police devised a Drug Harm Index showing the economic impact of drugs on the country. The DHI measures, retrospectively, costs of violent and nonviolent crime, the drain on police resources and ambulance and hospital services, and the burden on courts and prisons.

Per kilogram produced, heroin is still the most expensive, costing the country $550 000. This has halved since 2003.

Methamphetamine costs Australia $284 000 per kilo, the DHI found. In 2003, its cost was $80 000 a kilo. (The effects of cannabis, incidentally, cost the public $13 000 a kilo.)

The AFP assistant commissioner Mike Phelan told a parliamentary committee that the DHI for methamphetamine had trebled because of ‘the increased number of interactions with the health system, people having to go to hospital, and it’s also the crime that goes with that—drug-taking, the burglaries, break-ins.’ There was also the cost of road accidents, lost work days and family break-ups.

The DHI is one attempt to quantify the unquantifiable but longest-lasting and truest cost of a drug. How do you assess the price that is paid by families when one member becomes an ice user? How do you measure the effect on the thousands of children growing up in houses where their parents are addicted to a drug? In 2007, according to a National Council on Drugs study, there were an estimated 14 000 children whose parents used crystal meth at least once a month. How can the impact ever be quantified?

There is, at the very least, a body count. Users who have committed serious crimes have had their lives depleted by years in jail. Damien Peters, Mohammed Kerbatieh, Dudley Aslett and his acolytes, Dimitrios Kyriakidis, Lindsay Hearn, Sally Brennan, Matthew Gagalowicz, Darren Blackburn, Novica Jakimov, Ersen Cicekdag, David Khuu, Justin De Gruchy, Canan Eken, Todd Bookham and the fatal young friends, IM and CB in Newcastle and B and C in Collie, have gone to jail after what they did on ice, some for the rest of their lives. There are too many to count, and they multiply when the imprisoned traffickers and manufacturers are added in.

Australia’s prisons bear a certain burden, as do the mental health facilities that have looked after the ‘innocent criminals’ such as Trent Jennings and Andrew Kastrappis.

Among their victims, life will never be the same, due to a purely random crossing of paths with ice. The Marlows of the Central Coast pharmacy, whom I interviewed in 2007, were still traumatised. Jennifer Marlow could not recall Dudley Aslett’s attack in detail, and her husband Paul said they had altered their routine of locking up the newsagency at night because of Jennifer’s ongoing fear. Peter Sutherland of the Tuggerah NAB, Constable Elizabeth Roth, Karen Fairbairn, Andrew Hennessey and John Pestana of the West Australian rest stop, unnamed and uncountable victims of sexual attacks—these people must live with their memories of terror springing out of nowhere. Emad Youssef, Giuseppe Vitale, Kelly Hodge, Andre Akai, Graham Band, Eliza Davis and many others didn’t survive the ice age. Garry Sansom, Ricky Smith and Gavin Atkin were involved in the drug trade, but nobody except their killers could ever conceive of the idea that they deserved to die or that their families deserved to go on living with such painful memories. Somewhere there is a memorial for the deceased victims of ice-related violence, and it is one that stretches out to the horizon and beyond.

When I visited Beaver Hudson at the St Vincent’s emergency department in June 2007, he talked about how the ice problem seemed to have plateaued, or even improved. Leading up to the Australian Amphetamines Conference in September 2006, the hospital had had a 36 per cent increase in meth presentations on the previous year, ‘but since then,’ he said, ‘it seems to be less.’

He was very hesitant, however, to form a conclusion that people were using less.

‘It could be that they’re still using but are not coming into hospital. Some might be realising what it does to them and stopping, but there are a lot of others, long-term users, who are staying at home and using, they’re too paranoid even to go outside. And there are others who are in jail or in psych units. You just don’t know.’

But if overall use is declining, Hudson is one of many experienced workers and researchers who say that the problems with long-term users are getting worse. He recalls a man who came to the emergency department in 2007, just a few weeks before our interview.

‘He was a big boy, very fit, about 25, solidly built, and incoherent, raving, hallucinating. He was scary. The police brought him in handcuffed. We put him on a trauma bed, but his hands were cuffed behind his back which made things difficult for sedating him. We gave him 40 milligrams of medazelam in four lots of 10 milligrams; 10 milligrams would put a normal person to sleep for six to seven hours. We gave him 40 milligrams, and still needed mechanical restraints and six or seven people holding him down. So we gave him 300 milligrams of IV Valium. We were scared that we were giving him so many sedatives we were going to kill him. He was still out of control. So we gave him Butrenorphine, an anti-psychotic. Ten milligrams would put me asleep for ten to twelve hours, and then I’d be very drowsy the next day. We gave him 60 milligrams. Then we gave him more anti-psychotic—Clopixol Acuphase—150 milligrams.

‘Then we moved him to the mental health unit. Ninety minutes later he climbed a seven-foot fence and ran away. The following day he was back in. He’d fallen asleep in a park and was suffering the effects of being out in the cold.’

The ‘Incredible Hulks’, it seems, just keep coming in. The build-up of harm inside the human brain due to methamphetamine use is still in the process of being understood. For someone like Hudson, on the frontline, that process is in daily flux.

Our interview was ultimately interrupted by the arrival of police officers with a patient who was guided into a PECC room: a twenty-year-old ice user who, believing he had aliens in his stomach, had just jumped out of the window of his second-floor flat and landed in the bushes below. He had been up on ice for more days than he could recall. This was just before midday on a Wednesday in the middle of winter.

Paul Bennett, the Maori surfer who fell into an ice addiction and pulled himself out of it by 1997, has been living in New Zealand for the past decade. He has devoted himself to naturopathic remedies, a healthy diet and the practice of ‘chi gong’, a regime of exercises similar to tai chi. He wrote and self-published a book about his experiences, Walking the Taniwha, and a New Zealand crew made a television documentary about him. He works educating young people about drugs, seeing himself as a living, breathing cautionary tale. He turned 50 in 2007. A doctor described him, considering the amount of illicit drugs he had taken, as a ‘medical miracle’.

Paul doesn’t believe ice is on the way out.

‘My connections tell me that it’s as much around as it ever was,’ he says. ‘It’s just gone underground. The guys who are known to take it have been banned from nightclubs, so they just stay in each other’s place and do ice. It’s still around, for sure. It’s not about to disappear.’

Vicki Wolf and Mark Thomas are back together, with their daughters. After she returned from Queensland they moved home to Melbourne, where both their families live. Mark continues to be a house-husband, doing some part-time legal consulting. Vicki is working for a well-known commercial law firm. Her years of crystal meth use have not harmed her career irreparably. Nobody outside the law firm she left in Sydney has any suspicion of what she was up to, and even there they only thought she was burnt out by work stress and marital strain.

Eight months since she last smoked crystal, boredom, she says, is the big enemy. ‘I can cope with the guilt by trying to be a good mother, good daughter, good wife and all that,’ she says. ‘I can make my reparations to Mark, and he’s taken me back. I can work hard and be straight, and I can deal with the usual problems that were getting me hot and bothered before.

‘But I miss it, and I’m worried that I’ll miss it too much. I find myself a bit boring. That’s the scary thing. Mark’s happy with me, but I get bored with my own company. I sort of worry that I didn’t really let myself go that badly, didn’t have such a horrific rock-bottom experience that it’d teach me a lesson I’d never forget. The fact is, I got off lightly and I wasn’t scarred by it, or not enough to scare me off it for life.’

To which Mark says: ‘Actually, she is scarred by it: all you’re hearing is the depression speaking. There’s a long depression that follows this drug, and it took me a year to come out of it. She’s only just coming out of it. In six months, I promise, she’ll be her old self again.’

‘That’s what I’m afraid of!’ she says with a worried kind of laugh.

They talk about a new government advertising campaign, released in 2007, called ‘Pick the Drug User’. It is a poster with one hundred diverse people who are all, apparently, drug users. They look like a completely random cross-section of youngish Australians. None of them fits the junkie stereotype.

‘That’s the thing,’ Vicki says. ‘There actually are recreational drug users and these can be recreational drugs, and you can do it without anyone in the world picking you for a drug user. The thing is, though, you can’t do it forever.’

She shakes her head as if in wonder. ‘Nobody would ever have picked me.’

ENDNOTES

‘On the first Saturday . . .’ The Channel [V] story was widely reported in newspapers; these quotes are from the report in the Daily Telegraph, Monday 8 October 2007.

‘The anonymous online survey . . .’ ‘Drugs and Driving in Australia: a survey of community attitudes, experience and understanding’ [PDF 660KB], J. Mallick, J. Johnston, N. Goren & V. Kennedy, Australian Drug Foundation, Melbourne, October 2007.

‘The leading fact-finders . . .’ A large number of NDARC reports are referenced in this book. These reports, such as the Illicit Drug Reporting System (IDRS), the annual Australian Drug Trends series and National Illicit Drug Indicators Project (NIDIP), are available online at <www.ndarc.med.unsw.edu.au> or from NDARC, University of New South Wales Randwick Campus, 22–32 King Street Randwick NSW 2031.

Vicki Wolf and Mark Thomas are pseudonyms of subjects interviewed by the author in May, June, July and November 2007 and January–February 2008.

The author interviewed Paul Bennett in June and November 2007. Bennett’s words are from these interviews and his self-published memoir Walking the Taniwha.

The author interviewed Rebecca McKetin in May–June 2007. Statistics from her reports are sourced from NDARC (see note to p. iv above).

‘Mohammed Kerbatieh . . .’ R v Kerbatieh [1997] QCA 30 (7 March 1997).

The information on Mark Dudley Aslett in this book is sourced mainly from the following legal proceedings: Aslett v R [2006] NSWCCA 49 (24 March 2006), Aslett v R [2006] NSWCCA 48 (24 March 2006), Aslett v R [2006] NSWCCA 360 (16 November 2006), Regina v Aslett [2004] NSWSC 1228 (15 December 2004) and Dudley Mark Aslett v R [2006] NSWCCA 86 (28 March 2006).

‘Brent Martin . . .’ The Sun-Herald, 17 September 1989.

‘Japan is where we must go . . .’ Material on the history of amphetamines used in this book is drawn from dozens of widely available public sources. In particular, the author acknowledges the books American Meth: A History of the Methamphetamine Epidemic in America by Sterling R. Braswell (iUniverse Inc, 2005) and “Meth” The Home-Cooked Menace by Dirk Johnson (Hazelden Foundation, 2005).

‘Dr Nicolas Rasmussen . . .’ The author interviewed Dr Rasmussen in February 2008.

The information on Damien Peters in this book is sourced mainly from R v Peters [2002] NSWSC 1234 (20 December 2002) and from media reports.

The information on Darren Jason Blackburn is sourced from R v Blackburn [2006] VSC 246 (7 July 2006).

‘Frank Kelly . . .’ Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 2 November 1991.

‘Luisito Javillonar . . .’ Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 11 July 1992.

‘NSW Premier Bob Carr . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald, February 1998.

‘John McKoy . . .’ Reported in the Herald-Sun, 12 July 1998.

‘Darri Denis Haynes . . .’ Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, September 1999; also sourced from Inspector Campbell v James Gordon Hitchcock [2004] NSWIRComm 87 (21 October 2004).

‘The Oregonian newspaper . . .’ <www.oregonlive.com/special/oregonian/meth/>

See note to p. 36.

‘John Barrie Oldfield . . .’ Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 11 November 1999.

‘Australian police broke . . .’ Information in this book on seizures of clandestine methamphetamine labs, arrests, and other federal and state police actions is sourced from reports by the Australian Crime Commission— <www.crimecommission.gov.au>—as well as from media reports.

The information on Matthew Gagalowicz in this book is sourced mainly from R v Gagalowicz [2005] NSWCCA 452 (22 December 2005) and Regina v Gagalowicz [2005] NSWSC 675 (8 July 2005) as well as from media reports.

‘. . . an Australian statistical milestone . . .’ See note to p. 43.

‘The average price of heroin . . .’ See note to p. x.

‘As New South Wales usage rates . . .’ See note to p. x.

‘Dr Michael Dawson . . .’ The author interviewed Dr Dawson in February 2008.

‘So it proved with actual seizures . . .’ Customs reports used in this book are available at <www.customs.gov.au >. Some information on customs seizures is also reported by the Australian Crime Commission (see note to p. 43).

‘. . . an unemployed seventeen-year-old youth . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph, 3 March 1999.

‘In April 2000 . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald, 21 April 2000.

‘In October 2000 . . .’ Reported in the Herald-Sun and the Age, 11 October 2000.

‘. . . police impounding 152 kilograms . . .’ Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 15 July 2001.

The author interviewed Dr Alex Wodak in June 2007.

Information on Ersen Cicekdag used here is sourced mainly from Cicekdag v Regina [2007] NSWCCA 218 (2 August 2007).

‘Joseph Westermeyer . . .’ Archives of General Psychiatry, 33 (1976) 1135–1139.

‘Andrew Macintosh . . .’ Australia Institute Newsletter, No. 47 June 2006.

Information on Novica Jakimov in this book is sourced from R v Jakimov; DPP v Jakimov [2007] VSCA 9 (8 February 2007) and R v Jakimov [2005] VSC 328 (18 August 2005).

‘Dr Rachel Humeniuk . . .’ Reported in the Advertiser, January 2001.

‘. . . a Gympie man . . .’ Reported in the Courier-Mail, February 2005.

‘Peter Vallely . . .’ Reported in the Sunday Mail, 7 October 2007.

‘Bob Aldred . . .’ Reported in the Courier-Mail, February 2005.

‘Paul de Jersey . . .’ Reported in the Courier-Mail, December 2001.

‘Justice Martin Moynihan . . .’ ibid.

‘Barry Hills . . .’ Author interviews are supplemented with reports from the Herald-Sun, 16 December 2001.

Information on the Mohammed Kerbatieh case is sourced from R v Kerbatieh [2005] VSCA 194 (30 August 2005).

Information on the neurochemistry of methamphetamine is taken from author interviews and written material published by Chris Cruickshank of the University of Western Australia and Professor Iain Macgregor of the University of Sydney, as well as Braswell op cit.

See note to p. x.

‘In the early hours of 19 October 2002 . . .’ Information on the Dimitrios Kyriakidis case is sourced mainly from Kyriakidis v The Queen [2004] WASCA 33 (12 March 2004).

‘In February 2002 . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph, 6 February 2002.

‘. . . police in Brisbane raided a methamphetamine laboratory . . .’ Reported in the Courier-Mail, 14 February 2002.

Information on the Anna Zhang-Tony Tu case is sourced from R v Anna Zhang [2005] NSWCCA 437 (14 December 2005) and media reports.

‘Mick Fernandez . . .’ Reported in the Illawarra Mercury, 1 August 2001.

‘Allan James Wakeford . . .’ Reported in the Illawarra Mercury, 25 December 1999.

‘Jason Leslie Horne . . .’ Reported in the Illawarra Mercury, 2 August 2003.

‘John Anthony Hezemans . . .’ Reported in the Illawarra Mercury, 25 July 2003 and 2 April 2005.

‘Clinton Morgan . . .’ Reported in the Newcastle Herald, 30 June 2003.

‘Half the town is on it . . .’ Reported in the Sun-Herald, 20 September 2003.

‘. . . sent a journalist to Jindabyne . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph, 25 July 2003.

Graham Lomas was found not guilty of carjacking, due to being under the influence of a methamphetamine-related psychosis, in the NSW District Court (reported in the Australian, 19 December 2003).

‘On 13 August . . .’ The author interviewed Paul and Jennifer Marlow in June 2007.

‘. . . the unfortunate shooting death of a man in Merrylands . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph, 10 December 2003; also sourced from R v Aoun [2006] NSWSC 800 (7 August 2006).

‘Robert Mittiga . . .’ Reported in the Advertiser, 8 January 2006.

Information from DUMA reports have been sourced from <www.aic.gov.au/research/duma/> and from media reports.

‘Everett H. Ellinwood . . .’ E.H. Ellinwood, ‘Assault and Homicide Associated with Amphetamine Abuse’, American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 127, March 1971, pp. 1170–5.

‘Three and a half decades later . . .’ R. McKetin, J. McLaren, S. Riddell, & L. Robins, (2006a). ‘The relationship between methamphetamine use and violent behaviour.’ NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research Crime and Justice Bulletin no. 97, August 2006.

‘Beaver Hudson . . .’ The author interviewed Beaver Hudson at St Vincent’s in June 2007.

‘Richard Smith . . .’ Reported in the Age, 21 August 2006.

‘The Australian Medical Association . . .’ Reported in the Age, 25 March 2007.

‘Ngoc Qui “David” Khuu . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph, 28 February 2006.

‘Gregory Rama Biggs . . .’ Reported in the Herald-Sun, 25 May 2007.

‘Buck Reed . . .’ The author interviewed Buck Reed in June 2007.

‘Allan Eade . . .’ The author interviewed Allan Eade in June 2007.

Information on Sunia Kafovalu is sourced mainly from Sunia James Kafovalu v Regina [2007] NSWCCA 141 (24 May 2007).

‘Mal Hyde . . .’ Reported in the Advertiser, 14 February 2004.

‘Fred Gere . . .’ Reported in the West Australian, May 2004.

‘There was John Andrew Seckold . . .’ R v Seckold [2005] ACTSC 34 (22 February 2005).

‘There was AB . . .’ The murder of Dominic Li was widely reported in the media, but not AB’s ice habit. This information is sourced from Regina v AB [2006] NSWSC 69 (17 February 2006), R v Satorre [2005] NSWSC 367 (22 April 2005) and Regina v Tan [2007] NSWSC 684 (29 June 2007).

‘There was Azzam Abdul Hamid . . .’ R v Hamid [2006] NSWCCA 302 (20 September 2006).

‘There was David Lawrence Morrison . . .’ R v Morrison [2004] QCA 322 (3 September 2004).

‘There was Adrian John Van Boxtel . . .’ R v Van Boxtel [2005] VSCA 175 (28 July 2005).

‘There was Justin John De Gruchy . . .’ R v De Gruchy [2006] VSCA 10 (9 February 2006).

‘In December 2003 . . .’ This information is sourced mainly from Regina v Abdulkader and Hohaia [2006] NSWSC 866 (5 September 2006) and Regina v Abdulkader and Hohaia [no 1] [2006] NSWSC 198 (29 March 2006).

‘Trent Jennings . . .’ The Jennings case was reported in the media with little or no mention of the role played by crystal amphetamine. The extent of Jennings’s drug use is sourced mainly from R v Jennings [2005] NSWSC 789 (11 August 2005).

‘Professor Mark Findlay . . .’ The author interviewed Professor Findlay in June 2007.

‘Findlay explains . . .’ refers to R v O’Connor (1980) 146 CLR 64.

‘Victorian Youth . . .’ ‘Victorian youth alcohol and drug survey 2003’. Premier’s Drug Prevention Council Victoria (PDPC), Department of Human Services, Melbourne, 2004.

‘At the Enchanted Forest . . .’ Reported in the Advertiser, December 2003.

‘The Australian Drug Foundation . . .’ This information is sourced from W. Loxley, Toumbourou, T. Stockwell, B. Haines, K. Scott, C. Godfrey, E. Waters, Patton, R. Fordham, D. Gray, Marshall, D. Ryder, S. Saggers, L. Sanci, J. Williams (2004) ‘The prevention of substance use, risk and harm in Australia: a review of the evidence’.

‘David Laidlaw . . .’ Quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald, September 2005.

‘John Byrne . . .’ Interview with author, June 2007.

Greg Fisher pleaded guilty to ten charges in the NSW District Court and was sentenced to a non-parole prison term of seven years (reported in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph in January–February 2005, and the Sydney Morning Herald, 28 November 2006).

‘In 2004, the National Centre . . .’ ‘Gay Community Periodic Survey 2004’, National Centre in HIV Social Research, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2004.

‘The AIDS Council of NSW . . .’ Reported in the Sydney Star Observer, September 2004.

‘Don Baxter . . .’ Reported in SX News, issue 290, 2004.

‘David Buchanan . . .’ Quoted in the Sydney Star Observer, op cit. ‘Stevie Clayton . . .’ Quoted in the Sydney Star Observer, issue 730, September 2004.

CAAMA’s material is located at <www.caama.net>.

‘Tim Logan . . .’ The author interviewed Tim Logan in May and June 2007.

‘Deborah O’Reilly . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph, 11 April 2004.

‘Project STOP was developed . . .’ The author interviewed Shaun Singleton in June 2007.

‘Dr Bill Kingswell . . .’ Reported in the Courier-Mail, 13 October 2006.

‘Dr Alex Wodak . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph, 17 April 2007.

‘A study released simultaneously . . .’ Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 2 April 2007.

‘Dr Nigel Armstrong . . .’ Reported in the West Australian, 1 September 2005.

‘Chris Kewley . . .’ Reported in the Newcastle Herald, 14 November 2006.

‘Dr Peter McGeorge . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph, 10 September 2005.

‘David Spain . . .’ Reported in the Courier-Mail, 30 September 2006.

‘This Midazolam is great stuff . . .’ the Weekend Australian, 30 September 2006.

The story of CB and IM is sourced mainly from R v CB; R v IM [2006] NSWSC 261 (7 April 2006).

‘On 20 December 2002 . . .’ Reported in the Newcastle Herald, 16 January 2005.

For statistical sources on law enforcement, see notes to p. 43 and p. 60.

‘Abdel Alameddine . . .’ Alameddine v R [2006] NSWCCA 317 (10 October 2006).

‘Peter Vallely . . .’ see note to p. 69.

‘Here is a timeline . . .’ Compiled by the author from diverse media sources.

‘A Qantas flight attendant …’ Reported in a number of newspapers, including the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph in April 2006 and 13 April 2007.

‘Todd James Bookham . . .’ Information on Todd James Bookham is sourced mainly from R v Bookham [2005] VSC 483 (13 December 2005).

‘Tony Trimingham’s NSW Family Drug Support Service . . .’ The author interviewed Trimingham in May 2007.

The comments by John Herron were reported across national media on 9 October 2006.

‘Senator Bronwyn Bishop’s standing committee . . .’ Its name was the House Standing Committee on Family and Human Services: ‘Inquiry into the impact of illicit drug use on families’.

‘The Tin Man . . .’ Reported in the West Australian, 28 October 2000.

‘In 2005, a 33-year-old . . .’ Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 25 June 2005 and the Daily Telegraph, 29 September 2005.

Jason Bulgarelli admitted his involvement in cannabis cultivation in Queensland in R v Cook, Coleman, Kake, Innes & Le Blowitz [1996]QCA 66 (19 November 1996).

‘Brendan Francis McMahon . . .’ The McMahon case was widely reported in local and national media during his committal hearing in October 2005, his trial in May 2006, and his sentencing in July 2006.

‘Stephen John Clancy . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph, 16 June 2006.

Jamieson’s interview with Denton took place on 25 June 2007.

‘The Turning Point . . .’ The report’s title was ‘The Victorian Drug Statistics Handbook 2006: Patterns of drug use and related harm in Victoria’, by the Drugs Policy and Services Branch, Rural and Regional Health and Aged Care Services Division, Victorian Department of Human Services. Rebecca McKetin undertook a study of 400 ice users in 2007, called MATES (Methamphetamine Treatment Evaluation Study). MATES found that 48 per cent suffered from major depression, and 17 per cent had tried to commit suicide. Subsequently, NDARC set up a pilot thirteen-step treatment program called STEPS, which was underway with eighteen participants at time of writing.

‘B’s mother . . .’ The Eliza Davis murder has been widely reported in the Australian media. Especially helpful is the feature by Victoria Laurie in the Weekend Australian Magazine, published on 8 September 2007.

‘Daniel Paul Lidonnici . . .’ Information on this case is sourced mainly from R v Lidonnici [2007] VSC 3 (24 January 2007).

‘Matt Loria . . .’ Reported in the Daily Telegraph, 17 December 2006.

‘Andrew Kastrappis . . .’ Information on this case is sourced mainly from R v Kastrappis [2007] SADC 39 (18 April 2007).

The cases of Wald, Martin, Hearn and Eken were widely reported in national newspapers in 2006, specifically, Michael Scott Wald in the Herald Sun, 18 March 2007; Shane Martin in the Daily Telegraph, 21 January 2004; Lindsay Michael Hearn in the Newcastle Herald, 11 August 2007 and 4 October 2007; Canan Eken in the Daily Telegraph, 4 October 2006, 5 October 2006, 13 October 2006, and the Sydney Morning Herald, 5 October 2006.

‘Dr Nicole Lee . . .’ The author interviewed Dr Lee in February 2008.

The DHI is published in the AFP’s annual reports. For analysis of it, the author has relied on ‘The Australian Federal Police Drug Harm Index: A New Methodology for Quantifying Success in Combating Drug Use’ by Michael McFadden, Australian Journal of Public Administration, Volume 65, Number 4, December 2006, pp. 68–81(14).

‘Mike Phelan . . .’ Reported in the Australian, 10 May 2007.

‘. . . an estimated 14 000 children . . .’ ‘Drug Use In The Family: Impacts and implications for children’, Australian National Council on Drugs 2007.

Table of Contents

COVER PAGE

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT PAGE

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE: GOING UP 1986–2000

PART TWO: THE HIGH 2001–2003

PART THREE: COMING DOWN 2004–2008

ENDNOTES