Scattered (22 page)

‘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.