Scattered (3 page)

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!'