Scattered (5 page)

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.