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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.