Bali 9: The Untold Story (18 page)

In Australia, experts estimate that drug abuse costs billions, and it continues to rise. In a vicious circle that engulfs whole communities, addicts feed off crime to fund their habits—car theft, stealing, break-and-enters, armed robbery, assault, prostitution and even murder are in an addict’s desperate armoury to help them get their next hit. Years ago, researchers found that addicts could earn an average of $1175 each from crime in just one week and that property crime losses, as a direct result of drugs, can cost Australia up to $500 million each year. Add to that the cost to ambulance and health services, social security payments costing hundreds of millions of dollars each year, absenteeism, car accidents, needle-stick injuries, and the toll is even higher. Policing experts even have a term for the collateral damage: the drug harm index, which measures the cost to the community of specific amounts of illegal drugs. For heroin, it is $1.06 million for every kilogram.

Dr Ingrid van Beek, from Sydney’s medically supervised injecting centre, sees the cost daily. Especially
the human cost. ‘I see the worst of it. It’s not so victimless from where I sit,’ she says candidly. The likes of Renae Lawrence and Martin Stephens and Scott Rush and Michael Czugaj had the lives of drug users strapped to their bodies, she says, as they tried to board their flight home. An articulate and thoughtful woman, Dr van Beek doubts any of the mules were thinking that, though. ‘I don’t know what they were thinking—not very much, I suspect, but they should have been thinking that, because it’s the reality. X number of drug users will die as a result of that particular batch of heroin.’ In her centre, which began operating on a trial basis in May 2001, that X figure amounts to seven overdoses for every 1000 hits of heroin. ‘We resuscitate those people,’ she says simply.

Outside such an environment, the estimates of how many lives might have been at risk if the Bali Nine’s haul had made it back to Australia vary widely. It depends on who would have mixed what in it before it was sold, where it would have been bought and, sometimes, how long it would have taken an ambulance to turn up.

Van Beek sees the saved lives as only one of the positive effects of the Bali Nine arrests: ‘Maybe the next nine kids working at the showground, when they’re asked whether they want to have a free trip to Indonesia, might think twice if they know that there are these operations that successfully bust these type of things,’ she says. ‘I suppose I do see it as a little akin to being an arms dealer and thinking a little about what those arms are going to be used for. If they’re users
themselves, I suppose I can understand better why you’d get caught up in couriering. But if you’re not a user yourself, I am quite hard-lined on that.’ Certainly, though, she doesn’t go so far as to support the death penalty. ‘I don’t think they deserve to die,’ she says. None of the nine offered any defence that suggested they were caught in a personal drug spiral.

Most opposed to the death penalty don’t have van Beek’s daily insight into the situation. But they are just as passionate in their arguments. They say that the death penalty does not act as a deterrent to others; this point seems to be supported by the steady stream of young people who continue to put their own lives at risk by joining drug-smuggling rackets. Members of the Bali Nine would have all heard of Schapelle Corby’s case, but they still travelled to Bali. Tuong Van Nguyen, the last Australian to go to the gallows after being found with 396 grams of heroin at Singapore’s Changi airport in 2002, must have also known the risks. But still they board planes, attempting to outwit multimillion-dollar crime-fighting operations.

A second reason put up by those who oppose the death penalty revolves around the chances of convicting, and putting to death, an innocent person. It’s a real risk, given that, both in this country and others, scientific evidence or new information has later been able to clear someone. The debate in Australia was reignited by Van Nguyen’s death, the images of his mother prompting heartache in parents everywhere. The death penalty has a big ripple effect, engulfing
whole families, and, according to those who oppose it, stands as a permanent reminder of a society unwilling to forgive.

Tony Fox, from the foreign prisoners’ support service, says that views change quickly when it is someone you know at the centre of the debate. ‘Sit down and imagine it’s your son or it’s your daughter. Imagine you’ve just got a call at 2 a.m. Tell me then that you wouldn’t do everything possible to have your kid brought home.’

Despite the anger being vented against the Bali Nine, Fox’s service is host to a growing number of Australians wanting to support them. Kay Danes, a volunteer advocate with the service, says Corby supporters have directed others to their website, www.foreign prisoners.com
,
but it has been a slow process. At first, she says, there would be one inquiry relating to the Bali Nine for every 200 emails supportive of Corby. That has now grown to ten or more emails each day, many of them asking specifically about the welfare of Renae Lawrence and Michael Czugaj.

People have seen Lee and Christine Rush sit in court day after day, hoping their son has a future; they’ve heard the strangled voice of Bob Lawrence, just wishing that his daughter survives the next step; and they’ve heard how Michele and Bill Stephens—and all the others—would do anything for their children. ‘It’s no longer black and white in people’s minds,’ Danes says.

Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen’s mother, too, was responsible for a turnaround in Australian views. ‘It came down to a photo,’ says Danes. Mrs Nguyen looked
as though her heart had been ripped from her chest. ‘When you see a mum like that, it dawns on people that he might have done the wrong thing, but oh my god, look at his mother. People see that there are other people attached to it.’

Danes says supporters now want to send members of the Bali Nine all sorts of things. The advice list on what they need is long: toothpaste, soap, talcum powder, laundry powder (but they are told soap is cheaper to send because it is lighter), sachets of moisturiser, tinea cream, Dettol, Chapsticks for dry lips, cracked heel balm, Band-Aids, cotton buds, Wet Ones, mosquito coils, oil of cloves for toothache, cold sore cream, dental floss…The list is seemingly endless.

S
omewhere in a public toilet right now a teenager is rolling up his sleeves, ready to sink a syringe hard into a vein in his arm. In a ritual practised perhaps a couple of times already today, the addict will slowly unwrap a tiny foil package, the anticipation in his body building. If he is also dealing in big quantities, he might have already tasted a smidgen of the hammer on purchase, just to make sure he wasn’t being sold a pup, ensuring that the flowery, bitter taste on his tongue promised the way ahead.

Now he will lay out the ingredients he needs so desperately: a plastic spoon, some water and his needle or syringe, known as his fit. He’ll mix the gear, butterflies invading every crevice in the pit of his gut,
drawing up twenty or so lines into his used syringe. And then, with a deep breath, he will clench his fist a couple of times to bring the veins to the surface.

At this stage, time stands still. Nothing else matters but the immediate promise of euphoria. It will be the best sex he’s ever had, his best friend and his lover, all wrapped into one. He might tease himself a little, popping the fit in before taking it out. It’s called jacking, and it’s all part of the ritual. But soon he will plunge the needle with urgency born of desperation and little care deep into any vein he can find in his arm. Perhaps he won’t be able to find it as quickly as he would like and he will need to poke around a bit, missing the vein at first, before withdrawing the syringe, now coloured pink as his blood mixes with the heroin. Perhaps he’ll then share his fit with the young lad next to him, who is so frantic to block out life, to feel the same hit as the heroin rush spreads through his body, that he doesn’t care if he is infected with someone else’s blood-borne disease.

In public toilets in Cabramatta, parks that dot the Brisbane River and in back alleys in Melbourne’s underbelly, many will spend the rest of their lives and their incomes chasing that first heady rush, the subject of songs and musings by creative junkies for decades.

He will feel the whack within seconds as the heroin travels from his arm to the right side of his heart in just a few beats. From there it will hurtle off to the left side, before it is spat out into the arterial system, reaching his brain within seconds. There’s a massive explosion
of sensation as all connection to reality is lost. His pain disappears before him; life is blocked out. The addict’s body is isolated from his mind. Euphoria erupts, and his mind is able to trip wherever it wants. Life becomes poetic—all terror gone, all anxiety erased.

At least, that’s how it feels the first few times, even a dozen times. But, after that, things usually change. It takes longer to get there, more and more china white needed to achieve the same effect. But it still becomes a vital escape, a chance to shut out the noise of life. And when that happens, it seems as though the let-down comes faster and steeper. And the next use sooner. With each use, the euphoria seems to become a little bit shorter and a little bit softer, and he knows that he would do anything—even give up his own life—for the next hit, to feel that way again.

To feel dreamy and dippy with no sense of yesterday or tomorrow. Just now. He’ll do anything to feel like that and he’ll grow more and more cunning, more able to cheat and steal and swindle from those who would do anything to help him. He won’t care. Nothing will matter, except his next hit. Life is in the here and now. There are no consequences—just heroin, smack, skag, hammer, H, horse, rock, white, harry cone, china white or anything else it’s called on the street.

Crime will become a necessary part of his life, his addiction costing more money than he could ever earn but preventing him from keeping the most basic of full-time jobs. The cycle will become vicious. He might soon be having four or so hits a day. He will no longer
worry about the bad batch of low-grade heroin that might have killed those who sat on the park bench just hours before him; he won’t care if the syringe he is about to inject into his cubital vein is stained pink with someone else’s blood; he won’t care if he’s misjudged the heroin’s purity and the ambulance doesn’t make it in time, or that his arms reveal the sad tale of his daily journey, or that his hollow and glassed eyes play cover page to a sorry plot. He won’t care that each time he clenches his fist and prepares to inject, he is rolling the dice in a game of life where the odds are stacked terribly against him. Desperation can do that to you.

Only a couple of months earlier, his fix was being harvested in the remote and hilly regions of Burma, adjacent to the Chinese border. The area, along with Laos and Thailand, has earnt the name of ‘Golden Triangle’ and, along with the Golden Crescent in Afghanistan, and Central and South America, is responsible for the world’s opium production. But it is in Burma that most of Australia’s heroin originates.

There, late in the year, sometime around September or October, opium is planted by the families involved in opium poppy cultivation. Some put the number of households at 250 000; others at closer to 300 000. Across the region, handfuls of poppy seeds will be dispersed across the top of freshly tended fields. Three or four months later, from late January to March, the plants will have shot up to about a metre high, and boast ten or so stems. Each will have a brightly coloured flower at this stage and, everything going
well, a seed pod that experts say is the size of a chicken egg.

To milk as much as they can from the lucrative international trade, villagers will sometimes plant a second crop closer to Christmas, to be harvested slightly later, in April or May. But the appearance of the flower and pod acts as the impetus for Burmese farmers to begin the painstakingly slow and laborious harvest. They cut into the pod, extracting a syrup which quickly turns dark in colour once it’s released from its cocoon. The farmers collect it, load it onto donkeys and head off to laboratories, where the process of making heroin from opium begins.

The laboratories are often described as mobile chemical set-ups dotted across the region, their location a poor secret. Here, the substance is soaked in big vats of warm water before other ingredients are added. In forty-eight hours or so, the substance is dried and packed and ready for its next journey, eventually leaving the Golden Triangle as high-grade number four heroin and fanning out across the world. It now weighs significantly less that it did straight after the harvest, and is immeasurably more valuable. It’s guarded like gold.

It used to be that the heroin would travel in just one direction—north over the border into China and perhaps then on to Hong Kong and beyond—but that has all changed in recent years. Now it spurts out in all directions, by mule and donkey and any other means possible, to different ports in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, India,
Pakistan and Malaysia, for example, before being picked up by sea or air and heading further on its journey to the heroin capitals of countries the world over, including Australia. Its journey is an interesting one: traversing the globe on donkeys; in trucks, cars and motorbikes; on ships, in aeroplanes and secreted on passengers desperate to make a buck or feed an addiction.

Indonesia has become one of the primary embarkation points for heroin trafficked to Australia. Indeed, in recent years, it has become a bigger part of the new mix, and an important one too, giving intelligence officers a run for their money. The busy group of islands is a nuisance for those charged with policing the international trade, and once heroin lands in Jakarta and Bali it can be flown directly into Sydney, just as it can from Singapore, Bangkok and other busy international cities.

Sometimes it will be stockpiled, poised for the next rush, but mostly it won’t be, the steady demand within our shores and others encouraging its continuous journey. Most of it will escape detection as the ballooning law enforcement agencies in our airports and marine centres are not equipped with the finance, resources or intelligence to kill the trade. Certainly most of it will evade detection in some of the twenty-six countries where the Australian Federal Police have personnel.

The AFP have sixty-five people placed in thirty-one different cities in those countries, and drug trafficking is not their total brief. Their job is to liaise with local
authorities about all manner of illegal activities, and in a world of big illegal business, drug smuggling is just one part of it. In any case, the six to ten drug cartels that control the flow of drugs out of the Golden Triangle are well equipped to do battle with authorities. It’s not a new trade, and they’ve learnt over years and years how to diversify, change track quickly, and vary their travel routes and communication tools.

It’s a billion-dollar business with profits and freedoms at stake, so they’ll do all manner of things to evade capture. Sometimes the cartels will join forces; other times they’ll compete ferociously in burgeoning new markets, anxious for their share. With pragmatism, they’ve learnt to deal with any losses to law enforcement and move on to ensure they can meet the annual supply of heroin needed so desperately by addicts around the globe.

Their target touchdown in Australia is invariably Sydney and its big, bustling airport that plays host to thousands of international visitors each day. Often it will instead be one of the busy ports where detection might be avoided. Or, sometimes, the point of disembarkation will be less obvious: through the big expanses of coastline that present border authorities with an almost impossible task to police.

From the Asian ports, it’s Australian cartels or freelance drug lords who organise the heroin’s final trip to Australia. Organised crime groups behind the distribution within Australia, mostly Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese, will pay all sorts of prices, depending on
availability, to get the uncut blocks of heroin onto Australian soil. This year they might pay between $100 000 and $120 000 for a 700-gram block. Next year it might be wildly more or less, but price isn’t the crucial issue at this point. From the moment the heroin lands in one of the Asian ports that form an uneven arc over Australia, the most important job is to transport the heroin safely home. However they can. Without being caught.

It used to be easier; monster importations would slip through big holes in the policing net. But that all changed about the time of the heroin drought in early 2001. Some attribute the cause of the drought to policing being beefed up, closing the loopholes that allowed the trade to flourish in Australia. But its cause was probably influenced by other factors as well, like the severe drought in Burma and the Taliban ban on opium poppy-growing in Afghanistan. Others still attribute the fall in supply to the growing demand for heroin in China—and a massive seizure that put an Australian-based cartel out of business for a while.

Whatever the real reasons, the masses of high-grade white that flooded Australian towns and cities, taking into its clutch addicts from all socioeconomic groups, suddenly stopped. Heroin became harder to source, and awfully expensive to buy. The impact was immediate, not only on the addicts, who turned to other drugs in a bid to feed their habit, but also those running the smuggling operations. They could no longer take the same risks—there was too much at stake. They had to
be smarter and faster and spread the risk. They could not afford to have a single bust putting them out of business, so they could no longer afford to gamble on one big, single importation making it through the enhanced border patrols. They had to diversify, change distribution patterns and import smaller amounts more often. And that’s the way they continued to operate, even after the low supplies eased a little in the first half of 2002.

Mules were an essential part of the changed importation patterns: young recruits who would use their bodies to ferry drugs on international flights in return for wads of cash. The risk could be immense, but so too could the payment. White Anglo-Saxon backpackers made up a chunk of the mule recruits, rarely raising the suspicions of those employed to keep drugs out. Sometimes the drugs would be sewn into the hems of their clothes, or sandwiched in their toiletries bags or in the heels of their shoes. Other times mules would swallow tightly bound balloons of drugs, carrying them through electronic detectors in the pits of their stomachs—knowing the risk, but counting the cash in their heads. Still others would plaster the heroin on their person, or secrete it inside their genitalia in a bid to escape detection.

Often mules weren’t used and instead the drugs were packed tightly in all sorts of paraphernalia sent by mail or included in passengers’ luggage: in cooking pastry and fish fillets; stuffed into candlesticks and car parts; even funnelled into the buttons of clothing. It might
have been harder this way, with more detailed plans needed, but it was necessary for the cartels to escape increased policing measures, like a renewed Australian Federal Police presence and a front-line Customs service that was boosting enhanced detection technologies, profiling abilities and intelligence networks.

The drought forced changes once the drug had been successfully brought inside Australian borders, too. The six or so big Australian cartels started collaborating more, the shortage of heroin forcing importers to diversify into other drugs. Many dealers were stripped of their livelihood as in-your-face dealing in some areas disappeared, to be replaced by mobile traders, hocking their heroin aboard travelling trains, making home visits and refusing to cater for new customers they could not afford to trust instinctively. Mobile telephones became the dealers’ new tool of trade, with low- to middle-ranking heroin traders boasting 200 telephone numbers or more in their cellular address book.

Once the heroin arrives in Australia, it takes a fairly direct route to Cabramatta, about 30 kilometres south of Sydney city. Up to three-quarters of residents here speak a first language other than English, with 40 per cent born in Asian countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, China and Laos. It’s a young population, with higher-than-average unemployment levels, but it has been unfairly demonised by public perceptions. Few, however, doubt its role in the national heroin market.