Scattered (2 page)

She looked at Mark and asked him what it was. His response was to take the foil from her—he'd always been the willing guinea pig—hold a lighter under it, and suck the vapour through the straw. He passed the foil back where it had come from, gave Vicki a thumbs-up and mouthed ‘goey', or speed. They'd done speed many times back in Melbourne and, although she hated the crash—which was drawn-out and depressing—it had always been one of Vicki's favourites. It made you dance and chat and drink. Speed was simple, it didn't bend your mind.

The foil took a while to come back. Mark had sprung up and, without inviting or consulting her, gone off to dance. Vicki took the foil and copied what he'd done.

‘It wasn't like any speed I knew,' Vicki says. She began to dance with Mark and with the others on the floor, but dancing didn't seem enough. She wanted to—not sing, but roar. She remembers coming face to face with Mark on the dance floor and the pair of them roaring at each other, eyes wide, mouths split like jack-o'-lanterns, for what seemed like hours. At some point Mark had a group of Thais around him and was teaching them how to pack down in a rugby scrum. Later in the night, Vicki helped another woman take all the glassware and cutlery from the kitchen and organise them in order of height and length down a corridor.

‘It was just a lot stronger than speed, like the difference between drinking a schooner of spirits compared with a schooner of beer,' she says. ‘You could tell it was the same thing, but you were instantly much, much higher. It's hard to describe.'

But there were other, quantifiable differences from the amphetamines they'd snorted back in Melbourne. Where usually on a speed binge they'd refresh by doing more lines every few hours, they didn't have any more of the stuff on the foil that night in Bangkok, yet were still high for eight to ten hours. Where speed usually gave Mark an immediate and long-lasting case of genital shrinkage (‘needle dick' is his term), this stuff made both of them horny and helped them have marathon sex. And after they had a sleep back at their friends' place, there was no hangover, no crash, no anxious-depressive speed comedown. It was the best of all worlds.

Back home, they moved from Melbourne to Sydney. They did get serious and relatively drug-free as they both joined commercial city law firms and mixed with a new set of friends. With their old Melbourne friends from time to time, they would speak about this ‘super-speed', the dream party drug from Thailand. The Thais had called it ‘shabu'. Through the late 1990s, Vicki and Mark heard about shabu surfacing in Australia, but they believed it belonged to their past. They had two children eighteen months apart in 1998 and 1999, and settled down to a life of nappies, bottles and interrupted sleep. Their priorities changed, and they consigned their drug-taking days to their shared history. Many of their friends still partied, and it wasn't that Vicki and Mark wouldn't have liked to dabble again, but they never had the requisite two or three nights for the full-on experience; they were simply too busy and too tired.

That night in Bangkok wouldn't be their last experience with shabu, as it turned out. Shabu would re-enter their world under another name some years down the track. But they still hold to the belief that they were among the first Australians to dabble with crystal methamphetamine, or, as it became commonly known, ice.

It travels under different aliases. Ice, gas, crystal, glass, shabu, tina. Paul Bennett's mob called it ‘pure'—not as an adjective, but a noun. Bennett, a Maori raised on the east coast of New Zealand's North Island, was living on the Gold Coast in 1995 and working as a formwork carpenter on construction sites.

At 38 years of age, Bennett had plenty of regrets. He'd once been a leading surfer, entering professional events in Australia and New Zealand with the dream of joining the world tour. He'd had a daughter when he was 24, but had not seen much of her for the next decade, which he had pretty much blown through a prodigious alcohol and drug habit.

A heavy pot smoker and heroin user since his teens, Paul Bennett had been using speed since around 1988.

‘I started using it as a recreational drug at first, and only on special occasions. This substance had been around me for years, but after my handbrake (the missus) gave me the flick, I started to have the odd dabble at it, because there was no one around to pull me back into line. The guys I was working beside and associating with now were all big users, and it was only a matter of time before my addictive gene kicked in, greedy for that high that only class A and B drugs can achieve . . .

‘The rocket powder was everywhere, and the quality was wicked, the very best. It gave me such a high and so much energy that I tore into my work like a bat out of hell.'

Speed suited his bachelor's lifestyle: work, pub, party, work. Speed made him feel ‘bullet-proof . . . I had so much energy and confidence'. And he wasn't alone in the early-90s Gold Coast. ‘I began hanging out with other users—and they were everywhere. The place was crazy, people racing around off their dials, insane pedestrian traffic. There was a methamphetamine epidemic . . .'

In 1995, Bennett had ‘my first taste of the pure form, known as “pure” or crystal meth. It could cost from $200–$1000 upward per gram, depending on who you knew, and the quality and quantity involved.'

With hardcore and experienced drug users like Bennett and his mates, the difference between crystal meth and old-fashioned speed was noticed and analysed.

‘The crystallised rocket fuel was capable of giving you a turbo-rush that was more deadly than shooting up, blasting you from Cher to blur within seconds, and nuking your brains . . . The meth user stayed up there, and the pupils dilated hugely. Sometimes, depending on how long they'd been up, the entire iris was pitch-black like a possum. The lights were out, but someone was home, someone with a wicked, scary-wired look that warned, “Don't fuck with me”.'

Bennett's nostrils were destroyed from years of snorting drugs, and, as an asthmatic bearing the damage from two decades of smoking, he couldn't take smoking crystal in the glass pipes his mates used. Instead he drank it, mixing it with alcoholic or nonalcoholic drinks. The onset was slower than smoking or snorting, but equally powerful.

He would drink pure before work, during the day, and after work. Playing pool, he had delusions of genius: ‘I rarely missed. I'd see the sweet spot and kapow! . . . It also gave me the libido of a teenager.

‘When I first hooked into the methamphetamine, it was full speed ahead. I was sharp as a tack with a wicked sense of humour and a sexual appetite like a rampant rabbit, so it's no surprise that that was my drug of choice. I had never known such a euphoric high, and it led to an addiction like no other I had known.'

But as a long-term drug user, just as the upside came quickly for Paul Bennett, so did the downside.

‘I never got the same clean, clear buzz as the first time, because by now I was truly fried. At first users think this shit gives you mana because you believe you are smart and irresistible. In fact you're an egotistical, annoying, motor-mouthed know-it-all, who would sell his soul for the next fix.'

Within months, the partnership of crystal meth and massive alcohol consumption was eating away at Bennett's sanity.

‘Most times on the meth we'd get on the piss something wicked, and it wasn't just because we got the dry-horrors from the meth. Alcohol seemed to take the edge off my anxiety, and sometimes before I knew it I was on a binge and would lose another 48 hours plus . . . I couldn't relax or sleep properly because my mind was still racing. Night-time was the pits, lying alone in the dark, trying to handle being depressed, thinking what a fuck-up I was. I would make myself crazier, rolling things over and over in my mind. Depending on how hard I went, it would take me two to four days at least to come down properly, and then the cycle began again . . .'

He was hiding his addiction from his girlfriend, but she caught him once and started crying.

‘We talked later and she told me she could notice the changes in my personality. I knew I was losing it, especially when I went too hard for too long. I'd get paranoid, and spin out with close friends over the smallest thing. I almost cut a flatmate's nose off with a broken mussel shell; it was right under his nostrils. I was at my worst when I was coming down, with mood swings and depression. I had all the personalities of Snow White's seven dwarfs . . .'

Bennett also noticed the spread of dangerous paranoid behaviour among his acquaintances.

‘You had to watch your back, because you couldn't trust these speed freaks. Some of them were like attack dogs, and would take you out or rip you off without batting an eyelid. No honour amongst thieves with this lot.'

Then came the last of a succession of wake-up calls. Bennett had a friend who had been buying pure on tick; like a junkie, he could not afford his habit in cash, but could sustain it by dealing and taking a cut for himself. Like many a junkie, he got into trouble, using too much and not selling enough to pay back his supplier. ‘It was,' says Bennett, ‘like putting an alcoholic in charge of a pub.'

Bennett's friend began to suffer an unending paranoia—not without reason, perhaps. But as a result, he began to carry a gun.

‘I hadn't seen him for a while,' Bennett recalls, ‘and one day when I spotted him, I snuck up behind to give him a fright. The poor bugger was tripping out with fear and the next thing I saw was a gun in his hand . . . I could literally feel the blood draining from my face, and it must have taken twenty years off my life. I had been wanting to get out of the scene for a long time, as my health was failing, and that moment made the decision easier.'

It was 1997 when Paul Bennett left the Gold Coast. The next year he fell critically ill with a range of ailments, and was put on a waiting list for a double lung transplant. He returned to New Zealand to try to rebuild his health, and his life.

Crystal meth had barely hit Australia. Paul Bennett might have been the first man in this country to go through the entire cycle of use, abuse and organ failure; he might have been the first to give up ice.

The National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC) is in a nondescript modern building on the campus of the University of New South Wales in Kensington, eastern Sydney. When they blow, northerly breezes carry the scent of horse manure over the university from the neighbouring Royal Randwick racetrack and stables. NDARC itself, funded by the federal government, is an unpretentious warren of small offices and shelves overcrowded with files. Researchers sit at computers quietly absorbing and collating data, or conducting one-on-one interviews with people from the outside who inform their studies.

Notwithstanding its quiet atmosphere, NDARC has become the country's leading research centre on drugs and alcohol. Partly this is because it is situated in Sydney, close to the action. While other capital cities have developed their signature drug cultures over time, Sydney remains the most highly populated drug capital and the main gateway for imported substances such as heroin and cocaine. It is home to drug users, researchers and legal and health workers, who have been around the scene for several generations.

In mid-1996, researchers Shane Darke and Julie Hando were tapping into this network, surveying 154 injecting drug users for the centre's annual NSW Drug Trends report. Injecting drug users are sampled because of their importance as a ‘sentinel group'—they take whatever drugs are washing around on the street in central and south-western Sydney, and if a new drug turns up in Australia it usually shows up among Sydney's injectors first.

For that 1996 survey, Darke and Hando also interviewed other ‘key informants', including health and outreach workers, police and a researcher. The researcher told them that drug injectors were claiming to use ‘ice', or the crystalline form of methamphetamine, rather than old-fashioned powder ‘speed', or amphetamine sulphate.

This was the first time ice had been named in local Australian research, and it crept in more or less without comment. Injecting drug users, while connoisseurs in detecting the purity and effect of what they are taking, are notoriously loose in their terminology. A second-hand report of one user claiming to take ‘ice' could mean anything. It could have been a marketing term promoted by a dealer; it could have been the user's way of describing some speed hybrid that didn't behave quite like the speed they were used to.

NDARC published its report, but the first mention of ice in Sydney passed inconspicuously. It certainly wasn't picked up by the media. That was soon to change. In 1997, a young PhD student joined the NDARC team working on the next NSW Drug Trends report. Rebecca McKetin had studied animal behaviour as an undergraduate, and became interested in the psychotic reactions of rodents to injections of amphetamines.

‘I wanted to do my PhD on [amphetamine-induced] psychosis,' she now recalls, ‘but there weren't enough people to form a sample.' She modified her subject to ‘proneness to psychosis', and began asking amphetamine users during the NDARC surveys if they had suffered psychotic reactions to the drug.

‘Some said they did,' she says, ‘but when we talked about it further it was more likely to be mild paranoia or panic attacks.'

There was scarce grant money around for a study on amphetamine psychosis in the mid-1990s, as the problem wasn't widespread enough. As it turned out, McKetin's interest was a few years ahead of its time. She had correctly anticipated the crisis, but its trigger—a form of amphetamine sufficiently potent, cheap and quickly absorbed into the bloodstream—had yet to fully hit the streets.

In her first year at NDARC, she interviewed a Sydney health worker who reported that one drug user claimed to have smoked shabu. Another user reported having used ‘crank'—one of the drug's American pseudonyms—which he believed to be a mixture of amphetamine and cocaine. The effect was different from the normal amphetamine high, he said. An extreme euphoria came on very quickly, like with cocaine, but rather than lasting cocaine's usual half hour or so it lasted several hours, like an amphetamine. He thought it was so good, it could be dangerous if it got around. And it was cheap—$100 a gram compared with $200–$240 a gram for cocaine.