Chapter One

Ice monsters

I SMELT LIKE a dead pig. My hair looked awful. There were dark rings around my eyes, and dog-shit on my teeth. Smithy wouldn’t stop masturbating. Daytime television was blaring all over the house — NYPD Blue, Hawaii-50, JAG. There were never-ending television programs running in our heads, too. Smithy’s sexual fantasies were particularly vivid and enduring, full of highly skilled method actors who knew his tastes perfectly well — right down to the costumes, and the lack of dialogue and backstory. There were all kinds of different people in guest-star roles, in long-running plots, doing whatever Smithy wanted and liking whatever he liked: saucy librarians, the people next-door, a horny, rough-necked bisexual couple, and so on.

Smithy was in a sexual-fantasy world that released him from his most pressing, most unpleasant, and most urgent real-life problems as the father of three kids. But on this day, these fantasies were being used for another, more deliberate purpose — distraction and metaphor. Things seemed normal — dare I say, suspiciously normal. I’d just worked out that Smithy had been conspiring to kill me for months, and that my parents were paying him to do it.

Here’s how it panned out: it was a bright Tuesday autumn afternoon, and we were in the middle of a meth binge. Just another day in Pakenham, really. Smithy was wearing a red T-shirt and white tracksuit pants; I was in my tartan ‘daytime’ pyjamas. We were sitting in the lounge room of Smithy’s neat, new, spotlessly clean home. Three bedrooms, two living areas, furniture assembled around televisions, a 1997 computer with no internet, and smooth white walls, one with a framed picture of the 1991 Collingwood football team posing and smiling as if they were in a school photo.

As usual, the curtains were closed, and the scent of bleach (and bong smoke) was in the air. Clean carpets, filthy minds: when Smithy wasn’t cleaning, he was usually masturbating, for six to eight hours at a time, stopping only to pull a bong. Having visitors rarely stopped him.

Smithy masturbated so much because he shot up meth. I suppose you could call him a junkie. He was also an occasional drug-dealer, a long-time friend, and a full-time house cleaner — a cricket-loving, needle-using, dole-bludging Collingwood fan. He’d adapted poorly to new technology, feminism, and the demand for high-skilled workers — in fact, I could probably save some time by just referring to him as ‘Smithy from the 80s’, because in many ways it’s as if he never left them. A graduate of rehab and the army, he had also, about three years earlier, graduated from ‘truckie speed’ to using meth full-time. He had a track mark that looked like a chunky, purple birthmark.

He was constantly pulling shady little scams to get by, and he must have sensed the opportunity for another one a few weeks earlier when I’d pissed my parents off. He and my dad must have discussed the plot at length over the phone at night, while I was in bed. My dad would hand over $5,000 now, and then another $5,000 when the deed was done.

Smithy had been dropping hints all day that there was a plot to kill me. He’d been yelling at me about the state of my skin, my odour, the fact I hadn’t shaved in over a month, and my tendency to put my plates away in the bookshelf instead of in the sink. What this meant, though, was that Mum and Dad were paying him to slip me small, untraceable bits of arsenic mixed with doses of crystal meth. They knew full well that I had a history of drug addiction, loved living in a fantasy world, and that I couldn’t say no to the world’s most powerful stimulant — the perfect potion to hide your poison in. Smithy had been giving my dad regular updates on my ‘progress’ for weeks, and every time I left the room, my roommates would snicker. The plan was all falling into place — I had been so off-my-face for the past month, I hadn’t even noticed what was going on.

I knew that arsenic works by blocking the molecules your body’s cells need to perform their tasks. Eventually, arsenic kills by causing haemorrhaging, destroying enough cells to cause multi-system organ failure. So the arsenic poison had been building up in my liver and intoxicating my bloodstream, leaving boils on my skin, dark rings around my eyes, and strange dark matter around my teeth.

It would have killed me, of course, and the police would have thought it was a drug overdose, or a mysterious stroke — provided, of course, that they weren’t in on it, too. I realised what was happening when Smithy began telling me how awful I looked that day. By ‘telling me’, I mean he followed me around the house yelling it at me. We were in Smithy’s meth house: a bright, brand new, three-bedroom house — rented by Smithy from a large corporation that owned every second house in the neighbourhood — in Pakenham, 61 kilometres south-east of Melbourne, in a little pocket of new housing in a little valley surrounded by bushland and farms. Pakenham is right on the tip of the Gippsland/Latrobe Valley region, and is considered to be one of the most badly affected meth areas in Australia.

It began when I rejected Smithy’s sexual advances. He went on the offensive: ‘What do you think you look like from the outside?’

Oh dear, I thought.

‘You look revolting,’ he said, a packed bong in his hand, lighter flicking on and off. ‘And the way you smell, Jesus — people have been commenting, it’s rank — the whole end of the house stinks because of your bedroom.’

Oh dear.

I took a sniff of myself and, yes, it would seem I smelt a bit off — something had been seeping out of my veins in an unseemly, abject manner. Never one to be distracted from the task, I asked, ‘Can I have that bong if you’re not going to smoke it?’

‘No!’ he growled, the refusal seeming to shoot out of his nose.

Each room of the house provoked a new criticism: the unused vegetables in the fridge revealed I wasn’t eating properly; the dry, unclean bathroom revealed I wasn’t showering, while the bathroom cabinet revealed I wasn’t using deodorant; the bong bowl in the bedroom was a clear indicator I had been smoking too many of his cones.

‘Go on, go and look at ya self in the bloody mirror.’

I walked to the mirror in his bedroom — the light was switched off, and only a little bit of light crept in through the bottom of the closed curtains.

I looked at my reflection, and saw a very attractive person with glowing skin, so I walked back out of the room and told Smithy, ‘I look hot, as always.’

‘I think you should have a closer look,’ he mumbled. ‘Why don’t you go and have a look at your teeth if you think you look so good, you fucking pea-brain.’

This time, as I stared in the mirror, I saw poison oozing out of my skin, pus-y pimples, dark rings around my eyes, strange blisters on my neck, and blackened teeth. What was going on? I mean, really — there was something really messed-up going on. I started to think that perhaps Smithy wasn’t being nasty with his attack — perhaps he was trying to tell me something. My previous understanding of reality as more or less safe, fairly predictable — though at times somewhat mysterious and ambiguous — began to rupture from beneath those bathroom tiles. It might have been some kind of ontological earthquake right there in Pakenham, only the break wasn’t so much a big crack as an all-encompassing clear line of revelation: Smithy’s outburst, the dark rings around my eyes, why my ex had left me years ago and why he now looked so feminine, why our other roommate sometimes looked at me strangely, why my friend Beck had stopped talking to me a few weeks ago, why Smithy kept telling me to look in the mirror, my sunken cheeks, why my parents hadn’t called me for the past few weeks, and why I had those strange blisters. Finally a light of revelation had begun to flash: everyone is trying to kill me. My parents had organised it, my friends were carrying it out, and I was dying — slowly, silently — without a single ally, and with poison seeping out of every pore.

So now to the point at which I rang my dad — my gentle, generous, non-offensive dad — to reveal what I had finally figured out. Dad answered the phone half-asleep.

‘G’day, mate.’

‘Don’t try to pretend everything is normal, Dad! I’ve worked out what’s going on — please don’t do this to me. You have to understand, Dad, I was only joking in that story about killing you and Mum, it was only a story, and it wasn’t even about you, and now I know what is going on—’, and on I went, talking a mile a minute. I told him about the crystal meth, the arsenic, the secret sex-change, the animal-liberationist plot, the money exchanged with Smithy’s seedy drug-dealer friends, until finally Dad said the inevitable, ‘Um, mate, I think I might put you on to your mum.’

But I hung up the phone and walked into the lounge room — where Smithy was now entertaining a couple of seedy-looking guests — saying, ‘I know what’s going on, you rats …’

They started laughing. ‘Oh fuck, you’re a tripper, Luke,’ one said. ‘Never a dull moment when you’re around.’

‘You writing one of your stories again, Luke?’ Smithy asked, smiling.

I had been telling tall tales back then. Some of them took on a life of their own; in some I killed everybody I knew in graphic detail, often in the most unlikely ways, and with the most unlikely accomplices. These fantasies often took place in a post-apocalyptic world with no police, and where the council served only to take the bodies away.

Confused, I rang my parents back. My mum answered, and when she asked why I thought that they were trying to kill me, I realised there were a few gaps in my logic; that, in fact, I had been deeply mistaken. Beyond my imagination, there were memories which revisited me like movies: I started sweating as teenagers dressed in bright-red uniforms called me a faggot; then I was in Year 9 and my best friend was throwing my pencil case on the ground and telling me to sit somewhere else; then I was homeless and stealing food. Soon I was in tears, talking about the bullying I’d gone through in high school, and what had happened since, in a conversation that lasted nearly six hours.

For many chronic users, self-deception can become extreme paranoia, and sometimes full-blown psychosis. And at some stage in the preceding weeks, I had slipped into meth addiction. Why did I look like that? Because I’d been on a meth bender for a couple of weeks, and had completely forgotten to brush my teeth. What had actually happened? I had been using the drug for nearly two months, and I’d become an addict. I’d used it bit by bit, here and there. I’d feel so tired I’d take a bit more, until my mind got so twisted I lost track of how much I was actually using, and how much my behaviour had changed. I had become what I later realised was one of the estimated 100,000 Australians addicted to crystal meth.

On this particular afternoon, Smithy — the junkie and jailbird — had started that conversation because he was either worried about me, or he was experiencing some kind of psychosis himself. And yes, it took this person to tell me that what I needed to do was settle down and go to bed — but, before that, I really, really needed to use some Listerine.

I knew long before I moved in that Smithy dealt drugs from his house, and that meth use and meth users were near-constant companions. There were always people coming and going, with plenty of ‘drug dramas’ — fights, conspiracies, drug dealers arguing — that generally arose during the comedown of the meth cycle, and then vanished once the drug wore off. People from the local boarding house often used Smithy’s place to shoot-up in. Many of Smithy’s friends were also thieves, who robbed display homes to help support themselves and their habits. They would sneak out in the early hours of the morning, coming back with fridges, washing machines, or microwaves that they would then trade for drugs.

In short, Smithy seemed like the right subject for a story. So I came up with the idea of moving in with him to tell the ultimate story of meth addiction. Fresh out of a mind-numbing business-law job (I had retired from journalism to become a lawyer, but that didn’t quite work out, and I never finished the qualification), I told Smithy about my idea, and he agreed to participate. (‘As long as you pay your bloody rent, I don’t care what you bloody do.’) So I rented a room for $130 a week. What could possibly go wrong?

As it turned out, I got addicted to meth while living in a house to write a story about a meth dealer and his drug-addict mates. I cooked my brain so badly on meth that, after a few months, I genuinely lost track of the fact I was writing a story; I stopped taking notes, and became fixated on a series of non-existent events, with myself at the centre. So, yes — as you may have gathered — I got a story, a very good story. Only it wasn’t the one I was expecting: I didn’t bank on becoming a psychotic meth addict myself. I spent virtually the entirety of Melbourne’s beautiful autumn inside that house, gradually losing my mind. Slowly and unwittingly, over three months, I became an addict — replete with meth sores, violent outbursts, an obscenely bloody needle-stick injury, and shamefully long, disgustingly sweaty masturbation marathons. I met and had to make a few mad escapes from some very shady characters. I became embroiled in small-time crime, pointless, never-ending loopy conversations, and never-ending, taboo-busting sexual fantasies (Smithy’s and my own).

I became violent and threatening, particularly toward my parents; in one particularly memorable phone message I left for my tattooed, retired slaughterman father, I put on my best ABC-news voice to explain that I would come up to Queensland and ‘kill you with my bare fucking hands’. Grandiosity, bloodlust, bad memories and paranoia can be a rather unsavoury combination. In short, I went from being nice, respectable Luke to being ‘an ugly, sweaty, desperate animal’ in scenes vaguely reminiscent of the promo for the 1971 classic Australian film Wake in Fright.

June 2015: It was a winter’s night in Nowra, a stunning farm-and-bush town surrounded by mountains 160 kilometres south of Sydney. Inside the Bomaderry RSL club’s conference room, 100-odd people watched on as Tracey Reece told her story through a microphone.

‘He told us that there were people (probably adults) coming to the back gate of the school, and when we approached the school they said that it wasn’t possible, that they had teachers on duty down there,’ she said. Reece, a woman in her early forties with short, bleached hair, began to quiver.

‘Later on, a year down the track, we got told by our son that was where he was originally given it and asked to sell it,’ she explained to the police-sponsored Shoalhaven community forum on ice. Reece was talking about her son, now seventeen, who had been fifteen when he encountered meth, reportedly buying it from a dealer at the gates of his high school.

‘He went from being this beautiful little innocent boy who couldn’t lie to his mum, to [being] very angry. He turned into a monster,’ Reece said, tears streaming down her cheeks, as a slight murmur of agreement started to buzz around the room.

When a person becomes a meth addict, they change. ‘Monster’ is a common and often appropriate noun used to describe what they have become. The word derives from the Latin monstrum, which means an aberrant occurrence, usually a sign that there is something wrong with the natural order. Over time, monsters appeared in mythology as sub-human beasts, as nasty, bloodthirsty, amoral, and ugly as they were large.

Our long-running fear of monsters shows how the terror and sadness often experienced by those close to a meth addict, particularly as they begin to fall, is of a profound, archetypal, and very understandable variety; yet it is also one that is open to interpretation. We know the story of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 classic, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Dr Henry Jekyll takes an experimental new potion with the hope it will help his ill father — only to be transformed into the smaller, uglier Edward Hyde, who then kills two innocent people. Dr Jekyll vows never to turn into Mr Hyde again, but the transformations increase in frequency and do not, eventually, even require the potion to take effect. Dr Jekyll’s ability to turn back into himself diminishes, and ultimately Mr Hyde takes over; Dr Jekyll never returns. We never really know to what extent Mr Hyde was simply Dr Jekyll’s socially repressed dark side.

People do strange and often terrible things when they meet the beast within. We never hear the story from Mr Hyde’s point of view, though in the beginning, at least, Dr Jekyll has a full memory of what Mr Hyde did. We are left with the question of how much agency Dr Jekyll really had, and this in turn makes me ask myself some uncomfortable questions about what I got out of living on meth.

Leading up to my own addiction, I had observed this strange transformative process in many of the people closest to me, and I was often as upset as I was confused and alienated by the changes they went through on the way to becoming meth-heads. Before crystal meth started making it big in the news in late 2013, I had seen a key collection of my friends sliding into addiction, from 2011 onward. This included my cousin, my ex-boyfriend, my old friend Beck, and her ex-partner, Smithy, who — despite two restraining orders that forbade them from seeing each other — lived just around the corner from her, and visited regularly.

Most had lost his or her job, as well as any sense of ordinary meaning and direction in life. They had become loose with the truth, although at times it wasn’t clear if they were being manipulative, or they believed their own lies, or, indeed, if it was a combination of the two. Their lives seemed to revolve around the drug, but they had either limited insight into this fact, or a kind of ‘fuck you, sheep’ response to the conventional idea that life was better when you were not using drugs. A few had lost teeth. A few had turned to crime; for instance, when my cousin discovered meth at the age of thirty-seven, he went from being a sulky, reclusive pot-smoker with a job and a mortgage to being an unemployed burglar who’d stolen from his mum, and was living in a car in a public park. Dinner — on the rare occasions he felt like eating — was sausages cooked on the park BBQ. Perhaps this doesn’t seem all that bad when you’re high on meth. Perhaps he found that lifestyle more exciting, more dramatic, more relaxing even, than having a mortgage and an alarm clock to worry about. In any event, it was a phenomenon that begged serious questions, and I wanted to find out what the allure of this drug was — what it was providing that users’ everyday lives weren’t.

I had taken meth before, and enjoyed it, but I didn’t think it warranted throwing your life away. What’s more, the meth addicts I knew had taken just about every other kind of drug, and still managed to be semi-functional, crime-free, and predominantly sane — so why couldn’t these users manage their meth in the way they had managed their use of other drugs? And hadn’t the issue already been and gone? We had already heard about meth in the mid-2000s. What had changed by the time meth began to attract more and more of the public’s attention in 2013? Was this just an old issue being re-hashed?

Actually, no — I would learn that this increased attention coincided with a purer version of the drug flooding Australia’s drug markets. The first real indication that this purer form of methamphetamine — crystallised meth or ‘ice’ (as opposed to the powdered variety that we had heard so much about in the 2000s) — had made its way to our shores came in around 2011, when drug experts around the country started getting phone calls from health workers on the ground in Nowra, south of Sydney, saying that crystallised meth was being widely abused, and wreaking havoc, in its Aboriginal communities.

For reasons that are still not completely clear, however, it would be Victoria, and particularly regional Victoria, that would be saturated by ice. And it began to be felt in extraordinarily horrific ways.

In the early hours of Friday 15 June 2012, 19-year-old Harley Hicks, a troubled young man who been separated from his parents at an early age and had a significant criminal record, was prowling around the dark, empty, eucalypt-lined streets of Long Gully, a suburb of Bendigo in central Victoria. On this cold winter morning, he had already robbed several houses, and wanted to find just one more before the sun broke. He was energised from smoking crystal meth when he entered the old Victorian-style house in Eaglehawk Road. He was carrying a shoulder bag, and a makeshift baton crafted from copper wire and electrical tape. He first found a wallet on the kitchen bench that contained thousands of dollars set aside by the tenants, Matthew Tisell and Casey Veal — people Hicks vaguely knew — for a bond to move into a new house the next night.

He grabbed whatever he could find — a set of scales, and a pair of sunglasses. Then he made his way to the front of the house, where he searched two rooms before entering the bedroom of 10-month-old Zayden Veal, who was sleeping with a baby monitor next to him. With neither a motive nor a feeling of any particular ill will towards Zeal’s parents, Hicks unplugged the baby monitor, and then hit Zayden repeatedly with his homemade baton in the face and torso. After several blows, the baby slipped into permanent darkness; the subsequent post-mortem revealed that Zayden had sustained horrific injuries to his face and scalp, the pathologist noting that Zayden had been hit not only with the length of the baton, but also with the end of it, from which copper wire protruded.

In total, Zayden was found to have received at least 25 injuries to the face, and a minimum of eight injuries to the scalp. Hicks pleaded not guilty. The jury disagreed, and Justice Stephen Kaye sentenced the teenaged baby-killer to thirty-two years in prison before he would have the prospect of parole, telling Hicks before sentencing him that there was not ‘even the slightest indication by you of any pity or sympathy for the baby, whose life you had taken, or for his family, whose lives you have shattered. Rather, you seemed totally oblivious and impervious to such human feelings’.

This new drug, crystal meth — created in Japan nearly a century ago, originally available over the counter at pharmacies, and then made popular by American bikie gangs after it was made illegal — was enjoyed so much by Australia’s drug-using population that many users quickly became addicts, and others found their lives spiralling quickly out of control.

In early 2013, a joint state-federal police operation made a discovery that shocked them deeply. The investigation, which involved the Australian Federal Police (AFP), customs officials, New South Wales Police, and the Australian Crime Commission (ACC), was prompted by a tip-off from a member of the public about suspicious activity at a storage facility in West Ryde, Sydney. After monitoring the facility’s comings and goings for some time, the police intercepted three large containers, supposedly full of cleaning chemicals, which had been shipped from southern China. The raid turned up an astonishing 585 kilograms of high-quality crystal meth, with an estimated street value of $430 million. As a sign of things to come, the three men arrested were from different territories who had been working together to traffic the drug — a Singaporean, an Australian, and a Hong Kong man. Reporting on the bust, among many others, was the BBC, and The Huffington Post, which noted that ‘Australia seems to be a popular destination for drug smugglers’.

The 2013 Australian Crime Commission Illicit Drug Data Report (which was released in April 2014) indicated that this 585-kilogram haul was just the tip of the … well, iceberg. According to the report, the weight of amphetamines-group detections by customs increased by 516 per cent from 347.3 kilograms in 2011–12 to 2138.5 kilograms in 2012–13. Nationally, the number of amphetamines seizures increased by 39 per cent from 15,191 in 2011–12 to 21,056 in 2012–13. Unsurprisingly, the problem began to be noticed at rehabs, hospitals, police stations, and medical centres around the nation, as many drug users quickly moved to more regular use of this high-potency amphetamine. While the media was actually slow to recognise this new trend at first, there is no doubt it was making an impact on the community. It just took a little while for the problem to make news.

Jazmin-Jean Ajbschitz was a small, dark 18-year-old from the inner-Sydney suburb of Ultimo. When she was killed in mid-2011, the coroner who examined her corpse noted that the injuries to her ribs were so severe — her heart had been partially torn — that they were typical of injuries seen in victims of high-speed car crashes. Jazmin-Jean, however, had been killed by her boyfriend — who was high on crystal meth at the time — because she had ended her relationship with him via a text message. Twenty-seven years old at the time of the murder, Sean Lee King was sentenced to twenty-five and a half years in prison in June 2013, saying he ‘feels the pain every day’ of knowing he murdered his ex-girlfriend.

More murders would follow, and although it was unclear just how much of a role the drug had played when the murderer had been on crystal meth, the killings often showed similar characteristics: they were senseless, often depraved, often perverted, recklessly violent, and often playfully sadistic.

About two months after King’s sentencing, the then acting assistant commissioner, Doug Fryer, of the Victoria Police Intelligence and Covert Support Command, told the Herald Sun: ‘This is our new heroin.’ Journalist Mark Dunn reported that in at least 12 murders committed or tried by courts over the preceding two years, crystal methamphetamine had been either used by the killer or was otherwise a suspected factor in the crime. Four of those killings involved young women — including two in Smithy’s home suburb of Pakenham, in which both young women were senselessly killed in their homes — and others involved seemingly normal home robberies that became irrational, bloody, sadistic killings. So while it is true that murders occur all the time in Australia without the influence of crystal meth, police were beginning to see a clear pattern between certain types of homicides and the drug.

Around the same time I was living in the house, the Victorian parliament was running its inquiry into methamphetamine use — the Inquiry into the Supply and Use of Methamphetamines, Particularly Ice, in Victoria — with a final report to be delivered in August 2014. The report would receive 81 submissions, and conduct hearings all over the state. The committee would hear that nearly all drug rehabs had experienced an increase in the number of clients citing methamphetamine as their problem drug, often leading to six-week-or-longer waiting lists at many publicly funded facilities. Even getting to see a drug counsellor on the public purse could involve 10-day-plus waits, which was time enough for someone to relapse and not have the presence of mind to turn up to their next appointment.

Parliamentary submissions indicated that general psychologists and health practitioners lacked the expertise to deal with meth addiction, with conventional therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy often found to have limited utility in treating a condition that wears down a person’s reasoning and risk-assessment skills. Meanwhile, meth addicts and drug users more generally often complained about feeling stigmatised by health professionals, and having a deep sense of shame in accessing treatment for a behaviour which centres around an illicit substance.

In Victoria’s parliamentary inquiry, frontline community workers gave evidence that at times was quite shocking. Anex, a group that works principally as a needle exchange for drug users, wrote in their submission:

Casual users quickly progress to harmful use … long-term adverse effects of the consumption of methamphetamine are well documented and include dependence, cardiovascular complications, neurotoxic effects associated with the development of psychomotor disturbances similar to Parkinson’s disease and psychosis.

Dr Mathew Frei, of the Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre, told the Victorian parliamentary inquiry:

Sometimes we see people getting very overheated, and rhabdomyolysis is a breakdown of muscles which can lead to kidney failure. These are relatively rare but very significant toxic effects of methamphetamine. Occasionally we see cardiac events. You can imagine that a drug that increases your heart rate and increases your blood pressure might bring risk of a cardiac event, like heart failure or a heart attack, and occasionally we have seen seizures and actual strokes — so, injuries to the brain.

Melbourne City Mission reported that homeless meth-using clients ‘typically present to the service paranoid and aggressive — they can often be violent and threatening and display poor emotional self-regulation — including a reduced capacity or willingness to take responsibility for actions’.

It was obvious from the inquiry that regional Victoria was badly affected, though it was not clear whether this was because there were simply more users and abusers, or because treatment services were not as readily available. The Victorian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service told the committee that there was an ‘ice epidemic’ occurring in the Sunraysia area:

We have had about seven suicides due to the use of ICE this year alone. … We have also seen an increase in Hume, Echuca, and Bendigo … At a statewide level estimates of the percentage of clients using ICE at the time of offending vary from around 15 per cent to 60 per cent.

In October 2014, The Sydney Morning Herald would report:

Amphetamine use, particularly crystal methamphetamine or ‘ice’, has risen by up to 180 per cent over two years in some regional centres like Coffs Harbour, Cessnock. and Wagga Wagga. But the scourge is also infiltrating smaller towns — such as Moree, Broken Hill, and Casino — that had never heard of the cheap and destructive drug 10 years ago.

Over the 2014–15 period, an alleged Queensland Rebels gang member would be charged with giving a 2-year-old boy the drug ice; Harriet Wran — the youngest daughter of former New South Wales premier Neville Wran — was found sleeping rough and using ice in the lead up to being charged with murder; industrial-scale meth labs were being found in the ACT; a group of young fallen sports stars started a multi-million dollar ice syndicate in Wangaratta complete with written instructions when a new member joined; a Four Corners program would broadcast allegations that bikie gangs were getting people addicted to ice as young as thirteen so the victim would manufacture and sell the drug for them; dozens of babies would be born around the nation addicted to meth; a 20-year-old in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs would rack up 107 charges on a three-month ice-fuelled crime spree; and a paraplegic West Australian man known as ‘Hot Wheels’ would be charged and convicted with dealing meth, which he kept hidden in his wheelchair. A UNSW report published in June 2015 indicates that in 2011 there were 101 methamphetamine-related deaths in Australia, up from 85 in 2010. Preliminary projections they made for 2012 and 2013 of up to 170 deaths suggest a continuing rising trend.

Australia is just one nation among many grappling with this strange, dream-like drug. To be more precise, the reason we have high-purity crystal meth in Australia is because worldwide production of the drug has gone into overdrive over the past five years.

Throughout western civilisation, monsters, such as Medusa, have long been associated with something dangerously alluring — at times, people can’t help but engage with a monster, even if they know there are terrible consequences of doing so. Other monsters lure victims with enchanting music, drawing the unwary in, and leaving nothing but dead bones and rotting flesh all around them.

Being told that you are behaving like a monster when you’re on ice feels completely at odds with the way you actually feel when you are on the drug. And the way you feel is totally different to the way you look; a reminder that drugs don’t become addictive because they make you feel as if you’re eating razor blades — they become addictive because they feel bloody awesome. Meth feels … spectacular. It’s cheap, it lasts for a long time, and when you first start using it, you get a lot of work done — all while having the time of your life. What could be better than that?

People take drugs for a number of different reasons: because they are happy, as well as because they are sad; to celebrate, as well as to escape. People often take meth to lose weight, or to share an experience with friends; they take it to let go, and also to enhance life. And when they take it, there is nothing to suggest that evil or suffering might be just around the corner. To further complicate matters, there is no one single agreed approach on what works for treating addiction. There are also a lot of different theories about what causes addiction in the first place — genetic theory, moral theory, disease theory, learning and behavioural theory, socio-cultural theory. Our culture, too, sends mixed messages about drug-taking that make it seem at once a moral failing, and somewhat glamorous. Despite being an age-old problem, the drug addict that exists today is a perfect metaphor for a consumer culture with an insatiable pit of desire, and a tendency to have us want things we don’t really need.

But more so, there is something about the particular character of a meth high and meth addiction that mirrors the style of our culture. A dose of meth makes you feel as if you have won an award, been offered sex by a very attractive person, and are taking off in an aeroplane — all at the same time. You feel warm, calm, coherent, and crystal-clear; meth inflames your ego, your libido, and your sense of being comfortable with danger. You feel confident to the point of feeling superior — every memory of your achievements, every compliment you have ever received, seems to rush to your consciousness simultaneously. Indeed, it’s hard not to think you are amazing if you can feel so successful just by putting a needle in your arm. You feel fulfilled, purposeful, and excited. You also feel seedy, admittedly, but in a cool, edgy way. For the most part, we had loads of fun in Smithy’s house; we sat up and talked all night, we had crazy conversations and laughed so much we gave ourselves stitches. There is often an intimacy in drug circles that can be hard to find in other parts of society.

Crystal meth, and the wonderfully mysterious vortex it plunges its users into, can make you feel that your life is one big, magical, lucid dream where anything is possible, everything and everyone revolves around you, and consequences are not binding. But then there is the flip side, when the magic potion wears off, and the dreams become nightmares. Crystal meth is a bit like the ‘old religion’ spells in the TV show Merlin — you end up feeling as if nature is punishing you for messing with the equilibrium.

Meth, at its heights, fulfils the gap between what American sociologist Daniel Bell describes as ‘The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism’: the contradiction between the cultural sphere of consumerist, instant self-gratification and hedonism, and the demand, in the economic sphere, for hard-working, productive individuals.

This also gives us a chance to reflect on drugs in western culture, the modern concepts of addiction, and problematic drug use. In their book High culture: reflections on addiction and modernity, American philosophy academics Anna Alexander and Mark S. Roberts write:

Western Culture — the Bible and the heroic myths, Orphic cults and mysteries, as well as the history of testimonial writing — contains numerous references to these substances taken solely for the purpose of altering the mind. Their potential energy has conquered the earth, and established communication between various cultures and peoples … these substances have filtered pathways between people of different worlds from the tribal to the modern, and have, moreover, opened passages for us that have proved useful in a number of ways.

Along similar lines, others note that prohibition of drugs and the ‘medicalisation of drug use’ is a distinctly modern phenomenon. Australian academics David Moore and Suzanne Fraser analyse the work of American author Eve Sedgwick thus:

For Sedgwick, Western liberal societies reliance upon Enlightenment notions of autonomy, rationality and freedom have produced a central dualism: free will and compulsion. She argues that for as long as we have idealised and worshipped the idea of free will, we have also generated its opposite: the denigrated, devalued idea of compulsion. In this model we strive only for good: pure freedom. Dependence or reliance or compulsion to do anything becomes defined here as contamination and failure of the will.

Fraser and Moore also draw on the work of the French post-structuralist Jacques Derrida, who says that drugs are ‘not a scientific concept’ but a political category with norms usually tending on the side of the ‘prohibitionist’. While it can be tempting to use our pre-existing gripes with ‘society’ to explain the widespread use of meth, there is an important caveat to this line of questioning. In his book Methland: the death and life of an American small town, which documents the drug culture of Oelwein, Iowa, Nick Reding suggests that meth use in the American mid-west can be understood, at least partially, within the context of the loss of traditional local industry to globalising forces, and the social and economic decline that followed. Yet history shows that meth use occurs across all sectors of society, and in times of both economic prosperity and social decline. In Methamphetamine: its history, pharmacology, and treatment, medical doctor and author Ralph Weisheit says that:

drug surges can ignite quickly in conditions characterized by high availability, the absence of legal drug controls, a vulnerable population of users, and social and economic distress resulting from conditions such as cultural demoralization, mass unemployment, poverty, or mass migration. They may also arise in conditions of sudden economic prosperity, excess income, and the search for new symbols of status and pleasure — conditions that spawned Amercian amphetamine use after the Second World War and the cocaine surges of the 1980s.

With all that in mind, I think it’s noteworthy that meth often leaves the user highly individualised, robot-like, and egotistical. It is a drug developed and spread in an age of technology, productivity, prohibition, a globalised economy, and the subsequent global black market that grew alongside it, and in a culture dominated by big pharmaceutical companies and a highly medicalised society.

My experience is not everyone’s experience with the drug, and this is not necessarily how everybody becomes addicted. I have known many users over the years who use, even weekly, and still hold down jobs, and don’t appear to be adversely affected.

I have had drug addictions before. I took time off from my job at triple j to spend two months in rehab in 2008; after breaking up with my partner and failing at a big work project, I used every drug I could lay my hands on — including heroin and powdered meth — until I was a blubbering, teary mess. But since leaving rehab, though I did crave meth from time to time, I had been able to stop myself using it many times. I believed my life was so full, and my addiction-strategies so sharpened, that I could live in the Pakenham house, take the drug occasionally, and still function well enough to write a profile piece about a chronic drug addict. In truth, however, and as I shall explain, there are complex reasons why I succumbed to the drug, which go beyond the fact that I was taking, and indeed injecting, a far stronger dose than I was used to. I had suffered trauma as a teenager, but addiction itself is complex: seventeen years of using drugs, regardless of my initial reasons for taking them, have created a void — a drug-shaped hole — in my heart that not only leaves me susceptible to the ‘substance of the day’, at times and to this day, but that still seems impossible to fill with something else. I have always preferred fantasy to reality — particularly fantasy of the self-aggrandising type. I am often irresponsible, reckless, volatile, self-involved. I hate rules and limitations, such as the fact that humans don’t live forever, don’t have wings and can’t fly, and I can’t deny that a syringe full of meth brings me pretty close to flying and feeling immortal. This book is partly an invitation for you to go on a journey with me as I try to identity and then exorcise, or at least mitigate, the problems in my own character that led me to addiction.