Chapter Two

Panic!

I GREW UP in a small, hilly, damp, conservative town called Emerald and I went to school in Pakenham, where Smithy’s house is, and where much of this story takes place. I moved back to ‘Packy’ when I was twenty-eight, and I moved back again at thirty-four to write this book. How would I describe the place? Well, I quite like it; it’s close to nature, but just an hour’s train ride to the city. What does it look like? Well, it’s … pretty. It’s a reasonably affluent working-class town, the last stop on the suburban train line, with mixed terrain and a mixture of people. It’s not for everyone; one local suggested it’s ‘a place for fuckwits who can’t afford to live anywhere else’. All personal taste aside, it’s essentially a flatland, surrounded on its northern side by mile upon mile of damp, tough, mossy, fern-covered mountains.

In fact, two hundred years ago the Pakenham district was a marshy, fertile hunting ground for indigenous tribes, full of eels, and roos, and wallabies that would come down from the mountains to drink from the seemingly endless puzzle of lakes and swamplands. When the first white settlers arrived in the 1830s, they found nothing much but copperhead snakes, impenetrable bushland, swampy fields, and holes in the ground that were full of nasty, stinging bull ants.

The first commercial enterprise in town was a pub run by the original landowners, which was fittingly placed along what is now a major highway, then little more than a goat track, in an area of Pakenham called the Toomuc Valley. Eventually, more bushland would be cleared, and the kangaroos would leave and be replaced by acres of pig farms and quarries. In years to come, Pakenham — named after a British war general — was far enough away from ‘civilisation’ to attract a steady mix of anti-establishment entrepreneurs, rebels, misfits, working-class individualists, murderers, and people who wanted to live by their own rules.

The most dramatic event in the town’s history — the 1879 Sly Grog Riot — seems perfectly fitting when considered today, as Pakenham had a significant number of home-brewers who made their living selling grog to the inhabitants of the shanty town that sat on the small rise in the middle of town. In March 1879, the police turned up with a plan to seize the illicit spirits, only to be confronted by a hundred-strong mob armed with pick handles, sticks, and anything else they could find. The police retreated, and decided to simply ignore the illegal grog trade from then onwards.

For a long time, Pakenham had a reputation as a bogan farm-town. In the last fifteen years, however, its open grasslands have been filled with monotonous, homogenised, terracotta-roofed housing with multiple living areas and tiny backyards. Between 2007 and 2012, the suburb’s population grew from 20,000 to 34,000. The towns surrounding Pakenham also grew quickly, and in the last five years Pakenham has become connected to part of the mass suburbia of south-east Melbourne.

Today, a single creek runs through town, creating a dividing line between new Pakenham’s sparkling suburban areas, which have their own wetlands and cultural centre, and old Pakenham’s simple, nostalgic, even earthy mix of old farmhouses, commission houses, crab apple trees, 1980s rentals, and big, beautiful white gums.

One of the last areas to be eaten up was the Toomuc Valley, which had remained a farmland for around a hundred and fifty years until it was sold to a massive corporate property developer in 2010. Now a residential village tucked away from the rest of Pakenham, the valley is still surrounded by beautiful hills that are covered in a combination of virgin bush and hobby farms. Most of the hills are so steep that it takes a very fit person (or, in my case, a highly psychotic meth-flushed person, contemplating how he was going to counter a murderous plot or expose a sadistic paedophile ring) to climb them. But if you did manage to climb to the top of one of them, you would see Pakenham’s latest housing development. From a distance, the suburban outpost looks like a 1990s Sim City village with just enough parks to stop the locals from rioting. This is new Pakenham with a distinctive old Pakenham flavour: a mixture of rental properties and mortgaged houses, occupied by tradesmen, child-care workers, labourers, and the odd drug dealer. The little village is pleasant to look at, though if you look over the valley with a critical eye you will notice there is no community centre, oval, or anything that might resemble a means for people to run around or get together.

If you had been on one of the hills as the sun rose across the flatlands one Tuesday morning in the early autumn of 2014, you would have seen a half-moon lingering in the sky over the valley containing 30-or-so houses. If you had looked at one particular house, you might have seen that all the lights were on. Inside, sitting on his bed, was 42-year-old Rob Smith (Smithy), holding a syringe full of promise against the light cast by his bedroom lamp. An unskilled labourer in his everyday life, with needles the tools of his trade, he flicked the syringe with care and precision. Pouring white crystals from a clear, plastic sachet bag into a tablespoon full of boiling water, he mixed it with the end of the syringe, which he then used to crush the crystals until they became a white liquid. He tore off part of a cigarette and placed it in the mixture, took the lid off the fit, put the needle into the mixture, and drew it into the needle. He was a figure of concentration and purpose: efficient, careful, and productive.

I was also in that house, asleep. Beck, Smithy’s ex-girlfriend, and near-permanent houseguest, was waiting outside my door, having had a shot of meth not long before. The buzz had sent her first into a talking spin, and then to the hallway cupboard, where she pulled out the vacuum cleaner and began vacuuming all the floors enthusiastically, a thin trail of blood dripping from her arm. Beck was letting me — her best friend of nearly twenty years — sleep for an extra hour before delivering the good news: Smithy had decided to give me tick.

I had been living in the house for three weeks at this stage, and I’d had just one shot of meth so far — due to both my desire to keep my usage irregular and to my lack of money.

She woke me with a couple of taps, saying: ‘I told Smithy you were avoiding going over there because you owed him money and felt guilty taking more of his drugs. So he’s happy to shout you until you get paid.’

‘Okay, that’s really nice. Thanks, mate,’ I said, not wanting to give away that I’d hoped that by not asking for tick, Smithy would eventually get so horny and off-his-face that he’d offer me some anyway. I also didn’t want to give away how excited I was about taking the drug. After all, I was there on assignment — work wasn’t supposed to be so much fun.

I walked into the bedroom to see Smithy putting the finishing touches on my shot.

‘Packin’ ’em in Pakenham,’ he said.

I rolled my eyes at his failed attempt at humour, and thanked him for the tick. He was ready to inject me, so I pumped up my arm and smacked the underside of my elbow to make a vein visible.

As the syringe was brought forward, I felt as if I was waiting for a Christmas present. Not every meth trip is the same, though they are almost always good if you don’t do it all the time — even then, the effect of a syringe full of meth will always be better that doing your taxes, or working out how much of your pay will go on your rent. On this morning, my mouth watered, my throat tickled, and I took a deep breath in anticipation. He slipped the needle in painlessly; as it hit the vein, the syringe filled with deep, red blood — signifying that an exciting taboo had been broken.

As I later learned, when crystal meth enters the brain, it affects those neurons that contain dopamine, a feel-good chemical. On this day, the meth travelled up the blood in my arm, and was quickly absorbed into my brain’s grey matter, going directly to its reward centre. My brain was flushed with dopamine; at the same time, my serotonin levels increased, improving my mood, while my noradrenalin levels dropped, drastically reducing my feeling of stress and anxiety. Until I took meth, I didn’t believe it was possible for a human to feel so relaxed, alert, confident, euphoric, calm, and energised at the same time. I felt love, sex, danger, and mystery, right through my skin, all over my skin, enlarging my heart to the size of a balloon as I floated off into a land of dream and dance and immortality, excited by my rejection of everything I’d been taught about hard work being the only thing that can bring real happiness. With morning light just starting to seep through the bottom of the closed curtains, I put the stereo on in the lounge room and danced like a muppet. I felt energised by an edgy feeling of superiority, as if all the stupid, ordinary straights getting up for work were being ‘left behind’.

The rest of the day went pretty much the same way (full of rampant stupidity), and is difficult to piece together as a coherent story. So let me explain it as best I can:

•Beck asked everyone who entered the house that day whether they liked penises, but so softly that none of them could hear her.

•Smithy asked me at least a dozen times whether Beck had been sneaking off at night to have sex with men in the bushes.

•A large refrigerator-repair man visiting from Kalgoorlie tried to convince me of a secret UN plan called ‘Agenda 21’ to reduce the world’s population to less than 500,000.

•Beck spent approximately six hours playing Zombie Apocalypse on her iPad.

But — as they say — ‘it was all just a dream’. All good things must come to an end, everything that goes up must come down, and so on. Eventually, the balloon ran out of its proverbial helium, and I slowly floated back to earth. Before a big meth crash, you often find yourself just on the right level — not too up and not too down, the perfect time to get back to work. I was, after all, living in that house to find out how my friends had become hooked on meth (and, no, in retrospect, the irony of asking this after having such an outrageous time on meth is not lost on me).

Later that day, Smithy was sitting on the edge of his bed, wearing an Adidas tracksuit and a look of concentrated fury, discussing his theories of what had gone on during New Year’s Eve behind his back (which I shall explain shortly), and going to the mirror every now and then to squint, and rub his face. It seemed as good a time as any for me to raise the issue of meth addiction.

‘So, Smithy, I guess what I wanted to ask you about is how you fell into meth in that two years or so I didn’t see you?’

Smithy gave me a look of horror, followed by one of suspicion.

‘Well, you used to just use a bit of truckie speed on the weekends, and smoke bongs during the week, and now you use meth all the time,’ I continued. ‘I’m just wondering how that happened.’

Smithy kept staring at me silently.

‘Y’know, no judgement here, mate. I just want to know how you managed to get so into meth,’ I said.

His suspicion turned to mild aggression: ‘I don’t fucking use it all the time — who told you that? You always listen to everyone else, you always take everybody else’s side, you’ll listen to what everyone else has to say before asking me whether it’s true.’

‘Well,’ I said, slowly and carefully, like a dog-catcher cautiously approaching a pit-bull. ‘It’s kind of obvious—’

‘How?’

I looked at Smithy with his blotchy skin, a confused expression on his face, and the swabs, two used syringes, and used spoons sitting on either side of him.

‘I can tell you this, Smithy, because you’re a good bloke and my friend, and I can be honest with you: your skin, the way you look, you’ve lost so much weight, you don’t work anymore — ’

‘There’s nothing wrong with the way I look,’ he said, his face flushed with blood. ‘All this boils down to is people talking about me. I knew it, I knew it, I had a feeling this was going on. Arseholes saying shit about me behind my back, spreading shit, saying I’m a fucking paedophile, Beck telling people not to visit me. Why does no fucking cunt visit me? Because people are fucking spreading shit, that’s why. So next time someone says Smithy is a junkie, why not, rather than just accept it as gospel, come and ask me if it’s true?’

‘So are you?’

‘Am I what?’

‘Y’know, a junkie?’

‘No!’ he roars. ‘It’s fucking Beck. She’s just trying to fucking cover for her own fuck-ups—’

‘You mean cover for her own meth use?’

‘No fuckwit — to cover-up for New Year’s Eve,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’re going to take her side about that as well?’

And so we moved on to the topic of New Year’s Eve, when he was convinced Beck stole his acid, and had sex with one of his friends in the bushes.

Before I moved into the house, I had asked Beck about her meth use as well. Like Smithy, she would ask for evidence, and when I provided it she would dispute it. At other times, she wouldn’t answer directly, but would instead put her hand on my knee and say something like, ‘I know your heart’s in the right place, mate.’ Then she’d change the topic to something she knew would interest me, before I had the chance to realise that that was what she’d done.

Meth users are often highly paranoid, and genuinely lose track of the ‘truth’ somewhere along the way. In most circumstances, they wouldn’t answer a trusted friend honestly about how much they were using, even if they did have the self-awareness to monitor it. And it’s extremely difficult to keep track of meth use, as a user’s perception of time speeds up at the same time as their reasoning skills slow down.

Beck and Smithy would not be the kind of people to answer government surveys — or, at least, not honestly — and nor did they ever get medical treatment for their addictions. I wonder how many other meth addicts answer phone surveys by saying they either don’t use meth very much or perhaps not at all, while they are surrounded by their used needles, with tin foil wrapped around their heads. I know from my own experience that meth can eat away at your self-awareness — to put it mildly — so the idea that there are accurate national records about how many people use meth, how much meth is used, and the harm that arises from it, makes me deeply suspicious. And when I see how low the most respected survey, the government’s National Drug Strategy Household Survey (NDSHS), shows meth use to be, my suspicions are heightened. Why? The NDSHS, which is carried out by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), reports that the prevalence of methamphetamine use in Australia and Victoria has remained relatively stable since 2001. This puts meth use at around 2.5 per cent of the population.

This raises a critical question: why would the NDSHS indicate no increase in the number of people using meth, when we are all so convinced it is such a problem? Are their surveys unreliable? Or is it the case that we are in the grip of a moral panic over meth that’s affecting a far smaller cohort than we assume, and that I, for instance, was always wrong to assume that, just because I had known people who were addicted and didn’t want to admit it, this was a broad social problem?

Indeed, on the other side of the debate, there are those who suggest that there is no ‘meth epidemic’ — that meth is not a disease or virus-like problem that is spreading uncontrollably around the community. Some suggest that the sense of crisis we have about the drug is driven by a media beat-up, self-interested bureaucracies, and health agencies trying to get more funding, and by politicians driving their own agendas. Professor David Moore, for example, says that the public conversation around methamphetamine tends to be simplistic, panic-driven, and hyperbolic, leading to the perception that methamphetamine use is more prevalent and dangerous than the evidence suggests it is.

Could it be that our collective understanding of the ‘meth problem’ is being driven by a panicked approach that fails to take into account individual responsibility and pre-existing human foibles? Or, conversely, is this perspective a kind of relativist, media-studies framework that waters down the reality that meth abuse causes genuine human suffering?

Moore and his co-author Robin Dwyer, in an article published in the International Journal of Drug Policy in 2013, do not definitively answer this question, but they do argue that catastrophising messages not only stigmatise users and reduce their willingness to get treatment, but also that disproportionate attitudes may lead to hard-line, punitive legal approaches to drugs that will inevitably make the situation worse. The pair also suggest that:

Policy and health promotion concerning methamphetamine should: (i) develop a less alarmist and more nuanced portrayal of the relationship between methamphetamine use and psychosis; (ii) avoid portraying psychosis (or hallucinations, visions and paranoia) as always and inevitably distressing and pathological — such messages are unlikely to resonate with consumers … and (iii) avoid representing methamphetamine consumers as out-of-control, dangerous, threatening, and irrational.

Another viewpoint is that of Columbia University’s charismatic, dreadlocked associate professor of psychiatry Carl Hart, who Moore cites as a significant influence on his work. ‘Drug panics are a natural response to any threatening problem, but such panics are often exploited to advance the power, prestige, or financial interests of individuals and institutions claiming ownership of the problem,’ Hart says.

Hart argues that it is moral panic and media hysteria that distorts the truth about meth, and not the attitudes of the users themselves. One of the most salient points about the meth phenomenon is that the ‘vast majority of meth users are not addicted,’ he says, and that when a drug user is doing poorly in life, drugs become the scapegoat. ‘People stop looking for other reasons for problems once they know drugs are involved … that way, you don’t have to look at more complicated problems.’

Bearing all this in mind, there is nevertheless strong evidence about increasing meth use in Australia that is hard to repudiate. When we look at the health figures, and hear stories from people working on the front line, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the meth problem is getting worse. Nationally, the number of amphetamine-related hospital admissions recorded in 2011–12 (2,895) was the highest since 1993–94 (which was, incidentally, the year that the first shipments of powdered methamphetamine arrived in Australia, as well as the year that ecstasy reached its peak popularity). What’s more, these admissions had steadily increased over the previous three years. The figures from the health department are backed up not just by dozens of anecdotal reports by frontline workers, but by the crime statistics: the number of national arrests for all amphetamines (including ecstasy and speed) in Australia reached an all-time high of 22,189 over the 2012–13 period, which was a 32 per cent increase on the previous year. The number of clandestine laboratories detected nationally had more than doubled within a decade, increasing from 358 in 2003–04 to 757 in 2012–13. There was a 6.4 per cent decrease in the number of clandestine laboratories detected in Australia late in this period — from 809 in 2011–12 to 757 a year later — which was the first decrease since 2006–07. Despite this decrease, it was still the second-highest number of detections per year on record. Statistics and figures from state health departments also back the idea that the meth problem is ascending, as do the stories from rehab managers who say they now have a greater proportion of people seeking help because of methamphetamine.

So what’s going on here? Are official government surveys failing to capture a group of transient, paranoid users who never seek help, lack the self-awareness to answer research groups properly, and lie about whether or not they are using meth (let alone whether or not it is causing them harm or psychosis)? Or are these surveys not even reaching the population group — such as the homeless, the mentally ill, and prisoners — who are statistically more likely to take meth?

This seems to be a controversial issue. The National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC) declined to provide a person to be interviewed on whether the NDSHS figures were accurate, although a spokesperson conceded that their research doesn’t cover homeless or imprisoned populations. Indeed, slightly different research cohorts might be part of the confusing impressions left in the media. An NDARC spokesperson, Lucy Burns, told The Guardian Australia that:

The AIHW [the NDSHS] was a general population survey — which means they don’t concentrate on people who might actually be in the drug market.

Perhaps, though, the answer is both simpler and more nuanced than it first seems. If you look more closely at the NDSHS data, you’ll see that while meth use per capita isn’t increasing, there has been a significant increase in the proportion of users taking it daily or weekly (from 9.3 per cent to 15.5 per cent), particularly among ice users (from 12.4 per cent to 25.3 per cent) between 2010 and 2013. What’s more, it also shows that use of the less potent meth powder decreased significantly from 51 per cent to 29 per cent, while the use of ice (or crystal methamphetamine) more than doubled, from 22 per cent in 2010 to 50 per cent in 2013. From this, it can be concluded that while crystal meth is not taking over the community in ‘pandemic proportions’, many existing drug users — who once had hold of their drug use — are slipping into potentially addictive behaviour because a more potent drug is on the market. The fact that amphetamine users are using methamphetamine more often could also explain why there is more harm being caused. Crystal meth isn’t ‘recruiting’ people with no drug history; instead, casual users of powdered meth — often referred to as ‘speed’ or just ‘meth’ — and ecstasy have found themselves taking a more powerful and far more addictive version of the class of drugs that they had thus far been able to use in moderation (although this may change as younger generations come through without prior experience of any other drugs, and find that crystal meth is available in the same way ecstasy or powdered meth has been for previous generations who eventually graduated to crystal-meth use). In this regard, we can say that while crystal meth is a significant social problem, there isn’t really a ‘meth epidemic’ — at least not if we define ‘epidemic’ as a thing that spreads through the general community like an infectious disease — because it’s pre-existing amphetamine users (not the population at large) who are being affected, albeit often very seriously.

In February 2016, NDARC released a report conducted by a research team that went beyond population surveys and instead measured data on treatment episodes for amphetamines, including people seeking counselling, rehabilitation, detoxification, and hospitalisation. The team, led by Professor Louisa Degenhardt, concluded that ‘the number of regular methamphetamine users has almost tripled from 90,000 in 2009–2010 to 268,000 in 2013–2014’. Noting that their figures provided us with the first ‘quantitative estimate of the scale of the problem of methamphetamine use in Australia’, the study warned that methamphetamine dependence had more than doubled in people aged between fifteen and twenty-four between 2009–10 and 2013–14: ‘Worryingly 1.14 per cent of young people aged 15–24 are estimated to be dependent on the drug compared with only 0.4 per cent in 2009–2010’ the report, published in The Medical Journal of Australia, said.

ACC figures indicate that methamphetamine purity has risen, in Victoria, from approximately 20 per cent in the 2010–11 reporting period to more than 75 per cent in the 2012–13 period. In New South Wales, it rose over the same period from 9.5 per cent purity to 68 per cent; in Queensland, from 13 per cent to 52 per cent; in South Australia, from 31 per cent to 54 per cent; in West Australia, from 32 per cent to 50 per cent; and in Tasmania, from 9 per cent to 64 per cent.

Why is this purity rising? Over the last four years there has been far more methamphetamine coming into Australia from developing countries, particularly through the postal system via airmail. While we used to have powdered meth, the crystallised form is now far more common, and this form of the drug is far more potent (although, to confuse matters, they are both referred to as just ‘meth’ in street slang). Powdered meth and crystal meth are made the same way, with the same ingredients; it’s just that ‘crystallising’ the ‘base’ involves a few more steps in the process.

The vast majority of the 500,000 Australians who used meth in the last twelve months are not dependent on it (though this does not necessarily mean that meth isn’t having a negative impact on their lives). Dependence is a slippery concept in meth, but generally — if we accept that the official statistics are accurate — most meth users use occasionally, and most (although I remain suspicious of this self-reporting statistic, for reasons already stated) do not report harms such as psychosis, or commit crimes. Australia Bureau of Statistics drug-market modellers have calculated that there are approximately ten times more ‘occasional’ users of methamphetamine than there are ‘heavy users’. This is not the case with heroin, where they estimate ‘heavy users’ outnumber ‘occasional users’. Rebecca McKetin, a fellow at ANU’s College of Medicine, Biology and Environment, estimates that there are around 100,000 addicts, or about 20 per cent of this number. (Addict’ refers to someone who is using more than once a week.)

In his presentation to the Victorian parliamentary committee on methamphetamine use, addiction specialist Dr David Jacka agreed, for the most part, that a combination of media reporting and a misunderstanding of the true nature of addiction has contributed to a perception that methamphetamine results in more serious dependency problems than is the case, at least compared to other drugs. Dr Jacka said:

The vast majority of people never go beyond functional use. They never go beyond recreational use. It [meth] is nowhere near as addictive as cigarettes, nicotine … Crack cocaine is a really good example of something that is much more addictive. Heroin is much more addictive. Methamphetamine, crack and ice are perhaps more addictive than ordinary amphetamines, but it is still of the order of 15 to 20 per cent of people who use the drug habitually will become dependent. It is not the majority by any means.

One of the key risks is that by focusing on the ‘hard end’ of drug use, we may miss opportunities to take a more preventative approach and address important but less severe issues among users. It is important not to accept without reservation accounts suggesting all users behave in a violent or psychotic manner, particularly after only occasional or short-term episodes of using the drug.

I do know one guy, a journalist, who says he uses meth every time he needs to move house, and finds the drug incredibly useful. I also know a woman who works as a drug counsellor who uses the drug just once a year — on New Year’s Eve. Then there are the club bunnies — I’ve known many private-school kids who revel in the edginess of meth use, while still maintaining all the things that make them privileged. The meth use seemed to enhance their image; these were good-looking kids who loved extended after-parties, and saying things like, ‘Oh no, a bit of three-thirty-itis’ before smoking their crack pipe in the middle of the day. I’ve stayed in contact with many of them, and as far as I can tell they never lost their jobs, or jeopardised their education — as they got older, they simply gave up the drug, and now lead fairly safe and steady lives.

I am reminded of a passage from William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, where a middle-use opiate user assumes the narrator’s role to tell us that in the futuristic dystopian world:

How low the other junkies, whereas we — WE have this tent and this lamp, and this tent and this lamp and this tent and nice and warm in here and warm nice and IN HERE … IT’S COLD OUTSIDE where the dross eaters and the needle boys won’t last two years … But WE SIT HERE and we never increase the DOSE never-never increase the dose, except TONIGHT is a SPECIAL OCCASION.

I have gotten to know one user, while researching this book, who appears to have her life absolutely together — she is articulate, confident, and introspective — and yet she uses meth nearly every weekend. She gets paid very well in a Sydney corporate marketing job, and told me that she uses frequently, sometimes weekly, but has never missed a day of work, doesn’t get depressed, and, all-in-all, her usage doesn’t have a negative impact on her life. And I believed her — I often had conversations with her online when she was using, and it often took me a long time to notice she was off her face. She was very friendly and very happy when she was using, and although her thoughts moved more quickly than they normally did, she perhaps wasn’t quite as sharp as her usual self. She had a tendency to take things very literally, but generally her mind seemed to operate as usual — perhaps even a bit better.

‘So why don’t you think it’s problematic for you?’ I asked her.

‘Control,’ she replied. ‘I always take my dose on a Friday. It keeps me awake for two nights, and then I fall asleep on Sunday afternoon.’

‘How do you manage to fall asleep on it?’

‘My anti-anxiety medication: I don’t come down, I float down.’

Her long sleep from Sunday afternoon to Monday morning mitigated the nights she stayed awake. During those two days, she not only had fun, but also cleaned her house, and came up with many new ideas that she would later implement to enhance both her working and leisure life.

I wasn’t around Smithy and Beck when they started using crystallised meth during the summer of 2011–12. But I was there when they first got together in 2007, and I lived with them from 2009 to 2011, when they were using speed each week. What I’d noticed about Smithy was that, during the week, if he didn’t have any pot when he was coming down off speed, he would just lie in bed, in a catatonic state, and stare at the walls. If his mood was slightly more elevated than this, he would whinge, complain about everything, and not greet you when you walked in the door. Then ‘Smithy Super Saturday’ would come again, and he would be in your face, saying, ‘I used to think you were just Beck’s friend, but now I know you and I are friends — fucking great friends, too. Do you want another line?’

As for their relationship, it was never particularly good. Over time, their arguments became a bi-weekly phenomenon. I had also lived with them for a period of just over a year, about six months into their relationship. I remember getting up in the middle of the night to eat some Nutella; all the lights were off, and Smithy was bedded down in the lounge room (like he always did) while Beck was lying down in bed. They were just winding down from an argument.

Randomly, almost as if he was talking in his sleep, Smithy yelled out, ‘You stupid, dirty fucking slap—’

Without taking a breath, Beck responded, ‘You worthless, dole-bludging, lazy, drug-fucked fucking piece of turd—’

‘Fucking oxygen thief,’ he said after a 30-second pause.

I took the Nutella jar, and tiptoed back to my bedroom.

Over time, I got tired of Smithy’s sleaziness when he was off his face, as well as of his passive-aggression when he was coming down. Beck, too, could be extremely trying during the week, screaming at her kids first thing in the morning, and going into crying fits over (apparently) nothing. One day, Smithy and I got into an argument that ended in a physical fight; after that, I didn’t see them for another two years. This was the 2011–13 period, when they started using meth. Once they started using, Smithy began committing crimes, his moods became intolerably chaotic, his breath turned rancid and a front tooth fell out, and their arguing got worse. One night, he and Beck had an altercation, during which, according to Beck, she hit him first with her fists and then with a toaster. Smithy had a restraining order issued against her. She got her own place just around the corner, and they started talking again. They were using meth daily by this point — unlike their use of speed, which had been weekly.

Eventually, I started talking to Beck again, and then Smithy. The first night I saw him after our long break (and after he’d started taking crystal meth), he looked noticeably different — he’d gone from looking like a knockabout, ‘you beaut’, working-class bloke to a grubby criminal. He wore black clothes, had spots on his face, and that prominent missing front tooth. We never mentioned what happened between us the day of the fight — ‘blokes get over things, blokes don’t hold grudges’ — and we managed to form a new friendship, stronger than the one we had before.

I tell this story to demonstrate that although Beck and Smithy weren’t a clean, nice, problem-free couple, meth did ramp up the extent to which their worst sides featured in their lives. Beck became more moody and more verbally abusive to her kids; her tantrums shifted up a gear from yelling to violent outbursts. Smithy’s sleaziness became a full-time obsession; his threats to punch me, and others, in the face were almost constant. His paranoia about being ripped off slipped into psychosis at times. Once he started taking meth, he ended up taking so many days off work that his boss told him he should take a permanent vacation. When he went into Centrelink to apply for the dole, they took one look at him and suggested he apply for the Disability Support Pension instead.

Smithy and Beck’s descent into problematic meth use had a long, perhaps sequential history, and was often simply dictated by the availability of the drug. All things considered, however, there can be little question that the drug made their lives less stable, and made both of them more prone to violence.

It is important to note that not all meth users become violent. Many meth users already have a history of violence, and many people commit violence when they are not on meth. Others claim to have been on meth when they committed a crime, when, in fact, they weren’t. Still, there is little doubt that one of the biggest problems of meth is its apparent relationship with violent behaviour. Indeed, there is a whole body of research that has been conducted in Australia showing that aggression, violent behaviour, and violent crimes are relatively common among chronic illicit methamphetamine users. In 2014, Rebecca McKetin et al. published a study in the journal published by the Society for the Study of Addiction, ‘Does methamphetamine use increase violent behaviour? Evidence from a prospective longitudinal study’. The study concluded that, taking into account other variables — such as a person’s pre-morbid tendency for violent acts — there was ‘a clear dose-response increase in violent behaviour when participants were using methamphetamine compared to when they were not using the drug. This effect was especially large for frequent methamphetamine use (16-plus days of use in the past month), which increased the odds of violent behaviour 10-fold.’

Dr McKetin, who first started studying the link between amphetamines and psychosis when she was doing her PhD in the mid-1990s — long before anybody else in Australia had researched this correlative — told me that:

We know that people with schizophrenia have too much dopamine in their brain. Meth increases dopamine, and this causes an imbalance — resulting in too little serotonin, our mood regulator, and too much noradrenaline, our ‘fight or flight’ chemical. Meth has a clear correlation to very violent behaviour. Part of the reason people act violently when they are on the drug is the chemical interaction it causes: low serotonin levels are associated with aggressive behaviour. So, in the end, people are paranoid from too much dopamine, irritable from low serotonin, and overhyped — all at once.

In my experience, the comedown seems to be a particularly high-risk time for violent thoughts to arise. For me, they usually came as a result of psychotic episodes where I felt the need to defend myself from a perceived mob-attack. Research from the United States suggests that between one-quarter and one-third of meth users engage in violent acts while intoxicated or withdrawing from the drug. I wonder how many more contemplate it, or find that violence makes its way into their never-ending vortex of sexual fantasies.

Studies have also shown that meth reduces impulse control and inhibitions, while increasing the likelihood of psychotic episodes; psychotic patients are in turn more likely to be violent than other psychiatric patients. That said, McKetin’s 2014 study showed that feelings of violence during the meth rollercoaster have also been found to exist independently of psychotic delusions.

While I have to admit to getting into the odd fight before I became a meth addict, I had never before experienced such moments of blood lust. On ice, I had moments when the ground seemed to split in front of me, when meaning changed, and I experienced what felt like aberrant, ancient, repressed impulses. In those moments, inflicting pain felt like an exciting, transgressive act of destiny, where somehow all the pain, oppression, and condescension I had experienced as a human, and especially as a gay man, could be overcome by a single, spectacular act of cruelty perpetrated on another person. That person’s feelings seemed positively inconsequential to the excitement of doing harm.

McKetin’s research has also shown that up to 25 per cent of regular users experience psychosis, and that overall about 13 per cent of users report that they’ve experienced some kind of psychotic episode while on meth. ‘One of the most common psychotic fantasies that people tend to have is that they are being watched,’ McKetin said. ‘For some reason a lot of meth users think there are secret cameras in the house or that the government is spying on them.’

McKetin explained that as many as half of current meth users have previously experienced mental-health problems and taken medication for this condition — most commonly for anxiety, depression, and psychosis.

Yet, at the same time, she told me, ‘Our research tends to show that those who experience meth-psychosis rarely have any personal or family history of schizophrenia.’

McKetin told me that the less talked-about, but more common, problem for meth users was mild to moderate depression that often lingered for a long time after someone stopped using, making a relapse more likely. What is not clear is whether a person’s depression or suicidal thoughts are caused by the prolonged use of meth, or whether some people who take meth are self-medicating their pre-existing depression. It seems unlikely we will ever have a clear-cut answer to such a complex question, although one 2012 University of Melbourne research project did find that ‘72 per cent of participants reported that methamphetamine use preceded the onset of mental health problems’.

It would seem that the longer-running risk of meth use is depression and anxiety. Research by Dr Nicole Lee (associate professor at the National Centre for Education and Training on Addiction at Flinders University and adjunct associate professor at the National Drug Research Institute) and her colleagues has found that among 126 Australians who used varying levels of methamphetamine over a certain period of time, 69 per cent had been diagnosed or treated by a doctor for a mental-health problem, most frequently for depression (50 per cent) and anxiety (29 per cent).

Yet, these facts beg an obvious chicken-and-egg question. It seems quite likely that a person who is already down in the dumps (or anxious, or stressed) would take the drug. Meth has quite specific effects — it doesn’t bring the connectedness or light-heartedness associated with marijuana, ecstasy, and LSD, but it can make you feel as if you are living in a 1980s TV advertisement, where you have success, friends, boundless energy, endless sunshine, and instant gratification. It makes all your dreams come true, while you become your ego-ideal: an experience I call ‘Fantasia’.

In Fantasia, you are not just more successful and powerful than in your wildest dreams, you are the most successful and the most powerful. In my experience, crystal meth provides you with something that is increasingly rare in modern life — it enables you to live in the moment, right-now-in-that-moment when nothing else matters. Meth gives its users many things that seem lacking in our mainstream culture: a chance for unconventional thinking, and a window to mysticism, ritualistic spirituality, drama, and intimacy. These experiential aspects of meth lend themselves to some important cultural analysis: it is the perfect drug in a society where happiness, individual freedom, productivity, and self-esteem are our ultimate goals, but where loneliness, a loss of connection, exhaustion, and insatiable, inexplicable feelings of failure often reign. It is a synthetic drug for a synthetic culture: a modern-day nerve tonic for a 24-hour society. It is an anti-anxiety drug in the age of anxiety: a depression-busting, awe-inspiring chemical that brings a tribe, adventure, and excitement to an often monotonous, uneventful suburban life lacking in community, fun, and meaning. Crystal meth, therefore, has much to offer somebody who is feeling disenchanted with themselves and the modern world — though it can simultaneously inflict the same egomaniacal, lonely, deluded misery that you are trying to escape.

For me — someone who used crystal meth and had a history, and indeed a family history, of both psychosis and addiction — I found that, after a while, life stopped seeming interesting when I was not on meth. In his book Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: a neuroscientist examines his former life on drugs, developmental neuroscientist Marc Lewis explains how taking crystal meth gradually seemed to take the kick out of everyday waking life:

[T]he subterfuge of drugs like methamphetamine culminates in one brilliant trick: the message of meth is that goals don’t matter anymore. When engorged on dopamine, the ventral striatum acts as if it’s pursuing goals and gloriously, magnificently, achieving them. Yet there are no goals. The excitement is bogus. It’s free. It’s detached from any actual internal desires or external accomplishments.

I remain deeply sceptical, for several reasons, about casual users who say that meth isn’t harming them. First, they may not recognise the harm that is being done (and the idea that a person couldn’t be harmed by their drug use because they still work and remain productive really does make me squirm). Second, they may recognise it, but not want to admit it. Third, they may be in a state of denial about how much they are using. Last, one consequence of meth use — even of the kind that cannot be termed addiction — is that people will defend the drug because they want to keep the drug in their lives. Their brains have become so convinced it is good for them that they will use any justification to keep using it, even if it does not appear to be benefiting them, even if it appears to be causing them harm, or, even at the very least, if it is not allowing them to live life to the full or take pleasure in other things.

For me (as for Marc Lewis), the risk of using meth even occasionally is that you stop striving for new goals or new life-experiences that give you the same kind of thrill. Meth attacks your ability to reason, your sense of time, your counting skills — I admire anybody who is able to control their use of it. Indeed, the notion that meth use can be non-problematic or even life-enhancing must be tempered by the fact the drug wears down your self-awareness. Meth is not unlike the bite of the blue-ring octopus, whose poison is worse than its bite: it takes quite some time to realise you have been poisoned. With meth, you can go on functioning and feeling while addiction wraps itself around your body and mind.

Ms Trish Quibell from Berry Street South services in Shepparton told the Victorian parliamentary inquiry:

A lot of our young people would not see themselves as having an addiction; they would completely deny that they have an addiction. That would be prevalent regardless of what strata of society you come from. Most people do not believe they have got an addiction until something hits them and they have hit rock bottom.

With more than a bit of uncertainty floating around my mind about these issues, I decided to ring Dr Nicole Lee to ask some of these questions, knowing that she has a reputation for being fair, centrist, open-minded, and compassionate. In addition to her positions at Flinders University and the National Drug Research Institute, Lee is a practising clinical psychologist. In 2012, she co-edited Australia’s most extensive academic book on amphetamines, and her consultancy company, LeeJenn Health Consultants, was hired by the Victorian parliament as part of its inquiry to provide answers to some of the trickiest questions about methamphetamine use in the community.

Lee, a friendly and gentle-sounding person who spent much of our interview listening closely to my questions before giving long, considered answers, told me that she believes there are three broad types of users: acute — who are what we might term meth addicts, and use upwards of once a week; long term — who use intermittently over a long period of time, or go on binges before getting clean in a fairly constant cycle; and occasional users — users who use very, very occasionally, sometimes as infrequently as once a year. To this, she added the caveat that ‘unlike many other drugs where addiction is black and white, meth use occurs along a complex and varied continuum’.

So if we are able to draw something of a contingent, cautious line between addicts and non-addicts, where do we go with the question of harm? Does the occasional user risk becoming depressed, anxious, or losing enthusiasm for life?

Lee told me that there is a risk,

but that the risk of occasional users getting any of the serious mental-health issues are very low. It’s the long-term users who we often worry about because they always run the risk of becoming an acute user … it can also be very difficult for people to recognise their depression is being caused by their meth use, and what our research also indicates is that there is often a five-year gap between when people first develop problematic use and when they first seek treatment.

And, of course, there is always the risk that when people report their drug use to a researcher — particularly if they want reasons to continue their meth use — they will both understate how much they are using, and overstate the positive impact it is having on their life.

I also called Neil Mellnor, drug counsellor and lecturer at the University of Sunshine Coast, who told me he thinks there are three ways in which people go from being a meth user to being a meth addict:

1.They drift slowly into ice, and unexpectedly become addicted.

2.They take ice without understanding its full effects, prefer using meth to other drugs because its effects last longer, and eventually become addicted.

3.They are in a scene where it is acceptable or ‘cool’, and begin using it as a drug of choice.

‘When somebody gets too far into meth addiction, daily life just starts to feel like a grind,’ he said. ‘They prefer being on meth than not. Their health starts to decline, their everyday reality feels less and less tolerable — they start to struggle financially. Then a classic addiction-cycle starts — the worse life gets, the more drugs they take, and the more drugs they take, the worse their life gets.’

Even in retrospect, I have trouble piecing together exactly when the bit-of-fun use ended for me, and the serious, abusive use began. I can see only the after-effect, not the exact moment when I slipped from user to addict. In his book Crazy Town: money, marriage, meth, former addict Sterling R. Braswell compares the experience of being an addict to being Gollum from Lord of the Rings: ‘We forgot the taste of bread, the sound of trees, the softness of the wind, we even forgot our own name.’ My time in the house became a mess of sped-up time and drawn-out days, of coming down in bed, of blackouts, and of excursions into make-believe. The defining moment may have taken place when I started shop-lifting food; the day I thought everyone was going to kill me; the day of my bloody needle-stick injury; the day I started using two days in a row; the moments I spent fantasising about my next high while walking through the homogenised streets of inner Sydney. It may have come around the time I began having a recurring dream of walking along a field, and suddenly realising I was surrounded by steep drops, and was desperately hanging on, so as not to fall. When I had these dreams at Smithy’s, I eventually decided to let go, and enjoy the exhilaration and thrill of the fall. Falling can be joyful, even if you know that death awaits, and especially when you are so tired of holding on, and so sick of being scared.

Even still, I have met users who suggest that meth makes them better people, and improves their lives; people who think the drug brings them experience and thrills that are beyond the normal, limited realm of human experience. They think meth makes them perform better, think better, and become better, faster, more evolved human beings.

‘I cannot imagine living without it,’ one user told me. ‘I get so much done, I work so much out when I am on it. Actually, I don’t think I am that different when I use it, and often people around me can’t even tell.’

Many people simply think that meth isn’t affecting them at all. Apart from the possibility they are delusional, perhaps this also reflects the way new technologies have come to play an apparently inconspicuous role in our lives, while at the same time radically altering the experience and understanding of our own nature. Meth is a wholly synthetic drug, one of over twenty-million chemicals that have been created in the past hundred years, and it is often, and ironically, providing a pathway for many of us to discover the beast of yesteryear.