Chapter Three

Converging paths

THE ORIGINS OF meth can be traced to the chemical-research labs of nineteenth-century Japan. The late nineteenth century was a time of considerable scientific advance: medicine was riding high on the discoveries of microbes, vaccines, anaesthetics, painkillers, and the realisation that humans had powerful biochemical signals called ‘hormones’. Scientists around the world had set about trying to find a synthetic compound of the human hormone adrenalin, which was at that time particularly expensive to make because it had to be extracted from cow glands. Attention turned to the Ephedra plant, an unremarkable-looking organism that grows in sandy soils in sun-drenched environments, and that had been used for centuries in Chinese medicine. Its purported energy- and mood-enhancing effects came to be seen as a potential base for a new adrenaline-like product, as scientists believed it held the secrets to human fatigue and the common cold.

Dr Nagai Nagayoshi commenced work on his study of ephedra after returning from Berlin University in 1883. Nagayoshi was wide-eyed and impeccably dressed, and his lab at the Tokyo Imperial University consisted of wooden tables, with chemicals held in bottles like old-fashioned lolly jars. Like all lab researchers at the time, he did not wear lab coats or masks to work, but dressed as if he were working in an office.

Nagayoshi spent two years studying the plant, eventually finding the active alkaloid, ephedrine. Amphetamine sulphate (not meth, but similar) was actually the first compound to be developed, a few years earlier. It was made accidentally by the Romanian chemist Lazăr Edeleanu when he was trying to synthesise the world’s first amphetamine (speed, not meth) while making new fabric dyes. Eventually, Dr Nagayoshi used Edeleanu’s formula to synthesise amphetamine from ephedrine, creating a more powerful formula: methamphetamine (powdered meth).

Today ephedrine and pseudoephedrine are the two most common precursor chemicals used in making crystal meth.

Professor Nicolas Rasmussen from the University of New South Wales writes in his book On Speed: the many lives of amphetamine that methamphetamines and amphetamines developed in the tradition of ‘old human fantasies of magical cures and elixirs of youth’. He writes that in ‘the age of science-based pharmaceuticals … we expect new triumphs of science that, in our lifetime, will eliminate mankind’s most ancient enemies — the illnesses that bring pain, sorrow, frailty, and ultimately death’.

Intrigued by this observation, I decided to ring Professor Rasmussen — who has earned, by the way, no less than a PhD from Stanford and a Masters from Cambridge — to find out a bit more about his studious work on the history of the drug. I found him to be a fast-talking, fastidiously helpful American who stops every now and then to ask — as a matter of genuine courtesy — ‘Are you following?’

Rasmussen’s history lesson taught me a few things — first, unlike cocaine or heroin, meth is a purely synthetic substance. Second, methamphetamine differs from amphetamine only in the addition of a methyl group on the chemical chain; the difference of just one extra carbon — ‘meth’ (actually methyl) — is what makes taking meth feel as if you’re taking off in aeroplane, and makes taking speed feel as if you’re ‘merely’ travelling in a V8. Third, that perhaps it is no accident that methamphetamine was born in the age of scientific advances, the rise of the corporation, and the rise of a liberal society in which there is a perpetual promise that hard work will pay off.

In April 1981, Rob Smith was seven years old. Waking up one morning in his cosy three-bedroom brick house, on the foothills of the Melbourne’s tree fern-covered Dandenong Ranges, his ears fixed on a strange howl coming from somewhere inside the house.

He followed the sound. His feet tapped along the cold floorboards, past a picture of a little English cottage surrounded by autumn trees. The path took him to his mother’s room. The door was half-open, and his mother was sobbing on the end of her bed, her head resting on her left hand. Feeling his stare, she sat up, wiping her face with her hands. She smiled at her son, saying in her soft voice: ‘Hello, darling, how ya feelin’ this morning? You’re awake very early, mate.’

He trotted up to her and wrapped his hands gently around her neck. His face pressed against hers, and he felt the hotness of her tears as they soaked into his skin. She smelt like make-up, hairspray, and sweat. She smelt like his mummy. He didn’t understand why she was crying, though, and instinctively he began to sob as well.

‘Dad’s gone,’ she said with a look of anguished, apologetic horror.

She told him to go back to bed. As he lay down, he could hear his mother’s howls starting up again, more intensely, and she continued right through the morning.

In 1996, two awkward teenagers were sitting by the fire, wrapped in blankets, drinking sugary tea and enjoying each other’s company at 2.00am on a Sunday. Those teenagers were Beck and me, and the lounge room was in her parent’s musty, homely place in our rough bush-town. Beck had turned off Rage over an hour before; the open fire was only just still burning, and fatigue was slowing her monologue and slurring her words.

‘Some people are good at sport or maths, some people are pretty,’ she explained. ‘I don’t think I’m good at anything. I was hopeless at netball, I dropped out of school, and the best I ever got was a B. I’m not particularly good-looking, I don’t even really have an identity — I’m not really anyone. Do you get what I mean?’

Beck continued at length, detailing all the things she wasn’t good at before concluding:

‘The only thing I am good at is giving people money, and the only time I am happy is when I am sick. I really like Trainspotting and Pulp Fiction. It’s just so cool, and they have so much fun, and I know this sounds really awful, so don’t, like, tell anyone this, but I am thinking about becoming like a junkie — it makes you somebody.’

I didn’t answer. The fire fizzled out. We both fell asleep.

In 1919, methamphetamine hydrochloride was synthesised by Nagayoshi’s protégé, the Japanese pharmacologist Akira Ogata. Ogata was experimenting with Nagayoshi’s formula and its base materials when he made a reduction of ephedrine using red phosphorus and iodine, producing the world’s first batch of crystallised meth.

Today, the street slang for meth confuses the fact there are actually three distinct formulas: ‘speed’ (which is amphetamine sulphate); Nagayoshi’s ‘meth’ (which is the powdered meth that has been in Australia since about the mid-1990s); and Ogata’s ‘ice’ (crystallised meth, the drug that is causing all the trouble of late). All three formulas were developed in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, but they didn’t come into pharmaceutical use until the 1920s. When they did so, it was in the context of the creation of pharmaceutical patents, which allowed companies to ‘own’ some of these formulas and variations of them, and therefore to sell them under specific brand names.

When little Smithy woke the day after he found his mum crying, his dad still wasn’t there; nor was he there the next day, nor the one after that. The truth was obvious — his father was gone. For nearly nine months after, while the oval behind his house filled with large puddles and a choir of frogs, which then disappeared again, Rob Smith barely spoke a word. He spent nearly every spare minute lying on his bed, staring at the floor.

His mum increased her work hours as an office manager in a local factory to pay the mortgage. This meant she wasn’t there in the morning and she was not usually home when he got back from school. But on the weekends, when she saw him lying on the bed, she would ask him what was wrong. ‘Nothing,’ he would say. ‘Just tired.’ When she gazed at him, she saw a littler version of her husband: the same brown hair, blue eyes, and oval face; the football watching, the cricket playing, and the fart jokes.

The months he spent in silence in his room were countered by her with toys, lollies, and chocolate. She enrolled him in football and cricket. And bit by bit, little Smithy came back to life, with a deeper, darker sense of humour, and a new taste for naughty things. He started watching football and cricket again, and got used to watching them by himself. He started socialising again like mad, with a particular taste for pranks and ridiculous jokes. He was never lacking in friends at school. He was ‘one of the boys’, and all his mates played on the same football team as him. He admired alpha males, and had a soft spot for the underdog. Smithy remembers going to a friend’s house, and overhearing the boy’s mother talking about him before he walked in the door.

‘He’s a no-hoper,’ she said. ‘That’s what happens when you don’t have a father to set you right.’

He decided not to go in, and felt upset for a good week after. The words played on his mind for months, until he decided, ‘Well, I guess if I’m no good, I may as well have fun.’ Perhaps, he decided, not having any expectations meant one thing — freedom.

As he a teenager, he loved parties. He liked to get drunk — he liked spin-the-bottle and truth-or-dare. At fourteen, he dropped out of school. He would spend many of his days getting drunk or stoned. Later, he’d be introduced to speed by a 37-year-old neighbour he was having an affair with. He loved the energy, the confidence, the sense of fullness and cohesion he got from speed — the feeling of a never-ending party.

For thirty years after they were made, nobody knew what to do with meth, crystal meth, and speed. Then along came Gordon Alles, a 6-foot-something, alpha American male who had completed a PhD at the California Institute of Technology, where he had attempted to find a synthetic version of human insulin. He went to work for a big pharma company, and spent most of his downtime working on a new cold-and-flu formulation. In 1928, he independently resynthesised the original amphetamine formula (that is, amphetamine sulphate) and discovered its wide-ranging effects on the human nervous system (this was speed, not meth, and Alles didn’t create it — he just found out how it works). In early self-experiments, he would report a feeling of ‘self-exhilaration’; its results on asthma were mixed, but its effect on moods was exemplary. Nonetheless, he found it could also be used as a bronchial dilator, and sold his patent on the formulation to the big American pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline, & French (SKF). SKF then went on to sell the amphetamine under the brand name ‘Benzedrine’ in pills and inhalers. It was first sold as a decongestant, but by the 1930s, the company was promoting it as a treatment for 33 different ailments, from alcoholism to erectile dysfunction. SKF also marketed it to expectant mothers for weight-loss, extra energy, and as an anti-depressant.

While meth was more powerful than speed, pharmaceutical companies and scientists were unable to find a way to tweak its formula enough to fit the legal criteria to make it an ‘original discovery’ and therefore eligible to receive a proprietary patent. Benzedrine also received support from the American Psychological Association, which advised psychiatrists to start prescribing the drug to certain patients. This marked the start of a 20-year period in which amphetamines became the most commonly prescribed anti-depressant in the western world.

In post-depression America, speed (Benzedrine) became the obvious choice for a world in which things were moving faster, and individual unhappiness was seen as a purely personal medical problem in what was a booming economy. In fact, the 1930s were the start of amphetamine’s golden age. Not only were the side effects of amphetamines unknown, but they were developed at a time when the pharmaceutical industry was largely unregulated, and amphetamines could be purchased without a prescription over the counter at a variety of different stores. People even started getting high while they were, well, already high: Benzo inhalers started appearing on Pan Am flight menus in the 1940s, alongside cigarettes, drinks, and cocktails.

Australia was also quick to embrace these new products. On 4 August 1936, Mt Gambier’s The Border Mail published an article titled ‘New Drug will Banish Shyness’ that referenced a ‘new drug called Benzedrine, which raises the blood pressure and is also thought to cure depression and shyness’. The Adelaide Advertiser followed on 28 August 1936 in an article titled ‘New Drug for Happiness’, in which the journalist reported that ‘Dr Gordon Alles has found a new drug, according to the latest messages from England, which may result in happiness pills becoming a reality, and be able to turn melancholia into cheerfulness within an hour. Moreover, it is claimed that this new drug, Benzedrine, is supposed not to be habit-forming, and not to have dangerous after-effects.’

Evidently, there was unmitigated optimism about speed when it first hit the market legally. There were over 70 articles published about the drug in Australia throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, all of which talked up the newfound happiness pill that also made you smarter. No endorsement, though, compared to the one published in Adelaide’s The Mail on 15 May 1937: ‘Soon We Will All Be Brilliant’ ran the headline to the short article, reporting that while the drug might be addictive, it also led to more fluent and convincing speech.

For a long time, you could buy meth in Australian pharmacies. For a while, you didn’t even need a prescription to buy it. Meth was often sold under the brand name ‘Methedrine’, which was sometimes advertised in magazines and newspapers. One Methedrine ad from 1948 shows an illustration of a smiling woman, with the tagline ‘Methedrine is good for creating the Right Attitude’. Other ads suggested that the drug could ‘increase your optimism’, help you lose weight (‘help her resist temptation’), and relieve fatigue. Syndrox, another legal powdered-meth formulation, was — according to the ad — for the overweight ‘patient who is all flesh and no will power’. Long before Prozac and anti-psychotics, meth — under its various brand names — was prescribed by psychiatrists as an anti-depressant, and you could even get an intravenous Methedrine injection from the doctor if you felt you needed it.

During the Second World War, meth and benzos were used widely by soldiers across all sides to boost military performance. This led to an excess of production, and to many soldiers returning to the US, Germany, Japan, and the UK with leftover meth and speed — thereby leading to one of the world’s first black markets in amphetamines.

In his book No Speed Limit: the highs and lows of meth, Frank Owen says that the 1940s and 1950s were a time when ‘there was a naïve belief that science and technology could solve all our problems … Television and magazines bombarded consumers with images for a perfect lifestyle, especially for women, a number of whom felt trapped and alienated by this often-lonely new reality. Amphetamine appeared tailor-made for this new way of living — a synthetic drug for a synthetic environment.’ In Speed, Professor Rasmussen tells how ‘President John F. Kennedy received regular injections of a methamphetamine, together with vitamins and hormones, from a German-trained physician named Max Jacobson. Jacobson would go onto treat Cecil B. DeMille, Alan Jay Lerner, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and the Rolling Stones.’

However, by the late 1940s Benzedrine was becoming associated with crime, counter-culture, and deviancy. In 1948, a New South Wales man was jailed for vagrancy (that is to say, poverty), having told the court that he had been taking 200 Benzedrine tablets a day. A few months later, a 47-year-old telegraphist from Burwood, Arthur Haybe, was charged with murder, and told detectives he had used Benzedrine tablets ‘to keep himself awake in the early hours of morning’ because he believed his wife ‘visited a neighbour at night’. Even poor Dr George Basil Goswell, from Walgett, in New South Wales, fell into the trap. He started writing bad cheques after he became addicted to his clinic’s Benzedrine tablets. He told the court that he became addicted because of the pressure of work.

By this time, both members of the public and prominent medical authorities were demanding that Benzedrine tablets be made available on prescription only. In October 1948, an unnamed 60-year-old mother of two Benzedrine addicts (aged twenty-six and twenty-eight) publicly urged effective control of Benzedrine sales. She told reporters that her sons were taking up to 80 tablets a day, and said ‘Benzedrine is slowly murdering my boys before my eyes. It is heart-breaking.’ Her calls were welcomed and supported by both New South Wales police and the New South Wales public health director-general. Within a few years, and across all states, Benzedrine could only be obtained with a legal prescription. However, its less understood and more powerful older brother — Methedrine — was still widely available.

By the mid-1960s, edgy Australian partygoers were taking Methedrine in the bright, new discotheque scene. On Wednesday 28 June 1967, The Canberra Times published an article titled ‘Night Spot, a den for drug addicts and criminals’, which went on to explain that the Licensing Court had denied a liquor licence to the Catcher Discotheque in Flinders Lane, Melbourne, following reports — among many others — that girls had admitted taking Methedrine and Dexedrine to ‘keep dancing or just to stay awake’. Just a few months earlier, 19-year-old Peter Graham Johnson had been described by a magistrate as a ‘crazy mixed-up kid’ while being sentenced to two years’ probation for selling Methedrine at the Catcher.

These were the kinds of events that led to meth becoming more or less illegal by the mid-1970s. By this stage, politicians in both Australia and the United States were making more and more noise about the damage amphetamines were doing to society. After a number of drugged drivers were left unprosecuted, New South Wales health minister Harry Jago moved in 1965 to outlaw driving under the influence of Methedrine. Indeed, history should look kindly upon the Liberal member for Fuller who, four years later — and several years before a global, UN-led push to do the same — moved to restrict the illegal sale of amphetamines. Jago would eventually usher in new legislation requiring any person making or distributing amphetamines to maintain a register recording all drugs supplied or manufactured. While Jago was well-meaning and forward thinking, the problem of fraud remained an obvious blind spot for this legislation. As has been a constant theme in history, greater regulation did little to sway the growth of the amphetamine black market. In 1969 alone, there were 230 robberies of chemists and warehouses throughout Australia to obtain narcotics and amphetamines. In a letter published in The Medical Journal of Australia in September 1967, prominent psychiatrist Cedric Swanton wrote that ‘the extent of the consumption of amphetamines by the community might be gleaned from the fact that quite recently one of the drug companies’ premises was broken into and robbed of 130,000 “methedrine” tablets.’

Swanton’s views were quickly becoming mainstream among global elites, and things were set to change. The US government stepped in to put a stop to it all by enacting the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, which all but entirely restricted the sale of meth. The United Nations followed with a major international treaty: the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances. Australia would soon follow America and the UN’s lead by enacting the 1976 Psychotropic Substances Act, banning the sale of most meth and amphetamine products.

Meth production moved to the black market, and in particular biker gangs, which would later join up with Mexican cartels.

If I had my time again, on that night of self-loathing and pregnant pauses, when Beck announced her perverse ambition to become a drug addict, I would have told her that she had many, many talents. That she could easily be a scientist or a comedy writer. She, like her dad, was a natural caregiver; she could have been a magnificent social worker or community builder. It was only that she lacked the resilience, self-belief, and patience to work at her talents long enough for them to develop into skills. What needed to be said was that people become good at things through willpower and persistence, that she was a victim of her own self-fulfilling prophecy, and that she was young and had a lifetime to make good.

Ironically, at that stage I harboured ambitions of being a psychologist who lived in the mountains, wore tweed coats, had a big bookshelf, and lived by myself. It didn’t occur to me that I lacked the ability to say the right thing at the right moment. Drugs vaguely interested me, but I was determined to become a stuffy intellectual — I never imagined I would have the social skills, or the nihilism, to last in drug culture. I had gotten rotten drunk at parties as an early teenager, and always regretted it — on a number of levels — the next day. I liked sitting at home alone, doing my own thing; at other times, I spent time with Mum and her friends.

I remember growing up feeling that I was someone special, and Mum was always telling me she thought I’d grow up to be somebody important. I remember the private drama, tennis, and singing lessons: the wild aspirations, and the triumphs and failures that followed. I remember Mum reading a book with me out loud, over and over again. The book was called The Little Engine That Could.

I grew up in a semi-rural area with a golf course and patches of wet, rocky, fern-covered bush. My mind might be playing tricks on me, but I remember my childhood as a series of happy, shining moments connected by long walks through the bush with my Labrador, Daisy. She would always lead the way: we would find rabbits, foxes, echidnas, and wombats. (Apparently she thought these creatures were playmates rather than food, and whenever we found an echidna she would take one sniff and go running away.) I lived in a neighbourhood with half a dozen boys my age, who would often accompany us. We would build cubbies, get chased by bulls, and swing off a rope tied to a tree into a lake — which was once the town’s source of water — that had its own waterfall, surrounded by tall tree-ferns and a little apple orchid. I remember summer evenings at dusk, playing tennis with Dad, netball matches with my sister in the backyard, endless one-on-one basketball tournaments with my next-door neighbour, extravagant Christmas mornings, and ‘going to war’ with the other boys. During these games, allegiances were always changing, and they usually climaxed in an exhilarating punch-up. Of course, we all became friends again the following week, and then we’d turn again, or pick a new opponent when we got bored.

I was naughty in school; I got into trouble a lot. I wasn’t allowed to backchat at home, so I did so at school. I always had trouble concentrating, I often felt bored, I made stupid mistakes, and I was usually desperate to fit in, and put on a show. I have never taken criticism or rejection well. I always wanted everybody to like me.

Meanwhile, Beck was making her way through the final acts of her teenage years, changing her costume from hippie to cowgirl to gangster chick along the way. Beck lived in Cockatoo, a bush town about ten minutes from my straight-laced hometown of Emerald, and about an hour-and-a-half’s drive from Melbourne. Cockatoo, and many of its residents, had been burnt to a crisp during the Ash Wednesday fires. A series of extremely cheap houses, some actual housing commission homes, hippies, and criminals arose from the ashes — a group affectionately (and sometimes not-so-affectionately) known as the ‘Cockatoo Scum’. In Cockatoo, there were always bizarre crimes being committed and weird drugs being indulged in, strange ideas floating around, and people who looked like they had been born as the result of incest, or as if their mothers had taken thalidomide. Cockatoo was the place my mum told me to stay away from; Cockatoo was my kind of place.

Before I ever spoke to Beck, I knew her by reputation. She was commonly known as an easy root, an underachiever, and a sook; a bit clingy, but also a genuinely nice person who wouldn’t hurt a fly. She was certainly a drifter, a magnet for virtual stray cats (and, later in life, actual stray cats), and her dress sense left some ambiguity as to whether she was a nonconformist by accident or design. At first, she was as fascinating as a car wreck. But as we became closer, she seemed to be the only person at our school who seemed interested in anything other than cars, football, and social hierarchies. Beck told me that people liked to scapegoat, exclude, and tease her for their own entertainment. She told me she was teased for being poor in primary school (or, more particularly, because her mother made her clothes), and in Year 7 her parents received a series of anonymous phone calls from giggling, boyish voices asking if they could speak with the ‘BI-LO bitch’. Occasionally this would bring her to tears, but more often she invented cutting private jokes about the perpetrators, and did excellent, abstract impersonations of them when in peak form.

I was sure she was going to prove them all wrong one day; she was one of the deepest people I had ever met.

The 1971 UN convention became a watershed moment in our global problem with meth abuse. During the 1980s, the US government restricted access to and increased penalties for possession of P2P — the key ingredient for making meth. But such is the plight of good intentions that this only resulted in bikie gangs discovering they could make meth from ephedrine, resulting in a more powerful formula that could be easily obtained from Mexican labs that professed to be making the substance purely for legal cold-and-flu tablets. As amphetamines came back into fashion, with ecstasy and MDMA pills spreading around nightclubs and raves around the world in the late 1980s, crystal meth gradually got a stranglehold on a small proportion of American’s population. In a survey conducted in 2012, approximately 1.2 million Americans reported having used methamphetamine in the previous year, while 440,000 reported using the drug in the previous month. This was a smaller user percentage of the population than when the drug had been legally prescribed — but the legal Methedrine, Desoxyn, and Syndrox had been made from the powdered formula, whereas crystal meth was the substance that was dominating the American black market.

The rise of crystal meth in Australia would follow the same pattern, albeit a few decades later. Why so much later? Well, Australia’s biggest drug problem from the 1960s right until the new millennium was heroin, due to the island nation’s proximity to poppy fields across South-East Asia.

Like most people in the mid-1990s in Australia, Beck and I had never heard of or seen meth. In fact, the data shows that from the 1970s through to the 1980s, amphetamine use sat at around 4 per cent of the population — most of those were using amphetamine sulphate, and most had had it prescribed to them. It was a cheap, working-class drug, different in both its cultural identity and chemistry from cocaine. MDMA (ecstasy) would also make its way to Australian shores in the 1970s. MDMA, which is both an amphetamine and a psychedelic drug, appears to have been brought here from India by a religious group called ‘The Orange People’, who used the drug as part of their mystic process, whereby they saw sex as a path to enlightenment. Some psychiatrists in Australia, as part of their treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, even used ecstasy on their patients, before the practice was made illegal by the Australian government in 1985. Speed, and in some cases meth, was made in clandestine labs here and there across the nation, but hardly any Australians used either drug throughout the 1980s. The first batches of powdered methamphetamine arrived on our shores in the early 1990s; a minor rise in use followed, but none of this, as far as we know, was crystal meth. Government research from that time showed past-year use of amphetamines was less than 1 per cent in 1993 and 1995; lifetime use was around 4–5 per cent. The use of amphetamines was largely restricted, it seemed, to nightclubbers, and people wanting to increase their work hours and output. In the 1980s, in ‘relaxed Australia’, heroin remained king; some estimates suggest that there were as many 172,000 people injecting heroin in Australia in 1986 alone.

So, while the drug barely registered a ripple here, it was a different tale overseas. By the late 1980s, the recipes used by US biker gangs, and the many home-labs that followed, had made their way to parts of South-East Asia. Throughout the early 1990s, crystal meth was manufactured en masse in China, becoming the most widely abused drug in Burma and Japan, and the second most widely abused drug in the Philippines. When the US government then moved to restrict ephedrine, the bikers started using pseudoephedrine to make their meth, resulting in a more powerful formula again. More importantly, the formula was easy to make, and home labs began popping up all over the US.

A few years earlier, an unknown chemist in Hawaii had manufactured a smokeable form of crystal meth. This led to full-scale production on the US island, with the nearby nations of Taiwan and Korea soon learning the recipe and following suit. These trends alarmed many crime authorities here in Australia. In 1989, South Sydney drug detective Brent Martin told journalists he thought the Asian experience showed that meth might replace cocaine as Australia’s choice stimulant. Come 1991, and Customs and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) followed suit, warning of the new threat of a drug called ‘ice’, and lobbying the federal government to develop a campaign to stop its spread. Even so, the drug either continued to fly completely under the radar, or perhaps it didn’t even make it to our shores for at least another four years — nobody quite knows. What we do know is that the increase in the supply and use of methamphetamine in Australia appears to have begun around the mid- to late 1990s, while the more potent forms of ‘base’ and ‘ice’ methamphetamine were first detected in 1999.

Also in 1991, the same year that the US government gave speed to its war pilots in the first Gulf War, two momentous events occurred sequentially in Smithy’s life. He was eighteen, driving home one night on a near-empty Burwood Highway under orange lights through never-ending suburbia. He had just sold some pot and a bit of speed at a friend’s house, and Led Zeppelin was blaring through his speakers as he bopped along to the rhythm of the road, sipping on a VB, the stale smell of cigarette smoke drifting around him. When he caught a reflection of himself in the rear-view mirror, he realised he was smiling like a Cheshire cat. But the next time he looked in the mirror, he saw blue lights flashing. Smithy was arrested, and charged with drug trafficking. The second event occurred after his mum contacted his father about the charges. After twelve years of complete silence, his father responded, paid for a lawyer, and told Smithy that everything would sort itself out. And it did: Smithy was put on a good-behaviour bond without a conviction.

A new pattern had been set: Smithy — quite a likeable person for the most part, I might add — would work at odd labouring jobs, where he’d do pot and speed all day, until he found the speed more interesting. He would then leave his job to become a small-time drug dealer. He never made a profit, but the trade meant he had a steady supply of drugs, and of people — including women — knocking on the door. When he ran out of drugs, his phone often fell silent, leading him to lie on the floor when he was coming down, staring at the wall and thinking, They are not my real friends, they are not my real friends, they are not my real friends — nobody visits me when I’ve run out of drugs. He would feel miserable, alone and unloved, until the next speed delivery, after which his house would once again be full of people and grog, and the rooms would be filled with the warm sounds of his deep, wheezy cackle.

The mid-1990s were also a time when different kinds of social misfits were working out how to make something of themselves, outside the boundaries and expectations of acceptable society. As Breaking Bad would later teach us — in spectacularly entertaining fashion — meth production and distribution could bring the kind of wealth that people working in everyday jobs could only dream of.

Before this time, the passing-on of meth recipes was limited to physical delivery and word of mouth. This all changed, of course, with the advent of the internet. Soon there were dozens of websites publishing the biker method for making methamphetamine hydrochloride (crystal meth) using pseudoephedrine. Other recipes also made their way to Australian living rooms. The results of meth production would show up in some very random places. In 1995, in the stunning inland Sunshine Coast town of Gympie, a place full of palm trees and beautiful old buildings — surrounded by tree-covered hills — layman Dale Francis Drake made meth using an incredibly simple formula. He, in turn, showed various other people how to make meth by this method. Soon, meth cooks weren’t rare commodities, but simple, everyday crooks who just needed to be trained. Over the next four years, clandestine labs in the Sunshine Coast would triple, and amphetamine-related hospital admissions in Queensland would skyrocket.

Starting around 1997, Australian bikie gangs, in particular, began making methamphetamine, thereby giving ‘speed’ — that inferior Romanian sulphate version — the flick. One young man who started to see a cloudy, exciting combination of powdered meth and dollar signs was a 25-year-old truck driver by the name of Richard James Walsh. Walsh left his job in the country town of Maryland, north of Sydney, to take up a very different sort of heavy lifting — he became a meth dealer to bikies. A heavily built, fearsome-looking bloke with dark skin, a goatee, and five earrings in his left ear, he was already a member of the Nomads bikie gang. With meth becoming increasingly popular around Sydney, Walsh would travel to a manufacturer in Queensland about every three weeks to purchase several pounds of the drug. His business grew quickly. As a dealer at the top of the chain, Walsh also quickly ascended the leadership ladder to become a senior figure within the Nomads. Over time, he formed an important relationship with one particular cook on the Gold Coast — Todd Little, president of the Nomad’s Gold Coast chapter. Little, despite being nearly illiterate, had taught himself how to cook meth. Little got his precursor material by paying people to go from chemist to chemist purchasing huge quantities of Sudafed, from which he would then extract pseudoephedrine.

Over the space of four years, Little would make no less than 19 kilograms of powdered meth for Walsh, who in turn passed the gear on to dealers who distributed it further down the chain. Walsh would eventually look beyond Little, and between 1997 and 2001 is estimated to have supplied about 450 kilograms of methamphetamine to the drug markets of Melbourne and Sydney. He would, in the end, play an important role in Australia’s first major meth trend — the bikies’ involvement in spreading methamphetamine around the nation. By the 2000s, police estimated that Australia’s bikie gangs had a 75 per cent control of the meth market.

Like many truck drivers, 37-year-old Darri Haynes took speed to help him get through his shifts. While he didn’t understand it at the time, by about 1997 what he was taking, in fact, was meth. Haynes had been using it to try to get through some extremely tough shifts (which later resulted in his employer being successfully prosecuted in court for having failed to provide safe working conditions). After having driven more than 5,400 kilometres in the last week of August 1999, he called fellow truckie Duncan Mackeller, and told him he was so tired that he was ‘even starting to hear voices’.

‘I am even talking to them now,’ he said.

To which Mackeller replied jokingly, ‘As long they don’t talk back.’

On 1 September, Haynes’ vehicle collided with a truck on the Pacific Highway, near Grafton, in the northern rivers region of New South Wales. The truck veered off the road and caught fire. Haynes took just over three minutes to die after the impact, and was little more than a ‘sack of ashes’ when emergency crews arrived on the scene.

Things were changing in fits and starts, on the global, local, and individual scales. As Malcolm Knox writes in his book Scattered: the inside story of ice in Australia:

Up to 1999, there was still scepticism about the term ‘ice’. Many in law enforcement, health and academic research believed that ice was a new dealer’s brand name for speed … but it wasn’t so. Ice was, in fact, new. A profound revolution was taking place — a revolution in composition, the manufacture, the economics of supply and usage — a true cultural revolution.

By now, Beck had left school and taken a job as a checkout chick in a supermarket. She went on a few minor, joyful fucking sprees, and eventually fell pregnant. At seventeen, in the middle of autumn, she rang me from a drab, deserted children’s playground in her hometown, saying she had finally made a decision about whether to keep her baby.

‘A baby will be unconditional love,’ she said, sounding as if she was blowing out the smoke from a cigarette. ‘It’s something I’ve never had from my parents, and something I’ve never had from all those guys who dumped me. A child loves their parent no matter what, and I really want that. I’m going to have this baby.’