Chapter Five

Rise and fall

BECK, AGE NINETEEN, gave birth during Melbourne’s spectacularly hot, fire-ridden summer of 1998. A beautiful rosy-cheeked, hot-tempered child, Hayley was born at the Ferntree Gully Hospital on 11 February, and returned with her mother about a week later to a rented, non-air-conditioned share house in Rowville in Melbourne’s flat, sprawling south-east suburbs.

Many of Beck’s adolescent tendencies had continued into adulthood. If somebody in town believed in ghosts, or had a bad deformity, or had spent most of their life in jail, you could rest assured that Beck would track them down and be knocking on their door with a bottle of goon, ready to entertain.

Along her travels, she got to know one man named Barry, a former television-station electrician who’d hurt himself at work and then became lost in his own mind and its many theories — including one that Easter eggs were actually grenades wrapped in foil. Barry, in turn, introduced Beck to Nick while she was pregnant. He was a tall, muscular, kind-of-French-looking, handsome lad. Aged twenty-seven when they met, Nick hadn’t spent a single birthday out of prison in his entire adult life. He was a big fellow, but not usually a violent one. In fact, Nick was a bit of an intellectual; he read Dostoevsky and maths textbooks when he was in prison, and took classes in physics. When he was out of prison, he stole at every opportunity. His main trade was robbing houses, but he also robbed service stations — sometimes with a weapon (although his physical presence was often enough to get the attendant to cooperate) — when he got desperate.

Nick and Beck got together, and he moved into the Rowville house when Beck was six months pregnant. When she entered the late stages of her pregnancy, he would come home after a busy day with new toys, prams, and electronic goods. Beck was always uncomfortable with stealing, though no man had ever lavished her with such gifts. She told me she often felt terribly guilty knowing that somebody came home to find their baby’s goods missing.

Home robberies became at least a weekly event for Nick and some of his friends — ‘rorts’, they called them. They often sold the goods at second-hand stores, or traded them for pot, acid, and ecstasy.

On one occasion, when Nick and his friend Jason had cased at least a dozen homes in one particular area of Rowville and had made their way out the side window of a house with a few watches, phones, and entertainment consoles, they noticed a police car gliding toward them as they made their escape in their car. The police sirens screeched and their lights flashed, and Jason hit the accelerator. A chase ensued through the labyrinth of Rowville’s monotonous terrace-roofed suburbia, and when they got to the first traffic lights, the police instructed them through a loudspeaker to pull over and surrender; instead, Jason revved the car, and reversed into the front of the police car, over and over, in an attempt to blow up its engine.

Police cars are built to withstand such force, however, and the chase continued into neighbouring Lysterfield. At the next traffic lights, a panicked Jason — young and thus far without a criminal record — gave himself up. Nick made a run for it, until the police found him about to get on a bus a kilometre away.

Nick was charged and sentenced to around ten months in jail, which he didn’t mind; he always said he preferred life on the inside.

Beck’s other housemates had also moved out, and so at this stage, when Hayley was about ten months old, she asked me to move in to help out. So I did.

I had been scared of Hayley until she was seven months old. I was scared of breaking her. I didn’t know how to act around a creature who I thought I was supposed to bond with, and for the first part of her life, my presence was neither here nor there. Then one day, when Hayley was a rosy-cheeked, sweet-smelling 8-month-old sitting on the lounge room of Beck’s parent’s lounge room — not long before Beck moved to Queensland — I picked her up. She looked at me with confusion, and then she smiled. The next day I picked her up again and she giggled. Soon thereafter, nearly every time I saw her she held out her arms to me. Before Hayley was born, I had no idea how much we humans need each other, how much we need love and attention.

A few days after I moved in, I noticed Beck was no longer as sulky or needy. She had managed to find rhythm in this new life, had become, in fact, one fearsome bitch.

Beck’s mum had been a bank teller and an aged-care worker; her dad was a senior nurse at a big public hospital. While she enjoyed being a budget ‘gangstar’s moll’, it went deeper than that; she also enjoyed the thrill of the fall away from her hardworking family. She found her life relaxing and liberating, even funny. She seemed to almost thrive in it.

A few weeks into this new house set-up, we had a guy named Andrew move in. Andrew was a heroin addict who had tuberculosis and constantly threw up in the kitchen sink. He had also, much to his pride, been to jail and learnt the art of rape threats. One day he threatened the elderly man next door: ‘I’ll tie up your wife and put a knife to her throat,’ he said. Within a week, the house was for sale.

Another day I was sitting in my room, stoned and daydreaming, when Andrew and Beck started arguing. It didn’t take long before he started throwing around couches, and, as I sat petrified in my room, I heard him say he was going to rape her ‘in your toerag arse’ and then screamed that he would track down her younger sisters.

He then said — and I quote — ‘you toeragin me dowwwll’, before threatening her mum, her nanna, and her dad. To this day, we don’t know what he meant.

After about a minute’s silence, I heard Beck start laughing — at first sincerely, and then deliberately and provocatively loudly — and say, ‘First of all, Andrew, I am not a fucking toerag, and second of all you are going to rape my dad.’

And that was the end of that: a new era of Beck had begun.

We must have quoted that day a thousand times since, at random times and with the best comic timing we could muster: for example, while waiting in a doctor’s surgery she would say, ‘Oh shit, I forgot to ask my dad if Andrew has raped him yet’. That and ‘dowwwll’ would thereafter become permanent parts of our secret lexicon.

Despite the fun we had, I too moved out not long after this incident; this new Beck was constantly screaming and yelling abuse. She herself only stayed in that house for a little while longer before moving to Queensland. Then Nick got out of jail, and moved in with her into a tiny two-bedroom house in a southern suburb of Brisbane.

As for me? Well, after surviving the violent homicidal urges of hordes of angry large men — both real and imaginary — I settled back into uni, post-psychosis, with newfound confidence and a newfound addiction to reading. I took classes such as Classic Literature, Existentialism, Reason and Logic, and Post-modernism. I read obsessively. I avoided drugs, and sought to find the answers to what had happened to me in the materials I was reading. I began living with some of the hippies from Cockatoo in a large Northcote warehouse with a bunch of musicians, painters, and circus performers. We had no bathroom, and there were so many people coming and going all the time that at some stage I learnt how to look people in the eye again. After a semester, I was still at a loss to understand my ‘great decline’, but I became so involved in the texts it didn’t seem to matter. My friends from Cockatoo seemed to get over using drugs as well, and became involved in theatre, painting, and circus.

After a few months, it occurred to me that the house wasn’t quite my fit: I had yet to have any experience with gay guys or the gay world. I found a gay housemate online, and moved into a place in Collingwood. He turned out to be a 45-year-old Telstra exec who moped constantly about the loss of his younger ex-boyfriend (and his ‘elongated cock’) and who also injected ‘speed’ (powdered meth) on the weekends. I injected with him, and still didn’t have the confidence to walk into a gay club. I must have walked up to the door of The Peel a dozen times before walking away again, petrified. I was, quite simply, worried that I wouldn’t be attractive enough in a world where looks and sex mean everything.

Other than that, I found the house too clean and too neat. I don’t remember much about it except for my housemate’s loud middle-aged queeny queens coming over, and don’t remember much of that except for the pungent smell of their cologne. I had started to feel lonely by this time — I’d failed to make my way into gay culture, and I was missing Beck and her cavalcade of addicts, gypsies, tramps, and thieves.

One day, on one of our many phone chats — we had stayed in touch — she invited me to go and live with her again, and I took her up on her offer.

I spent a week in King’s Cross before going up to Brisbane, where I took a train south to a small town 20 kilometres from Brisbane, in the heart of Logan City. I arrived to find a cute, basic, warm, sunny town with palm trees, plate-sized cane toads, and a large Islander population.

‘So I’m in a relationship with a criminal, I’m on the dole, I live in the welfare and crime capital of Queensland on dole street. I’m on the dowwwwll, man. The dowwwwwll,’ Beck said as she met me at the train station.

‘You make me sick,’ I replied.

And so it began.

Beck lived in a tiny house on sand like soil, with a gigantic eucalypt in the backyard. She woke me up every morning at 8.50, tapping on a bong with the lighter and saying in a faux-posh voice:

‘Luuuuuuke, Denise is on.’

And so every morning, when Hayley (then two) was in day-care, we would sit in front of the television, ripping down bongs and watching the Denise Drysdale show for two hours, normally so stoned we couldn’t follow what was going on. Then the Olympics started, and we took turns making angry, stoned phone calls to Channel 7 about how disrespectful it was to Denise that the program would be off-air for three weeks.

By the time I arrived in that winter of 2000, Beck and Nick were using intravenous ‘speed’ as well, though not every day (mainly because they couldn’t afford to). Beck wasn’t showing too many signs of going nutty, and while I did use, the big psychotic episode I had in 1999 — and the break from drugs I had taken after it — had seemed to clean out some of my demons. I decided not to inject it, but to snort it instead.

Fortuitously for me, Beck and Nick had made friends with a few gay guys from Brisbane. Brisbane back then was slow and friendly, more like a country town than a city; the high-risess in the CBD felt very artificial because it really could have been a country town in Gippsland or Central Victoria. The gay guys were less intimidating: less concerned with the way they dressed, friendlier, and more down-to-earth. The gay clubs felt like country pubs, and for the first time, I found myself going out all the time without feeling much in the way of anxiety.

I began to feel comfortable in my own skin, although life in Woodridge could be a little rough at times. One of our most frequent visitors was a guy named ‘Filthy’ who was in his mid-sixties and had tattoos all over his face and body. He used to rob houses, and pawn what he’d stolen in second-hand shops. He would come to our house, sit there in the kitchen — bone-thin — with a syringe, and inject himself with powdered meth through a huge track-mark. He would stare into space with his chin moving up and down, just like an old woman’s might do involuntarily while she knitted or did the crossword.

We also had regular visits from a woman who lived across the road. She had three young children and a shaved head. One night, she came over asking if she could take some of our blankets or mattresses.

‘Ours are all being used, sorry,’ I said.

‘Well, we have people staying over.’

‘Sorry, we need them,’ I replied.

‘Well, so do we,’ she said, staring at me like a serial killer.

Beck then screamed abuse from the bedroom, ‘Fuck off, Simone, you stupid bitch, or else I’ll come over there and beat the fuck out of you and your skinny runt excuse for a fucking boyfriend.’

Simone remained expressionless, staring at me, while I smiled awkwardly and slowly closed the door in her face.

Another day, I was lying in bed, half-stoned, in the middle of the afternoon, listening to Beck and Nick argue in their bedroom. We’d all had ‘speed’ — which, of course, was powdered meth — the night before. I could only half make out what they arguing about. Then, in an instant, it all boiled over. I heard the bedroom door fling open.

‘Well fucking go then, go, get out!’ Beck yelled, her anger tinged with anguish and fatigue.

I heard him mumble something back, to which she let out a cross between a scream and a gasp. ‘You fucking arsehole! How could you be so cruel?’ This was followed by a loud, hollow ‘pop’ — like a bottle being shot with a gun — that jolted me right out of bed. I opened the door to see Beck picking up whatever she could reach in the kitchen, as Nick rather sheepishly tried to defend himself from the attack. She was a flurry of wild brown hair and garbled swear words as she first smashed two coffee cups over his head, then picked up a large frying-pan.

‘Stop it, stop it, please, please,’ I said. ‘What the fuck is going on?’

Beck stopped and Nick stepped out on the balcony.

‘He’s going to slit Thor’s throat,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘He said he wanted to leave, he said he doesn’t love me anymore, so I asked him what he was going to do with Thor and he said he was going to slit his throat.’

With that, she started howling and ran into the bedroom; Hayley was thankfully in day-care. I went outside to the balcony. Nick had his back to me, and was smoking a rollie. ‘Nick,’ I said.

‘Yep,’ he replied, turning around to reveal a spatter of blood on his forehead that had somehow already dried.

‘You are not really going to slash Thor’s throat, are you?’

‘Well, what else am I supposed to do, she wants me gone.’

‘Listen, Nick, I’ll look after Thor, Beck will look after Thor, and if we can’t, then someone else will.’

He turned around again, looking across the palm trees and the dishevelled little houses.

‘Nick, Thor is a very nice dog. He is his own being. He deserves to have a full, lovely life and we can all make sure that happens.’ At that, Nick put on his backpack and stomped down the steps. ‘It’s a shame nobody ever gave a living fuck about me,’ he said, his anger escalating. He was breathing faster and faster, his body heaving like the Incredible Hulk, until finally he began to scream. He left the house, and walked (and screamed) all the way down the street. He never came back.

By the end of the year, Beck and I had both returned to Melbourne. For a long time after this, we again went our separate ways. But in her world, I had started to grow into myself. I had survived and even thrived around her criminal friends. It gave me confidence, and, no longer crippled with anxiety, I felt it was time to get more involved in life. In Melbourne, however, I found people a little more intimidating, and I had next to no friends by the time I got back. Also, I was nearly twenty-one and had neither been in a relationship nor really even had sex. But the biggest problem, the one that had stayed with me since my drug binges of the late 1990s, was that strange thing I had been unable to articulate — my confusion about what was real, and, in particular, the fact that I kept hearing hidden meaning in people’s words. I would be talking to someone, and I would hear a word and believe it was referring to me, or that the other person knew something secret about me, or that they were doing an impersonation of me. I couldn’t even explain at the time, but I was — to put it mildly — one drug-fucked fucker.

I picked out a psychologist at random from the Yellow Pages. A week later, I had an appointment at his Clifton Hill terrace house. He was a small man in his seventies, crippled in some way — he had both a limp and shoulders that sat crookedly enough to suggest he may have had a slight hunchback. When I told him about my lack of friends, he went quickly to work through the categories and criteria he had learnt over his many decades of work as a therapist, and suggested that Schizoid Personality Disorder (SPD) possibly summed me up best — but that ultimately I didn’t fit the criteria.

(SPD is a personality disorder characterised by a lack of interest in social relationships, and a tendency towards a solitary lifestyle — which could also describe somebody who is introverted or whose confidence has been destroyed by being alienated from society because of the moral taboos of the time.)

When I explained to him that I kept hearing nasty references about myself when I heard people talking, and that I had ‘paranoia’, he disputed this, saying it wasn’t paranoia but ‘low-grade depression’. He suggested I take anti-depressants, but I didn’t want to because my only experience with them had been negative. But, of course, in retrospect what I was suffering from was low-grade psychosis, and what I needed was a short course of low-dose anti-psychotics.

In the second session, he told me to join groups that fitted my interests if I wanted to make friends. In the third session, he asked to see my penis.

Yes, my psychologist asked to see my penis. Out of the blue, and over and over again.

Needless to say, I left, but eventually I took him up on his suggestion of getting involved in things that interested me, in order to build a life and make friends.

I started volunteering for a gay community-television program, and soon after met my first boyfriend, and another guy whom we moved in with. We started doing a radio show together — twice a week, midnight till 6.00am — on an outer-suburban radio show in Mill Park.

Around the same time, on a warmish, breezy night in the slightly old-fashioned, middle-class, beachside suburb of Moorabbin in the south-east suburbs of Melbourne, just before the start of the new millennium, Neil Mellnor was working his usual phone shift at a drug and alcohol counselling line. After more than twenty years working as a social worker, Mellnor had pretty much seen and heard it all. On that night, he received a call from a woman who earlier that night had been forced to call the police after her daughter’s boyfriend had destroyed the house. The police in turn called an ambulance, and paramedics administered drugs to bring the boyfriend under control. Of all the phone calls and clients he had seen over the years, he couldn’t remember anybody else who had presented as this distressed and confused. This would be, in fact, Mellnor’s first professional encounter with methamphetamine, and it left him with no doubt that something had changed.

‘The extremity of the event and the distress involved really stood out for me,’ he said. ‘The mother was absolutely petrified. What also struck me was that she said the boyfriend — who was coming down at the time — was not usually violent. The reason why I became so fearful of this drug, despite working in the drug and alcohol field for so long, is the way it changed people’s character; it seems to make people violent, aggressive, impulsive, and it gives them strength and a sense of purpose that alcohol doesn’t.’

After doing some reading, Mellnor realised he was dealing with methamphetamine, and a deluge of similar calls would follow in the coming months.

As Burma’s opium fields wilted at the end of the millennium, and were then all but destroyed by the extreme flooding that broke the drought, and the highly abnormal frosts that followed, the Taliban cracked down on opiate production in Afghanistan. At the same time, the Australian Federal Police were given extra resources and began to get a handle on, and thereby reduce, high-level heroin importation networks; a number of key arrests and some major seizures would follow. Around Christmas in 2000, Australia experienced an unprecedented reduction in the supply of heroin. Unsurprisingly, the price of heroin rose from $218 a gram to $381. Dealers went to work with cutters — the purity of heroin fell from 60 per cent to 20 per cent. The Illicit Drug Reporting System found a continuing drop in the number of fatal heroin overdoses, which went from 345 in 1999–2000 to 265 in 2000–01. This was the period that became known as the ‘heroin drought’.

Many people thought that if heroin became more expensive, dealers’ profits would increase and heroin users would commit even more crime to fund their habits. What happened instead was that heroin use, and crimes such as theft and robbery, fell like a stone.

The national robbery rate fell 30 per cent; the national burglary (which, unlike robbery, does not involve the use of force) rate fell 50 per cent; and the national motor-vehicle theft rate fell 56 per cent. The New South Wales robbery rate is now back to where it was in the early 1990s, while the burglary and motor vehicle theft rates in New South Wales are lower than they were in 1990.

The absence of heroin didn’t mean the nation’s chronic drug-injecting population just gave up drugs and started mid-week social tennis, though. The hunger remained; many injectors love the medicinal eroticism of the needle, as well as the ritual of injecting. Australia’s intravenous-drug users would go searching for something else to fill the hole. In 2003, a former prison inmate named ‘Scotty the Barber’ told Radio National’s Background Briefing that in some cases, he knew users who shot up conventional medicines (that they knew would not give them a high) and even Vegemite. So, taken altogether, it’s not really surprising that it didn’t take long for Australia’s cohort of drug addicts to shift to another white substance, which offered a very different type of buzz — methamphetamine.

Dr Sandy Gordon, then head of intelligence for the Australian Federal Police, would tell the Global Economy of Illicit Drugs conference in London on 26 June 2001 that the East Asia-Pacific’s economy had grown by 8 per cent in the 1980s and 7 per cent in the 1990s:

Although there are clear benefits from development, it can also bring harm, especially in the social sphere. In Asia, rapid urbanisation and development increased working hours in the building, transport, and service industries, resulting in major labour market dislocation. Consumption of amphetamines helped workers cope with these longer hours.

Indeed by this stage, methamphetamine had already replaced heroin as the problem drug in Thailand, and crystal meth was the most commonly used drug in the Philippines. Gordon went on to explain that crackdowns on heroin and methamphetamine by authorities in Thailand had created opportunities for crime groups operating in the Golden Triangle:

Production of amphetamines in Burma was also facilitated by another development, this time in China. With the advent of economic liberalisation in China, many of the inefficient state-run chemical plants lost their captive markets and could not find new ones. This provided an incentive to ‘turn a blind eye’ to chemical precursor diversion. It is noteworthy that the very routes now used to take heroin out of Burma could also be used in reverse to bring precursors back in.

The ‘Burma problem’ resulted in China signing an anti-drugs cooperation agreement with ten other Association of Southeast Asian countries. Intelligence would later reveal that Asian organised-crime gangs targeted war-torn South Pacific nations to manufacture drugs in the hope of targeting Australia. In June 2001, then new AFP chief Mick Keelty told the Herald Sun he believed that the heroin shortage may have been a deliberate strategy by crime czars to shift their business to the more profitable methamphetamine, which could be made entirely inside drug factories.

All the signs were pointing in the same direction. A total of 82 kilograms of crystal meth was seized in the 2000–01 year compared with 971 grams in 1997–98; the number of police detainees found with methamphetamine in their system jumped from 10 per cent in 2000 to 31 per cent in 2001. Research from the Illicit Drug Reporting System showed that of the 910 illicit- drug users surveyed in 2000, just 16 per cent named meth as their drug of choice; by 2001, that figure had jumped to 25 per cent. By the end of 2000, The Sydney Morning Herald would publish an article saying that ‘researchers across Australia have documented an unprecedented rise in the presence and use of methamphetamine, the derivative of amphetamine best known locally as “ice” or “shabu”. The numbers, they say, are unexpected and the fear is that it is being manufactured locally, heralding further rises’. Nearby New Zealand witnessed a similar increase in methamphetamine use, with past-year prevalence increasing from 2.9 per cent in 1998 to 5 per cent in 2000.

Throughout 2000–01, the use of methamphetamine among injecting drug-users increased in almost every state and territory. Relaxed and comfortable Australia was speeding up.

The number of clandestine-lab detections in Australia rose from 95 in 1997 to 201 in 2000, and to 240 in 2001. In March 2003, the annual Australian Crime Commission Illicit Drug Data Report found that amphetamine labs had increased fivefold since 1996 to almost 250 in 2002. The report would say that the overwhelming quantities of methamphetamine precursor chemicals that were being imported (ephedrine and pseudoephedrine) were coming in from Chinese and Filipino ports, with Myanmar, China, and India also playing key roles in meth production across the Asia-Pacific region. A few years later, it was thought that Myanmar was the biggest amphetamine producer in the world, though most of its precursor chemicals would come from China. Three hundred and fourteen clandestine labs were detected in 2002–03, gradually rising to 390 in 2005–06.

While Australia’s first meth outbreak was making old criminals richer, new criminals rich, and plunging ordinary citizens into the world of crime, others would see their burgeoning criminal careers draw to a close. By 2001, Richard Walsh — the truck-driver turned dealer we met in Chapter 3 — wanted to limit his risk by making sure he was only dealing to and with high-level bikies who he could trust. By now, Walsh was a sergeant-at-arms in the local chapter of the Nomads and one of his customers, a man called Peter Bennett, had been unable to repay a drug debt to Walsh’s de facto Julie Clarke. So Walsh agreed to let Bennett work off the debt by running drugs between Queensland and Newcastle. Peter’s wife, Wendy, was also employed by the Walsh household as a nanny, cleaner, and tester of amphetamines.

The Nomads lent Bennett a gun to provide him with protection during his inter-state drug runs, but it was seized by police during a search. To punish him for losing the gun, the Nomads beat Bennett so badly he needed hospital treatment. A short time later, Walsh denied Bennett a long-promised Christmas bonus.

By this stage, Bennett was furious and plotted his revenge, deciding to become a police informer in March 2001. His wife also informed, all the while working for Walsh and Clarke. The quality of the information being received led New South Wales police to throw more funding at the operation and the Drug Squad — along with Northern Region police — set up Strike Force Sibret.

On 23 September 2001, Strike Force Sibret made their penultimate move: Walsh’s HiLux was stopped near Murwillumbah with a heavy load of drugs — he now had to do the runs himself without Bennett around. At the same time, raids were conducted at thirteen properties in Newcastle, northern New South Wales, and on the Gold Coast; forty-three people, including sixteen Nomads, were charged. Walsh’s de facto Julie Clarke also gave evidence against the accused. Among those arrested, charged, and eventually sentenced was Todd Little — the illiterate drug cook who had become rich making his meth formula. Police recovered $1.5 million in stolen vehicles and other items from the Nomads in Newcastle. As for Walsh, he would receive a sentence of thirty-two years — the longest ever given for a non-importation drug offence in Australia. Walsh had been charged with supplying an entire tonne of kilograms, but pleaded guilty, and was sentenced for, supplying 400 kilograms. Sibret would go down as one of the biggest hits on an outlaw motorcycle gang in Australian history.

In September 2002, a softly spoken 33-year-old, Damien Peters — slim, tattooed, with messy, wavy hair — murdered two male lovers in the house the three of them shared. In a gruesome scene, he cut off one of their heads, before disembowelling them, and flushing their organs down the toilet. Peters had taken meth on the afternoon of the crime, and was also found to be using steroids, methadone, and anti-depressants. Psychiatrist Dr Yvonne Skinner, who examined Peters in preparation for the trial, found no underlying pathology, personality, environmental, or cognitive factors that created a basis for his attack. Instead, Dr Skinner’s report concluded that Peters’ actions ‘did not arise from an underlying condition, but from the transitory effect of the drug “Ice” amphetamine’.

It’s unclear from the legal records whether Peters was taking crystallised meth or powdered meth. But the crime occurred just before several major hospitals around the nation — one of which was St Vincent’s in Sydney — began reporting daily or near daily incidence of patients presenting with amphetamine psychosis. Perth seemed particularly hard hit, with record seizures at customs; The West Australian newspaper would report Graylands hospital being the first to report that ice was wreaking havoc in their emergency room. Although there was increased awareness of these drugs, there was also a misunderstanding about the difference between ‘speed’ and ‘meth’. ‘Ice’ and ‘meth’ were used interchangeably when referring to both crystallised and powdered meth, which are very different drugs.

We didn’t know it then, but the worst was yet to come.

By 2001, I was working as a glassie at a big nightclub on Chapel Street. This is a time I remember for cleaning up toilet paper and vomit, for the odours of sweaty bodies, cigarette smoke, stale cellar beer, and Scotchguarded carpets, and for thunderous beats that vibrated through my body at six in the morning when all I wanted to do was go home. I was soon involved in Chapel Street’s ‘hipster’ drug scene, and was taking drugs all weekend as I worked. I remember walking outside into the bright spring morning light and sitting in the car, waiting for my friends to come.

This was also a time of important political change: September 11 happened, and then the Afghanistan invasion and the subsequent debate over refugees. At that moment, sitting in the car with no energy and no direction, my life felt frivolous, selfish, and insular. I felt like a stupid, hyperactive kid who hadn’t been allowed to go on a rollercoaster, and then, when his parents were out, snuck into the fair and went on the rollercoaster over and over and over again — up/down/vomit/thrilling/surprising/look-no-hands/up/down/up/down for weeks and weeks and weeks. Eventually, it got, well … boring. After three days of not sleeping, when the thrill was well and truly gone, I stopped to rest. I thought of all the beaches, all the forests, all the things I was missing out on, realising that there was more to life than a joy ride. Aside from anything else, in 2001 it was still more socially acceptable to be homophobic than to be homosexual. My battle scars from high school seemed to have healed, though; I met gay men who had suffered far worse, and I decided now was the time for a second round at bringing down the bigots.

I also felt like a failure career-wise — that I had wasted a few crucial years I could have spent building my resume. I was nearly twenty-two, and working deep into the night sweeping floors and picking up glasses. Many of my peers had graduated uni, and had already started their careers. I had an abiding sense of status anxiety when I started my quest to have a professional, middle-class job — but it was then or never.

We had stopped doing the community radio show, and instead were doing theatre. We had also continued with TV, and over time I did a few things on camera. I’d created a character called ‘Peter Puffpaint’, which I performed at the Fringe and Midsumma festivals, but I knew this wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I decided that — with everything I had been through and the sudden interest we all had in current affairs — being a journalist would be a good career path for me.

I had the sense that the freethinking transcendentalism of the 1990s had flown off somewhere on a unicorn. Little mattered in my life, and the lives of those around me, except career success and finding somewhere nice to live. But it wasn’t just that: I now had friends, a relationship, an interest in community radio and TV — in sum, I had a brittle but growing sense of achievement and belonging.

It took me years to get into the media industry. I often wept at how hard it was, how embarrassed I was at having to continue working as a telemarketer at night to support my various low-paying media jobs. With higher ambitions — and without the option of jumping off and falling — my anxiety, and certainly my status anxiety, increased. I felt as if I was two steps behind everyone else; my colleagues were eighteen and nineteen years old, while I was twenty-three and still working part-time in a call centre. I dealt with my anxiety by cutting myself with a knife until my partner told me I needed to get help — so I got a referral to see a psychiatrist in Clayton.

Dr Lennon was a man in his mid-forties with an orange beard and a nice car. Over time, he undoubtedly helped me a lot: I stopped cutting, I got my career on track. He told me that part of improving my life had to involve the delicate balancing act of simultaneously realising that things hadn’t gone right in the past, but not sending myself into despair with self-loathing commentary at every step I took. I guess I was looking for a kind of father-figure, with whom I could discuss even practical things — something I had been unable to do with my own dad, whose behaviour had been become increasingly erratic and self-centred after his boss decided to close the abattoir, where he managed the piggery section, just after 2000.

It was fitting, therefore, that Dr Lennon started looking at me — after a while — as if I had just been to the toilet and not washed my hands. Eventually, in his well-crafted accent, he told me that he didn’t like the fact I came to therapy without showering, dressing properly, or styling my hair. He cancelled the sessions as soon as I told him I was struggling to pay them, and he immediately sent the remaining debt to a debt collector. I would later get my hands on a progress report he sent to the referring doctor. There was no mention of anything I went through in high school in this letter. Instead, most of it was dedicated to whether or not I had a Borderline Personality Disorder, because while I self-harmed, and had a history of substance abuse (and a ‘history of confusion over his sexual identity’), I had shown signs of having both empathy and long-term friendships. In the end, he concluded that I didn’t have a BPD.

My partner and I moved into an apartment in the city, and we had a cat, and a nice life by the Yarra. This time would be part of a five-year period during which I didn’t take drugs, and so I was unaware, for the most part, that Australia was having its first methamphetamine surge. During this time, Beck moved into a housing-commission house in the country. She got back together with Nick, and gave birth to her second child, another girl, whom she called Alice. Smithy lived all over Melbourne; he had periods of working and then periods of lying on the couch with the curtains closed for a long time. He continued taking ‘speed’ — as in, powdered meth — on weekends. He was moody, volatile, often charming, and at other times verbally abusive. He met a woman, got her pregnant, and then one day — for reasons he says he does not understand — she snuck away in the middle of the night with their 6-year-old, and never came back.

While all this was happening, I first got a job at the ABC in Ballarat, then Mt Gambier, and then finally as a reporter at triple j. Each of these gave me a confidence boost at the time, but I still didn’t feel completely comfortable in my own skin.

My parents, meanwhile, changed a lot during this period. Dad had something of a breakdown after the abattoir closed, and eventually went to the doctor, where he was diagnosed with Bipolar II (the less severe variety). After beginning to take anti-depressants, he found a level of happiness that he hadn’t experienced in a long time. Seeing the difference in him, Mum also went to the doctor, and was placed on an anti-depressant that also worked to reduce anxiety. I cannot begin to describe how much Mum changed. She became happy-go-lucky, she grew her hair long, and she was always ringing to see how I was. She was silly, and funny, and was always making jokes. I had never imagined that the reason for her being so aggressive all the time was actually anxiety.

Eventually, my parents moved to Queensland. A few years later, Mum paid for me to go travelling up the east coast of Queensland with her, and I had a marvellous time. Along the way I took her to a few gay clubs, which she in turn experienced as a marvellous time.

I guess things were looking good for us, in some ways. By 2005, I had spent nearly four years without touching a single drug except alcohol.

It was a smarter decision than I realised at the time.

In 2004, experts from both academia and the medical frontline were claiming that the meth problem was at least as large as the heroin peak in the late 1990s. A National Drug and Research Centre (NDARC) study in 2005 suggested there were 73,000 people nationwide addicted to methamphetamine — about 1.5 times the number of heroin addicts. Meth users were also found to have a rate of psychosis 11 times higher than the general population, and many of those had no prior or family history of mental illness.

While crystal meth was then only making up a tiny proportion of meth use, the ACC would warn in its 2004–05 Illicit Drug Data Report that:

Increasing demand for high purity crystal methylamphetamine, which is readily available in Asia, is likely to create an increase in attempted importation and domestic production in the foreseeable future.

The ACC’s 2005–06 Illicit Drug Data Report would follow, stating that: ‘Globally, approximately 50 per cent of all global ATS (Amphetamine-type stimulant) production takes place in East and Southeast Asia, Burma, and China’ and that there had been ‘a significant increase in the number of ATS laboratories dismantled globally, from 547 in 1990 to 11,253 in 2003’.

Indeed, in winter 2004, long before Breaking Bad hit our screens, Fijian police, in collaboration with the Australian and New Zealand authorities, discovered a massive methamphetamine lab hidden in a three-storey building complex near the Fijian capital Suva. The laboratory had an estimated production capacity of 500 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine a week.

More ‘super-labs’ would be found in the Philippines, Malaysia, China, and Indonesia over the coming years. Burma would remain the world capital for producing powdered meth pills, also known as Yaba. However, the vast majority of the meth being consumed in Australia was still homemade then, and all of it was powdered meth. Some of it was being made from cold-and-flu tablets obtained from chemists; the rest of it was relying on overseas imports of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.

Further research from NDARC in 2005 suggested that in some parts of Sydney, the domestic production and supply of meth was entirely controlled by outlaw bikie gangs. But the criminal market was becoming increasingly diversified, fragmented, and difficult to crack — it involved new alliances and new groups. Legitimate businesspeople in Australia were also mixing their lawful activities with forays into the drug trade. Many manufacturers were small-time, and others simply made meth for themselves and a few friends. There was now no set of key groups or individuals that controlled the national meth trade, the links of which often stretched right across Southeast Asia.

So meth — though not yet crystallised meth — was both proving popular and doing damage in the nation. With apologies to Tolstoy — while every meth abuser and addict ends up looking and behaving roughly the same, each has their own reason for getting hooked.

At the beginning of 2007, my life had been steadily improving for five years; I had been drug-free for six. I was clean for a long time. A long time is good, but it is not forever. Despite my good intentions, and despite ticking what I thought were ‘life’s boxes’, at the age of twenty-seven, my life rapidly unravelled. As is characteristic of a breakdown, it seemed like a mess of random events at the time, but looking back now, it all seems patently and painfully logical. This is how it went: I broke up with my partner after a six-year relationship, an amicable and mutual split — we both agreed the relationship had run its course. The apartment felt half empty when he took half the furniture, and entirely empty when he took my beloved cat. I hadn’t realised how much of my time and life was taken up by a relationship, and the force of the break-up proved to be bigger than I could handle. I tried going out to clubs, but had little confidence after being in a cozy relationship for so long; I started to feel lost, lonely, and ugly, and felt too intimidated to go out and meet people. When I did go out, I started searching for drugs, pills mainly, as soon as I walked in the door. Amphetamines always did the trick; I was able to go up and talk to people without a second thought. The more I looked in the mirror, though, the more I hated what I saw. I had forgotten how often I’d felt like this before I was in a long-term relationship.

It wasn’t all bad, though — I also saw the end of the relation-ship as a chance to have more fun, to date young guys I hadn’t had the chance to date when I myself was eighteen and nineteen, and, most importantly, to concentrate on my career. I decided that six years of radio — including two award nominations and getting a job at triple j — would culminate in me getting my own show on Sunday nights over summer. I had been making comedy for triple j’s evening show, done some work on its TV show, written for its magazine, and appeared as a guest on nearly every other of its shows. I decided the best way to deal with not having anything to do on weekends was to go to the studio and work on my demo.

The program director called me into his office a month later, saying that he liked the idea for the show, but didn’t want me presenting it. I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t say yes straight away because the demo was, in the end, an over-baked mistake. But his feedback was particularly disheartening: he suggested that I had a ‘long, long, long way to go if you want to present a show on the station’ but didn’t tell me what I needed to improve upon. His attitude seemed to suggest that I was not very good at being a presenter, and that there was very little point in me pursuing this line of career; or, at least, that is how I remember it.

I bought $450 worth of cocaine the weekend after the project failed. In the coming weeks, my feelings of loneliness and rejection morphed into abject feelings of self-disgust. I became so miserable that life felt surreal. I had spent five years building up a radio career, sure that it was my destiny, and now my career — which had been all-important to me — felt like a complete waste of time.

The only relief was drugs, which I had started taking every weekend. At first I took ecstasy, which filled me with hubris, deception, and all things nice. Going to work at my job as a reporter began to seem utterly pointless, and I started taking days off during the week, turning up late, and missing deadlines. Soon I was going to nightclubs and taking drugs Thursday through Monday every week. By then I was using GHB and ketamine, and when they stopped working, I started smoking meth. I spent all week at work fantasising about being high, which gradually turned into crying at my desk, then having lines at my desk, and then I stopped turning up at work altogether.

For a long while, my weekends were amazing. I went to a now defunct nightclub called The Market — this was just before the emergence of Facebook and smartphones, when people still went out. Thousands packed the place every Friday and Saturday night, from all walks of life, and partied until the place closed at 11.00am on Sunday, amid balloons, streamers, transvestites, and drugs.

I would dance for hours, and talk to strangers all night long. Before things got really bad, I knew that my work performance was seriously dropping, but while I hated getting yelled at, I just didn’t care. I had what seems now to be a rather prophetic dream one night that I was on the dance floor at The Market when I realised I had marbles in my pockets, and that I had just spilt them, and that my boss was standing there, hands on hips, demanding I pick them up. I did try — but by then they had scattered everywhere.

It was hard for me to imagine, at that point in time, how anybody could get through the week without having a party on the weekend to look forward to; it was certainly the only thing that got me through the week. And as the winter set in, that week took on a slow, sickly rhythm, during which I was tired, and desperate, and obsessing over every second guy I met. There was one who became a full-time obsession; when he didn’t text me back, I felt so miserable I would pile on the pills and the meth to forget about him, but when the drugs wore off, he would come back into my mind, bit by bit, until I took more.

The therapists I saw were expensive and didn’t seem to get it; I was taking anti-depressants that didn’t do much good either. A psychologist I was seeing called a CAT team after I told him that the Zoloft I was prescribed made me feel like stabbing random people at a shopping centre. They told me to see a therapist, to keep taking my anti-depressants, and to stop using drugs.

Work noticed that I was going downhill. They calculated all of the sick leave and annual leave I was owed, and gave me six weeks off. I went to Queensland and stopped using drugs; when I came back, though, I felt depressed also immediately, and starting using again.

When I got back, the ABC sent me to a psychiatrist — as far as I know, it cost them $1,500. But this was not for treatment — which, as I was only working part-time then, I couldn’t afford — it was, at HR’s initiation, a Fitness for Work Assessment. The report came back with the use of Axis and Criterion (which are the diagnostic tools used by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)) to conclude that I had ‘Major Depressive Disorder in the context of Substance Abuse and Borderline Personality Traits’.

Meanwhile, I had begun to obsess over guys again: one day, when one of them didn’t message me back, I sent him flowers. When he still didn’t reply, I took a knife into the work bathroom, and made a long, thin cut from my knee to my groin.

I didn’t feel as though I could tell anyone about these humiliations. Whenever I did start to talk to people about what I was going through, I could see them either getting very uncomfortable or they would start lecturing me on what I was doing wrong. That, or they just couldn’t have cared less.

At home, I spent hours staring out at the grey Melbourne sky from my high-rise Southbank apartment, miserable and anxious. One day, I decided to give Beck a call; it had been about two years since I had last seen her. As soon as she asked me how I was, it all came pouring out. She listened to everything, and then relayed three or four stories from her own life that seemed to not only encapsulate how I felt, but were remarkably similar to what I had been through. Only Beck, it seemed, had the empathy and the selflessness to admit to having endured the same humiliations as me when it came to unrequited love.

She asked me to come over, and I ended up basically living with her. While there, I met a friend of Nick’s — he was by now well and truly off the scene, but his friends still came around — who had recently gotten out of jail. We started a romance as well as starting to use heroin together — never enough to get me addicted, but enough to stop me from killing myself.

I started taking Beck to The Market, where, like everyone else, she had the time of her life. One night, she told me she was going home early because she had bumped into the guy she’d met in a Ferntree Gully pool hall a few weeks earlier, and they were going back to his house to smoke some meth with his two gay mates.

She gave me the key to her place, and returned the next day in a riotous mood. The following weekend, that guy — Rob Smith — was over again, and the weekend after that, and soon enough he hardly left.

From the outset I found ‘Smithy’, as we called him, to be kind, friendly, down to earth, generous, and very quick to give a compliment. He and Beck hung out together for a good few weeks before they finally slept together, and he seemed — in his own rough way — to be a real gentleman. He came out with just me a few times, and one night we were joined by another friend; we went back to her house and shot up some heroin. I’ll never forget him sweating so much that she — on a fairly cold night — took him out to the backyard, and hosed him down with the garden hose. Around the same time, the guy who I had met at Beck’s died from a heroin-related illness.

Needless to say, my work was suffering more and more, and I was quickly becoming a liability. Work managers were very supportive until they got the psychiatrist’s report — when they realised I was also using drugs, my manager told me I was an ‘occupational risk’ to other employees (at triple j). I was eventually called into a meeting with HR and my manager, who said if I didn’t go to a residential rehab I would almost certainly lose my job; she felt I was underperforming to such an extent that I could be placed under a performance review. She said that over 160 people had applied for my job, and that there were award-winning young journalists who had worked on 7.30 and Lateline who had missed out to me — even though I was less qualified — and she was now beginning to believe that she had a mistake. I sobbed loudly in front of them for ten minutes, and agreed that yes, rehab was only the option. I went back to my parents, and in the sunshine and isolation, my need for drugs subsided, and by Christmas of that year I was clean. As a condition of getting my job back, though, I still had to go to residential rehab.

As quickly as methamphetamine use had risen in Australia, it now — almost inexplicably, and without the fanfare of its dramatic introduction — began to drop. According to the 2007 National Drug Strategy Household Survey (NDSHS), the proportion of Australians who reported use of these drugs in the previous twelve months decreased significantly, from 3.2 per cent in 2004 to 2.3 per cent in 2007. The meth scare seemed to be over, and it also seemed as if many people had been guilty of engaging in a bit of moral panic. In fact, ecstasy use was still far higher, and used by far more people, than methamphetamine in 2007. The proportion of Australians who had ‘ever used’ methamphetamine also decreased significantly, from 9.1 per cent to 6.3 per cent.

Meth’s popularity — at least as we understood meth then — seemed to be in free-fall. Perhaps the world had moved on, and the nation’s drug users were re-collecting their marbles and going back to work and regular play — including me.