Chapter Six

Every creature has its soft spots

IN A CLASS, in a public rehab on the rural outskirts of Brisbane’s southern suburbs, Audrey, a thirty-something black New Guinean with a slight, almost European-sounding accent, was telling her group, ‘Addiction is an illness, addiction is a coping mechanism. Addiction is about survival.’

Audrey was methodically making eye contact — through her 1960s-style eyeliner — with each of the 11 people in her rehab class. Half were jailbirds who were being forced to attend; there were also two former school teachers, a guy with schizophrenia, a bespectacled middle-aged librarian addicted to sleeping tables, and Richard, the self-described ‘bisexual bipolar bear’, who was in rehab after neighbours found him trying to gas himself in the car while on amphetamines. Many eyes were drifting off Audrey, onto the gum trees and the farmland out the window, and perhaps to the future (their plans for when they leave), or to the past (the joys and sorrows of drug use).

‘The brain associates drugs with pleasure, the opposite of pain and death — but instead of giving yourself something that nourishes you and gives you strength, an addict is engaging in behaviour that will make their life worse in the long run,’ Audrey explained. ‘You face a problem, you take drugs, your problem gets worse, you take more drugs and on it goes; that is what we call the cycle of addiction.’

Sitting among this motley crew was me: I had arrived three days earlier with my head wrapped in a skull bandana, and my stomach a mess of angry echidnas. I was clean by this stage, and wasn’t too keen on going to rehab, or even going back to my job, but the prospect of life on the dole — that is to say, life without parties or drugs while living at my parent’s house, an hour away from Bundaberg — didn’t grab me either. I was, however, keen to work out what had gone wrong, and how I could go back to normal life without experiencing the flood of misery that was my usual experience. I didn’t really believe that rehab would help, but I was curious to see if it could.

So in February 2008, Eileen the admin lady picked me up from Beenleigh train station in a minivan. ‘It’s quite an interesting area around here,’ she remarked. ‘A few years ago it was all rural; now it’s becoming an outer suburb of Brisbane.’

We were actually about half-an-hour’s drive from my old haunt of Woodridge, which seemed appropriate. Logan House was a publicly funded rehab; the weekly bill was taken straight out of my Centrelink payments. By way of comparison, the Sanctuary, a luxury private rehab in Byron Bay, costs $30,000 a week, and you can get in straight away. Logan House cost $220 a week. It was a bargain, really; for that we got three meals a day, and about a tenth of the medical staff that are employed by the Sanctuary.

Eileen drove me up the driveway, from where I could see the tennis court and the pool. Like the rest of the buildings, the front office was made of ‘he used to give me roses’ brown brick.

There were three villas, holding about 24 residents in total, and each of us shared a room with two others.

Eileen explained the rules:

•There was no contact with anybody from the outside for the first twenty-one days.

•Urine and breath tests twice a week.

•The day started at 6.30am with exercise, then classes, four days a week.

Eileen asked if I had deodorant or Listerine or any medications. I answered yes, and she took them off me and put them in a locker, telling me that people can get high on deodorant and Listerine in rehab. I was allowed to keep my asthma medication in my room, but she took my Zoloft from me: I could only take that during specified medication times.

The first resident I met at Logan House was a guy in my villa: he was a talented musician in his early twenties called Max.

‘What’s your poison?’ he said.

‘Party drugs; I partied Thursday through Monday,’ I replied. ‘And eventually heroin on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Until my managers at my radio job told me to take time off or face the axe.’

‘Here sit down, have a smoke with me,’ Max said. ‘This is how it went wrong for me, dude. My ex-girlfriend and I were supposed to go to Europe together. I started, like, partying and dealing and stuff, and she told me I couldn’t come. But that’s why I was dealing, so I could save money. Well, she went to Europe and I’m still here, and with all the money I saved, I spent it on heroin.’

A second guy sat down with us, having overheard Max talking. He was tall with brown hair and a deep Scottish accent.

‘I had a breakdown,’ he said without being prompted. ‘And then I went back to the booze.’

‘How are you now?’

‘Getting there. It’s difficult. I’ve been here six weeks. I’ve been to rehab before, but I really want to make it this time ... and don’t worry there are lots of educated professionals here, you’ll fit right in. There are all kinds of people here: teachers, business owners, musicians, even a psychologist.’

‘A psychologist in rehab? You mean as a client?’

‘Yep.’

And a few days later I would meet her — her name was Holly — while she was raking up some leaves outside one of the villas. She had brown hair and brown eyes. She told me she became an alcoholic a year or two after her husband died. ‘You know, the thing about grief is, the more you hold on to it — the worse it gets,’ she said.

Unlike most rehabs, which are based on the 12-step program, the rehab course at Logan was based on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT); we were taught that our thoughts control our behaviours and emotions, and our willpower controls our thoughts. We would have a weekly one-on-one counselling session, using techniques by which we would learn to expect and tolerate restless or low moods. We learned to question those assumptions that reinforced our habits (for example, ‘I’ll never make friends who don’t do drugs’), and to focus on engaging our non-drug activities and creative interests.

The classes were certainly interesting. We were told that thoughts control everything, and that we had complex psychological reasons for drug triggers. According to Audrey, most of our heartache is caused by our own thinking. She told us that most negative thinking is the result of errors in reasoning; what she called ‘thinking distortions’, such as ‘overgeneralisation’, and ‘all-or-nothing thinking’.

In class, we discussed triggers and traumas. Men talked about being dumped. A young stripper said she used to get so smashed she would peel her cigarettes and eat them like a banana. We each made a list of events that often led to our drug use. For many people, those triggers were similar: ‘Friday nights’, ‘having an argument with my partner’, or ‘hearing dance music’. Audrey explained that ‘hearing dance music’ belongs to a category called ‘euphoric recall’. I wrote my list of risky events:

•Being dumped

•Going out

•Being at a venue

•Stressful day at work

•Having something good happen

•Having something bad happen

Audrey was also my individual counsellor. We had our one-on-one sessions by the river once a week. The thing I found most irritating about her was the way she kept about asking about my homosexuality, and whether or not I had been mistreated because of it. At the time, this seemed completely irrelevant to me.

During our first sessions, I told her I was worried that I might seem a bit boring without drugs.

‘Boring?’

‘Yeah, like when I was a workaholic journalist and a nerd.’

‘Luke, if I saw you at a party, I would want to talk to you. You are interesting.’

‘Are you spinning me a line, Audrey? As in a standard psychology how-to-make-someone-feel-better line?’

‘I’m not that sort of counsellor, Luke. From what I’ve seen of you in class today, I like you a lot. You’re a deep thinker, and I think you have a big heart. You have a tough facade to protect yourself, but I think you’re very sensitive underneath.’

By our second session, I realised I struggled with group situations, and that my parents had mental-health problems, and so I over-achieved or recklessly under-achieved to get their attention. Audrey asked me to write a list of things I had achieved in life, and to ‘take full credit for them’. I have to admit, I started to feel better and more in control of my life after just a few days.

But even still, I was nervous, my thoughts were racing; I couldn’t sleep, and all I wanted to do was sleep.

Come week three, and although many people had been listening and agreeing, a dissenter emerged in class. This dissenter was Max, who said, ‘Audrey, we keep hearing in class that drugs are the result of a lack of something else in our lives. But lots of people here are confident and seem happy. I just don’t think I will ever find the same high I found on drugs anywhere else.’

Although Audrey was quick to disagree, telling Max that that kind of justification was ‘cognitive distortion’ and that 90 per cent of people with addictions have a mental illness, the damage had been done. I was having a lot of trouble coping without drugs, and Max’s line of reasoning made it worse.

I found myself walking around at night: pacing, wanting to leave, hating being there. I couldn’t sleep, I was up all night, my mind racing and worrying. I wanted to leave; I felt like an idiot, it felt melodramatic to be there in rehab. I made small incisions with a pair of nail scissors on the inside of my thigh. Halfway through my next counselling session with Audrey, after pushing myself again and again to tell her what I did, I told her that I had cut myself.

She put her hand on my leg. She told me cutting didn’t help. I told her I felt that it did. She told me I cut myself when I was anxious, and I needed to do breathing exercises instead. She told me that my thoughts caused my anxiety, and that my thoughts were things I could control. She told me there was no need for me to be anxious. She said I was funny, and attractive, and smart. She told me I was safe.

‘Anxiety comes in waves,’ she said. ‘It peaks and then it goes. You need to identify when it is starting, and slow down your breathing. When you slow down your breathing, your body will relax, and you will feel better. You don’t need to cut yourself to feel better.’

Audrey then took me into the director’s office. Apparently, an episode of self-harm was considered a serious incident in rehab. The director was a tall, strong-looking woman with greying hair cut in a kind of flat-top.

‘Luke, self-harm is a maladaptive way of dealing with anxiety,’ she said. ‘Your body is preparing itself to fight or to run when it senses danger. You are becoming aggressive when you feel anxious, but you are turning your aggression on yourself. It’s not actually helping your situation to cut yourself. Do you understand what I mean?’

‘I think so,’ I replied.

‘You feel scared or worried about something, you can’t cope, so you lash out at yourself,’ she said.

And suddenly I did understand; the concept of internalised aggression made perfect sense. It was what we called in rehab a ‘light-bulb moment’, and the urge to self-harm started to dissipate thereafter.

But I still felt anxious, and I still had trouble sleeping. Audrey asked again and again whether I was comfortable with my sexuality, and I began to resent her for it.

More classes followed. We talked about boundaries, and the ways in which they can be violated: physically, sexually, socially, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually.

The vast majority of people relapse shortly after they leave rehab, whether they finish the program or not. Many people fail at rehab. One patient asked nearly everybody — including me and including all the staff — for sex. It was near constant, and he was eventually kicked out. The librarian was expelled a short time later for smuggling in anti-psychotics, and taking them in the morning, so she could sleep all day and avoid class. A few weeks later, a resident with schizophrenia left in the middle of the night, bought some heroin, found a syringe, injected it and died almost instantly — a reasonably common problem among addicts when they leave rehab, and, after having had a break from their drug, take a dose that is far too high for what their body is now used to.

But there are also people who graduate and stay clean. Holly, the psychologist, graduated the eight-week program. Her mother and daughter attended the graduation, beaming with smiles. Before she left, she thanked the girls in her villa for ‘making me feel beautiful again’.

And me? Well, I still couldn’t sleep. And I was still annoyed at why Audrey kept asking me whether or not I was comfortable with my sexuality. One night, my annoyance with her turned into an extensive diary entry about high school — the first time I had written any of it down. When I had my next session with Audrey, she became the first person I told what had happened at high school.

She gently rubbed my back as I went through all the details; I sobbed, but by the time I’d finished, I had become angry.

‘You’ve got through the worst of it,’ Audrey told me. ‘You have already survived it; it’s time now to accept yourself and be kinder to yourself.’

I stayed awake all the next night, feeling tender and exposed; a soft spot had been uncovered.

I learnt a lot about soft spots during my time in rehab. That started when I saw a guy named Billy punching a boxing bag. He looked like Rocky; he had a boxer’s nose, and was Italian or Greek, and he was really going at it. I knew he had just spent a fair bit of time in jail, but he was actually pretty friendly, and when he saw me walking past he called me over.

He said he used to be a competitive boxer, and asked if I had ever boxed before. I laughed nervously and said no. He got a pair of boxing gloves for me, and proceeded to show me the basics of how to throw a punch.

‘Turn your arm as you do it, so it’s all knuckle,’ he said. Self-consciously, I started hitting the bag again and again until I found a rhythm, and I ended up doing it for about half an hour.

We had a few more boxing sessions after that. And then, the day after my big day with Audrey, Max came up to me, announcing he had come up with a plan for me, inspired by a highly effeminate champion Thai kickboxer he once saw on TV.

‘I am going to turn you into society’s worst nightmare,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’

‘A poof who can kill.’

‘No, Max,’ I said. ‘I don’t need to know that kind of thing, not anymore.’

‘C’mon,’ he protested. ‘It will give you confidence.’

So he took me into the shed with the boxing bag.

His philosophy was simple — your hard bits thrown at full force to the other person’s soft bits.

Elbows to eye sockets.

Knees to testicles.

Fists to windpipe.

Shin to stomach.

Legs to ribs.

Head to back of head.

And so on.

Even with all this activity, I couldn’t sleep, so the rehab took me to the doctor. I was prescribed anti-psychotics, and woke up after weeks of not sleeping properly, light as a feather with a peace I had never known before: fear could be overcome, failure was simply a matter of perception, demons had been slayed, and there was a light shining out of my heart.

I wrote this note in my diary:

I go back to my room. I think about, for some strange reason, Easter, and I thought about boundaries. What is in my boundary? I thought. Me, self-love, me, good stuff, me, me, me. I start feeling a strange sensation in my chest. Perhaps it’s some epithet of narcissism, but it feels like something else. It feels like I’ve tapped into some kind of divine energy. I feel a little white light or something glowing out of me. I feel connected with all the living things around me. I think about Jesus Christ. I never got the myth of Jesus, it never made any sense. Now it seems to have kind of clicked. It’s like no matter what suffering and hatred we endure in life, we will always rise up because we will always have our essence. We can all rise again cos nothing ever kills our essence.

I am not saying I want to be a Christian, no way, but I understand the spiritual messages of Christianity now. But it feels right. And it feels like for the first time, maybe I have grasped what it means to have a soul.

I woke that day feeling light and lovely, feeling as if anything at all — including complete sobriety — was now within my reach.

Then suddenly my time was up. I gave a goodbye talk to the group, in which I revealed I had cried over things that happened to me fifteen years ago. I told them I’d recognised that my drug abuse was a form of poorly expressed, internalised rage. Everyone clapped, and I left. It felt life-changing, revelatory; nothing could stop me, anything could be achieved.

Meanwhile, methamphetamine use had continued on its downward fall, which began toward the end of 2005 and went through right until 2011.

In 2010, at 2.1 per cent across the population, use of methamphetamines had fallen to the lowest level seen since 1995. A similar trend was seen among young people, where students were less likely to have ever used the drug in 2011 (2.9 per cent) than in 2005 (5.3 per cent). Clandestine-lab detections had also dropped, as had meth imports and drug offences.

There was a sense — at least in drug circles, and by following what the media were saying — that meth had come and gone. However, others — and by others I mean here experts in the field — were less convinced. They tended to see the drop-off in meth use as either 1) too insignificant to be statistically meaningful or 2) simply part of what many see as the inherently cyclical nature of population drug epidemics.

‘Drugs, for a number of different reasons, come in and out of fashion all the time,’ Geoff Munro, national policy manager with the Australian Drug and Alcohol Foundation, told me. ‘There will always be a population cohort of addicts who abuse the strongest drug they can find; drugs throughout history follow an often inexplicable cycle of being widely abused, and then use falls off again, before we get another spike a few years or a decade later.’

According to the cyclical perspective on community drug ‘epidemics’, the dynamic nature of drug markets — both supply and demand — means that today’s problem drug could well be replaced by a new problem drug tomorrow.

Another possible reason for the decrease in use was the tightening of restrictions governing the sale of pseudoephedrine-based cold-and-flu tablets in some states. Most meth being consumed in Australia in that decade (2000–10) was being made here, and intelligence suggested most manufacturers were sourcing their precursor material through ‘pseudoephedrine runners’ who went from chemist to chemist all over the state, and sometimes interstate, to buy cold-and-flu tablets in bulk. Queensland, perhaps because of its vast geography and scattered populations, has always been Australia’s meth-making capital. So in November 2005, the Queensland state government brought in Project Stop, an electronic tool and database that allowed for sales of pseudoephedrine to be tracked in real time using a Global Positioning System. This system aimed to prevent individuals from purchasing small quantities of pseudoephedrine from many different pharmacies. In the short term, the project seemed to work; the number of clandestine labs in Queensland dropped between 2005 and 2007 by 23 per cent. By 2006, nationally, all products containing pseudoephedrine had been rescheduled as either ‘Pharmacist Only Medicines’ (Schedule 3) or ‘Prescription Only Medicines’ (Schedule 4), depending on the amount of pseudoephedrine in the product. This means that prior to 2005, anybody could buy pseudoephedrine off the shelves without asking a pharmacist, or showing ID, let alone getting a prescription. Given that nearly all meth is made with either ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, it’s not surprising that many people were taking advantage of this loophole. Jason Ferris, a senior research fellow at the University of Queensland, has extensively studied Project Stop, and told me that a national compulsory system would reduce the opportunities for addict-based manufacturers to make meth.

However, others, such as the ACC, have suggested that the tighter controls on pseudoephedrine simply resulted in the growth of the illicit-precursor importation market. Indeed, the US introduced the federal Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act in 2005, which increased restrictions on pseudoephedrine sales. Similarly to Australia, pharmacists and sellers of medications containing pseudoephedrine were required to place these medications behind the counter, and buyers were required to show a state-issued identification card and sign a log that could be used to track their purchases. Two researchers, Dobkin and Nicosia, studied the effect of this legislation, and concluded that this intervention substantially disrupted the supply of methamphetamine, but that the effect was only temporary.

All things considered, this legislation may have opened up a market for more sophisticated meth manufacturers overseas and here. Meth’s minor drop-off at the end of last decade turned out to be the calm before the storm — from where we are now, we can see that Australia’s meth story goes something like this: The first clouds of meth were detected in the syringes of Sydney’s injecting drug users in the mid-1990s. Then came the thunder — crime bosses across Asia stopped producing heroin, and started making the profitable, easier-to-make methamphetamine in 1999. Local drug dealers and crime gangs got on board and starting making gear; as a result, it rained powdered meth in Australia from mid-2000 to mid-2004. Then things dried up. Years later, without any apparent warning and before we had a chance to notice the dark clouds, it started raining crystal hail.

And before the storm, and after rehab, I was back living at Beck’s.

Rehab is a bit like an idealised society, where you don’t have the usual life and money pressures. When I returned to real life, I was relegated to part-time work because of my breakdown; I couldn’t afford my own place, and my family lived in Queensland, and couldn’t help me. So I wasn’t really able to cut ties with the only people who could offer me a cheap room: people who were always using drugs. That is to say, Beck — and Beck’s place was now hers and Smithy’s.

I returned to work in Melbourne. While I never reached the same levels of misery and low self-esteem, and my life was without a doubt better after I got out of rehab, I still fell back into addiction. Non-drug-using people tended to avoid me, and I them; I continued hanging out with my drug-using friends instead. We smoked pot most nights, and some mornings, and on Friday nights, we snorted powdered meth.

And these Friday nights were undoubtedly the best night of the week because everyone was so happy and upbeat. But the meth was so weak then — this was back in 2008–09 — that I found it easy not to use; when I did use, I usually fell asleep, and when I woke up the next day I always regretted it because I had less energy in the gym — though I still went. I didn’t really go out, because living with Beck and Smithy meant that I felt less lonely.

Smithy and Beck, meanwhile, had settled into a life together: a life of silly jokes, bad TV, and drugs. During the week, Beck would yell and scream. Smithy would take at least one day a week off work — usually on Tuesday or Wednesday — when he would literally just lie there awake, staring at the wall, and wouldn’t answer if you spoke to him. He dealt bits and bobs of pot to make ends meet.

Smithy did bring an element of stability to the household, if for no other reason than that he actually did work (apart from those mid-week days off). He also loved sport, and went to work quickly to ensure both of Beck’s daughters played sport. He went along and watched their games every week, and referred to both of them as his ‘champions’.

With a more stable household, Beck always offered a couch to anybody who needed it (and in my case a room to someone who needed it). One day a woman from the neighbourhood said she was going through some issues and dropped off her cat. Beck took George — a cat with a gimpy leg — in, no questions asked.

Later, the same would happen with somebody’s dog. The dog had a large cyst on its face, and Beck sat by the heater with the dog, squeezed the entire cyst out onto a tissue, and cleaned it up with antiseptic — the cyst never grew back. A short time later, somebody dropped off another dog, which got the first dog pregnant. The male dog was then adopted out, and the female died during birth. Beck bottle-fed the puppies for the first six weeks, setting her alarm every six hours. She gave away three of the puppies, and kept one for herself — that dog is now seven, and as far as I know, it still lives with Smithy.

But all was not well in Beck’s world, and by the time she reached the age of thirty, it was beginning to show. I’m not sure exactly when it started, but she began to experience a smouldering resentment towards others and the world, which, over time, became an obsessive, perhaps pathological, jealousy.

Beck regarded anybody who had any measure of success with open disdain, and sometimes subjected them to abuse — and she had an extremely wide definition of success. She regarded my achievements as a mere consequence of my parents having money, or the fact that I received private tuition, or the two years I had spent at a private school.

It wasn’t just people from our general area who had gone on to have money (or mediocre journalism careers) that Beck resented; it was anybody who had a mortgage or a nice car. One day in Coles she commented that the ‘women working in the deli are up themselves’ and the gay guy who supervised the checkout area was also ‘stuck-up’.

The only jobs she worked as an adult were as a factory-hand, or on a production line in the slowly disappearing manufacturing industry of a rapidly changing Dandenong. When I asked her one day why she hated all the people who worked in the supermarket, she explained that she had applied for a traineeship a few years back at Coles, and after a day-long workshop-style selection process, she was rejected because she had ‘poor group skills’, didn’t listen and ‘constantly talked over the top of people’.

‘Too socially retarded to even be a check-out chick,’ she said one day, giggling, when she was stoned.

Beck was still funny — even delightful — when she was stoned, and was super-friendly and happy on those Friday nights. In between, though, life could be pretty grim — especially for her kids. Beck’s sense of unfairness about how her life had panned out was, after a while, being taken out on her children every morning, as if she had been unfairly sentenced to living in a small house with a partner who slept in a separate room, and two children who she often couldn’t stand. Beck’s weekday mornings were unpleasant for her, and even more unpleasant for her children after two years of using powdered meth every weekend. The problem was yelling and screaming, and a mood that seemed to have no discernible cause but manifested itself in huffiness and screams of ‘fucking hurry up you little cow’, ‘move it’, ‘who drank all the milk, there’s no fucking milk’ before refusing to take her daughters to school, and making Smithy crawl out of bed to drive them. Beck went from waking up with no energy to smashing dishes with such panic-driven hysteria that her youngest would often go to school in anguished tears.

I am not sure why I never said anything; I often heard it, and I was usually glad it wasn’t directed at me. I guess we all just sort of got used to it, and tried to stay out of her way.

By about midday, when the kids were at school and Beck had had some more sleep, and smoked some marijuana, she was marvellous again. Witty, funny, offering to get Smithy and me something from the bakery. Whatever we asked for, she would come back with twice as much. I believed that Beck wouldn’t have behaved like that if she was fully in control of herself, and I understood why she had a degree of anger — whether in good or bad faith — about the way things had panned out for her in life. If I gently raised the issue of her anger, most of the time she would claim she was ‘crook’ because she had a cold.

Roughly every second Saturday, Smithy would go out with some mates, and Beck would call him and call him. He’d say he would be fifteen minutes, and would then be away for six hours — with her car. It was as if he liked being out with a man-friend, and having her call every ten minutes, and not answering her calls. That way he could tell his mate — or perhaps just leave the impression — ‘bitch wants me’. It was unclear to me, though, whether she wanted her car, him, the drugs he said he was buying, or all three.

Amid all this, Beck got pregnant for the third time in just over two years; Smithy was convinced she was deliberately getting herself pregnant to 1) keep him at home more (she used to call him dozens of times and cry for hours on end if he was out for too long on the weekend) and 2), and more importantly in his eyes, to get a financial claim on his father’s estate, which by now was worth several million dollars. Smithy was incredulous when Beck got pregnant the third time and urged her to have another abortion. ‘Urged’ might actually be too nice a way of putting it: Smithy told Beck that if she didn’t have an abortion this time, he would leave. She cried for days on end, before agreeing that she would give herself a miscarriage by injecting herself with an enormous dose of powdered meth. When she went to the doctor a short time later, she found that not only was her attempt unsuccessful, but also that she was having twin boys. She sat me down in the lounge room when she got home and said, ‘I want to have these kids because being a parent is the only thing I am good at.’ She promised Smithy that he could be the stay-at-home parent, and she would go and work fulltime at her job packing boxes at a factory. He agreed, and eventually he seemed quite taken with the idea of twin boys. Excited, even — but he made no plans to give up his party lifestyle.

In September 2009, two splendid little beings were born, and brought with them hope, and sunshine, and giggles, and all things that babies give, no matter who their parents are, and no matter what the circumstances of their birth.

Meanwhile, my work situation had become untenable. One day, I got a call from a friend who worked on the same program as me, doing the same job, but who had started about two years later. A top guy, he’d called to ask me why I hadn’t applied to present any programs over the summer because, he thought, I would be a very good presenter. He said management needed people to present shows, and when he’d asked to present, he’d been given a heap of graveyard shifts, and — here is the clincher — he didn’t need to put in a demo. The next day, I emailed the program director to ask if he needed anybody to do shifts over summer, and whether he needed a demo. He said no, he didn’t need anybody, and upon that I got up, walked out of the ABC, and never went back. I took multiple legal actions, won some, lost some, and won enough to get me a big trip to Europe, where, inspired by the fact my legal actions had been more successful than my radio career, I took up a law degree.

By this stage, I was fuming — I felt as if my life had been derailed over and over again by people who had abused their power and screwed me over for no good reason. I was convinced that the reason this has happened was simply because I hadn’t been powerful enough. I read my law studies like a madman, and enrolled in boxing (which by then had replaced self-harming as an outlet for anger — but like most things I became obsessed with it and at times I took it too far). I began using steroid cream, and packed on a heap of muscle, which led to heavy weight-lifting and Muay Thai kickboxing, eventually training with competitive teams.

I became very volatile and vicious — looking back, I was not a very nice person a lot of the time. I not only didn’t take shit from anybody, but the slightest provocation would see me with my hands around someone’s neck, and/or an email to them explaining that I had initiated legal action. By the time I got halfway through my legal studies, several people I knew had employed me as their pro-bono legal advocate (not as a lawyer) in workplace injury, bad loans, and unfair dismissal. They did this knowing I would charge into conciliations and trials using a combination of broadcasting skills, legal know-how, bitchiness, vengeance, and testosterone to scare their adversaries into handing over money.

I was eventually so angry that I would, on occasion, be walking down the street and start punching the Christ out of a tree. In the end, I had to wind things back, as being in a constant state of rage aggravated a neck injury that I had gotten at the ABC; I had to take long periods off from studying law because I was in pain and depressed. I still smoked pot and did a bit of powdered meth, but only to help me focus and prepare for the next battle.

For the most part, Smithy and Beck — along with my parents — were the only people I didn’t fight with. By midway through 2011, in fact, Smithy had been spending more and more time on those Friday nights chatting with me while Beck was in bed (she always crashed early). We talked about all manner of things, mainly sport, and he was almost certainly my closest friend for a long while. Over time, however, something curious happened. He stopped talking about sport and started talking about sex.

In particular, he asked me over and over again what I thought about when I masturbated. Usually I would just pretend to go to sleep, and not answer him, but he persisted for months and months. It seemed really grubby and childish to me.

The final straw came late in 2011, the day my alarm went off on the opposite side of the house to Smithy, and he started bitching and mumbling. I had had enough. I walked into his room and told him, in great detail, what I thought of him: he was a fat, lazy, sleazy piece of shit who had done nothing with his. At the end of the tirade, as he sat there stunned, I gave him a decent shove. Then he got mad.

He grabbed me and effortlessly — the guy hadn’t done any exercise or work in two years, but was still as strong as an ox — threw me to the ground. He got on top of me, and held both my arms to the ground as I struggled to get up, tearing a muscle in my shoulder in the process. Beck walked in, saw the scene, and screamed, ‘I am sick of you coming here, causing trouble between me and Smithy; get out!’ So I did, and I didn’t speak to either of them for two years after that.

I moved to St Kilda; I found anti-depressants that actually worked; I calmed down, and my neck pain went away. I saw three therapists in this time; the first told me that my rage came from a narcissist’s sense of entitlement because of my ‘narcissistic personality traits’; the second told me that I nearly met the criteria for an anti-social personality disorder; and finally I found a softly spoken African-American who sent me inside the dreams I had in which I was falling off something. Through this process, I realised that the object I was falling from was life itself, and that when the going got tough, I decided to jump off.

This period when I was away from Smithy and Beck, doing my own thing, was a largely positive one for me. Between 2011 and 2013 — although I still had the odd marijuana and MDMA binge — I finished my law degree, got a job in a community legal centre as a media officer, and was nominated for a Human Rights Media Award for my long-form written journalism. The more I wrote, the better I felt. I started getting paid good money for my print journalism. And, gradually, my dreams changed, too; now when I dreamt I was falling off something, I grew wings. At least once a week I would have a lucid dream in which I flew all over the country, and then deep into the galaxy: when I wrote, I felt as if I could fly.

This feeling of flying was becoming more common, for different reasons, around Australia.

From around 2011 onwards, we had what was basically a new drug on the market — crystallised meth, which was far stronger and far more addictive than the powdered meth that most of us knew only as speed. So it’s not surprising that by the reporting period of 2012–13, every state and territory reported an increase in the median purity of methamphetamine. Victoria reported the highest annual median purity of 76.1 per cent in this reporting period, the highest median purity reported in the previous decade — a massive jump when you consider that in 2007 it had dipped to around 17 per cent in most states across the nation. As criminal networks and drug manufacturers got smarter, though, even the powdered meth on the market was of an exceptionally high purity.

On one level, the explanation is simple — more of the drug was getting into the country, and that’s because more of it was being made all around the world from around 2011 onward. The cause of our current crystal-meth problem is that so much of the drug is coming through our border, while local production has also risen — as indicated through the detection of clandestine labs — but at a much smaller rate. A few years ago, it was thought that 90 per cent of the meth being used here was locally made; today, that figure is thought to be to around 60 per cent.

As Australians grew tired of powdered meth by the mid- 2000s, our local dealers seem to have fallen ‘victim’ to the forces of globalisation — a higher-quality imported product, produced at a cheaper cost. Crystallised meth is now being made all over the world: in the jungles of Burma, in the densely populated slums of Manila, in the deserts of Nigeria, and, perhaps most importantly, in the shantytowns of China. Australia was seen as an easy market for these producers, and soon our hospital emergency rooms were awash with wide-eyed, psychotic meth users.

How exactly did this happen? We need to back up a few steps, and examine what took place in the sub-regions of East and South-East Asia in the first decade of the millennium. For an overview, we can start with these four points, taken from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) World Drug Reports from 2008 to 2010:

•While opium cultivation levels worldwide had also restored to and stabilised at pre-2000 levels, drug manufacturers and users were showing a preference for synthetic stimulants. Global seizures of amphetamines increased some threefold over the period 1998–2010, far more than the increases for plant-based drugs.

•In 2008, UNODC reported that methamphetamine use and production was starting to rise, and that 55 per cent of the world’s 14 million amphetamine users were in Asia, most of those in the East and Southeast sub-region.

•In the same year, more and more industrial-scale meth labs were being discovered across South-East Asia, ‘run by large criminal organisations’ according to the UN. By 2009, China accounted for the majority of reported methamphetamine laboratories seized in East and South-East Asia.

•The 2009 UNODC report concluded that Amphetamine-type stimulant (ATS) producers adapt to evade law enforcement. There are signs that criminal organisations are adapting their manufacturing operations to avoid control by: 1) utilising precursor chemicals not under international control; 2) moving manufacturing operations to more vulnerable locations; and 3) shifting precursor chemicals and drug trafficking routes to new locations to avoid detection.

By 2010, there were an increasing number of countries reporting methamphetamine seizures — by now, West African nations were well and truly on board as places to manufacture and distribute drugs, as well as to launder drug money. Iran, Syria, and Pakistan — all of which already had big markets for the legitimate use of crystal-meth precursor drugs — were also developing large black markets. Although the proportion of people requiring treatment for amphetamine abuse was just 5 per cent in Africa, 10 per cent in Europe, and 12 per cent in the Americas, UNODC would report that the number of people seeking treatment was ‘particularly high in Oceania (20 per cent) and Asia (21 per cent), reaching 36 per cent in East and South-East Asia with proportions exceeding 50 per cent in Japan, the Republic of Korea, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines, as well as in Saudi Arabia in the Near and Middle East’ and that ‘Government experts have reported that methamphetamine ranks among the top three illicit drugs consumed in several countries in this region, including China, Japan, and Indonesia’.

Although the proportion of people treated for crystal-meth use in Indonesia was far lower, at around 25 per cent, this still signified an increase of almost 80 per cent from the previous year. Crystal-meth users also accounted for the second-largest share of newly admitted patients receiving drug treatment in 2013 at 31 per cent, after heroin users who accounted for a 36 per cent share. Moreover, in China, crystal-meth users accounted for 70 per cent of synthetic drug users receiving treatment in 2013, while methamphetamine tablet users accounted for about 16 per cent.

And it was Asian nations that would continue to drive production, distribution, and demand: and further, it was the growth of richer, younger, more urbanised populations in these nations that was a driving force behind the increase of meth use. These were societies where new opportunities were growing exponentially, and there was a perception that hard work — and having the ability to put in very long days with little sleep — would pay off.

‘It originated as a drug that was taken by poor people, traditionally workers. That migrated into youth culture over a decade ago,’ Jeremy Douglas, UNODC regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, said in a press statement in 2014. ‘More recently, that has evolved into a growing prosperous youth culture … You have rising incomes occurring across the region. You have a large, large youth population. So you have natural growth of the market.’

As these, particularly Southeast Asian, nations became richer, and their populations skewed younger, consumer demand for strong amphetamines increased. Between 2008 and 2013, crystal-meth seizures in the entire Asian region almost doubled, while methamphetamine tablet seizures rose at an even more rapid rate, resulting in a seven-fold increase. In November 2013, an ACC report, ‘Patterns and Trends of Amphetamine-Type Stimulants (ATS) and Other Drugs — Challenges for Asia and the Pacific 2013’, said that:

Seizures of methamphetamine in both pill and crystalline forms reached record highs [in Asia] in 2012, with 227 million methamphetamine pills seized — a 60 per cent increase from 2011 and a more-than seven-fold increase since 2008 — along with 11.6 metric tonnes of crystalline methamphetamine, a 12 per cent rise from 2011.

In its submission to the 2015 Australian federal parliamentary inquiry, UNODC would write that the ‘rapidly developing chemical and pharmaceutical industries’ in Asia posed a serious threat:

There is evidence of domestic production in most of the countries of the region, but two countries have advantages that allow them to undercut local prices. The first is Myanmar, where political instability in Shan State and the Special Regions adjoining China has provided cover for large-scale drug manufacturing and trafficking. The second is China, where large quantities of precursor chemicals are produced domestically and industry scale of methamphetamine labs have been continuously dismantled. Myanmar, however, does not have a legitimate pharmaceutical industry, which means practically that precursor chemicals such as ephedrine and pseudoephedrine must be smuggled from outside Myanmar for the production of methamphetamine. Therefore, precursors have been smuggled from neighbouring countries with large pharmaceutical industries including India and China, whereas the finished methamphetamine products have been trafficked in the reverse direction.

Dr Alex Wodak, from the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, told me that drug manufacturing reflected not just an increasingly globalised and outsourced international capitalist economy, but also an economy that creates vast inequality in developing nations, with slick skyscrapers and shopping centres growing around slums, stalls, and beggars.

‘People are joining the drug trade to get a slice of this pie,’ he said.

In a 2015 report, among the 95 countries and territories worldwide identified as destinations for the meth ATS seized between 2009 and 2013, three of the five most frequently mentioned ones were located in East and South-East Asia and Oceania: Australia, Japan, and Malaysia.

The ACC’s CEO Chris Dawson explained to me that the way the world markets for methamphetamine and crystal methamphetamine work are similar to traditional markets — that is, they function according to supply and demand. The supply has increased significantly in recent years because there are more transnational organised crime groups in the market.

Crime groups with international links to the Middle East and Asia have also demonstrated the ability to manufacture and traffic methylamphetamine and its precursor chemicals into Australia. Australia has for several decades had a relatively high level of demand for illicit stimulants, and illicit drug users in this country pay a premium for illicit drugs compared to their overseas counterparts. This has made Australia an attractive market for transnational crime groups.

And somewhere along the line, probably around the southern summer of 2011–12, Beck and Smithy stopped taking powdered meth, and started taking crystal meth.

Come 2013, and Beck rang me to say she was well and truly over our fight, and she missed me. By now I felt exactly the same, and I told her that. She started visiting me again in my new pad in St Kilda. She told me she had moved into a nice new four-bedroom house in the Toomuc Valley — ‘new Pakenham … I’ve finally made it in life’ — and that Smithy was also over it. He knew I wasn’t very well at the time, and was busting for me to come down. But I stayed away, for whatever reason. While I did want to be friends with Smithy again, it just felt too awkward.

Not long after we started talking again, Beck rang me to say she was so sick of Smithy’s weird, sleazy games, and his whinging, and his verbal abuse that she had tried to hit him with a toaster. He had gotten a restraining order against her. She moved into another house in the Toomuc Valley, on the cusp of the 100-metre stay-away mark, and, bit by bit, the two started spending time together again.