Chapter Eight

Wheeling and dealing

MUCH TO THE disappointment of many of those I have met in my life, I did manage to survive that afternoon with the Chief, thanks to the quick-thinking Celia, who asked the Chief to get her something from his bedroom before leaning into me and whispering ‘run’. We were out the door before the Chief realised we were gone. Two minutes later, I was safe: back in the car with Smithy, fielding all manner of questions about why it took so long and where we could get some syringes. I was glad we didn't have to regularly endure such trips to score. In fact, travelling nearly an hour to get crystal meth was a rarity for us — and pretty much everyone else — post-2011 in Australia. It isn’t hard to find crystal meth once you start looking for it.

The Victorian branch of the Australian Medical Association told the Victorian parliamentary inquiry that ‘the drug is exceptionally cheap and easy to obtain’. Indeed, Smithy’s trips into town were very rare. To support both his habit and his own low-level dealing, he had multiple dealers to choose from — dealers who traded in both wholesale and retail. With this in mind, as well as the low cost of crystal meth, it should come as no surprise that even welfare recipients can inject the drug several times a day. Others — such as me — used less: a dose that can last many users up to twenty-four hours costs somewhere between $30 and $50.

From about 2011 onwards, if you were buying crystal meth in South Australia, you may well have bought it from a minion for an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang (OMCG); in Wangaratta, you may have bought it from a makeshift drug syndicate run by a former sports hero gone bad; or in Brisbane, you may have bought it from Patrick ‘Ryan’ McCann, a suburban real-estate agent who was earning as much as $100,000 a month in property commissions, but who, behind closed doors, was a daily drug-user, hiding silver bags of methamphetamine in his home.

And if you were in certain parts of Perth, the secret code to getting your gear was ‘Hot Wheels’. To be more specific: you might have been told to go up to a paraplegic in a wheelchair and use a special code, after which he would reach down and pull a point or two out of his socks. Wheelchair-bound Ryan James Salton was arrested in July 2014 during a hospital visit. When he faced court, WA police alleged that they found four bags of methamphetamine hidden in socks in Salton’s tracksuit pants, as well as a ‘sweet puff’ (crystal meth) pipe. Prior to the hospital incident, police had found the 33-year-old in bed next to a toiletry bag that contained his personal belongings as well as several drugs, at a house where Salton was believed to be living. It was also alleged that electronic scales, a gun, and a CCTV system that monitored access to the building were found at the house, as well as $5,000 cash hidden in a wheelchair. After he was charged, he was placed on bail, where it is alleged he committed further offences: police alleged they found him with hundreds of grams of methamphetamine in tablet and crystal form, almost $45,000 in cash, and a list of customers he had sold drugs to ‘on tick’. Police would also allege that Salton’s drug-dealer nickname was none other than ‘Hot Wheels’.

Australia’s meth dealers are an extremely diverse bunch. The ACC told the Victorian parliamentary inquiry that:

No one criminal syndicate, type of crime group, or ethnicity-based group are dominant in the methamphetamine market in Victoria. Members of Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (OMCGs), family groups, ethnic groups and entrepreneurial individuals working alone or in partnership are represented. The methylamphetamine market is sufficiently diverse and profitable to support a large number of competing and sometimes collaborating suppliers, at different levels of sophistication.

Later, a joint submission from six federal government agencies, including the Australian Crime Commission and the Australian Institute of Criminology, would tell the federal inquiry into crystal methamphetamine that:

More than 60 per cent of Australia’s highest risk criminal targets on the National Criminal Target List are known to be involved in the methylamphetamine market. Approximately 45 per cent of the highest risk criminal targets in the methylamphetamine market are characterised as OMCGs. The rest of the crystal meth dealing and manufacturing market remains then somewhat of a mystery.

This supports research by University of Queensland legal academic Andreas Schloenhardt, whose 2007 study found that within the methamphetamine drug market in Australia ‘a changing mix of criminal elements is present, ranging from highly sophisticated and structured criminal organisations to individuals operating within small, local markets and friendship circles’. Other research from NDARC suggests that most meth users buy their meth off a friend, rather than a ‘formal’ drug dealer. Making in-roads into the problem of supply, particularly in the context of a rapidly expanding international market, has proven difficult for authorities; a legal database search shows meth-dealer convictions on any level are extremely rare.

I asked the ACC what the impact of the international trade had been on the local market. Their CEO Chris Dawson told me:

There is no evidence that increases in the frequency and weight of methylamphetamine importations into Australia have led to a reduction in domestic production. What seems to have occurred is that both the level of domestic production and supply of methylamphetamine and the market share of imported (particularly crystal) methylamphetamine have increased.

Simultaneously, local manufacturers ‘picked up their game’ and began making higher-purity meth; it’s probably only a matter of time before they start making crystal meth en masse. It would be a lucrative business — nationally, Australians are spending more than $7 billion each year on illicit drugs, according to research from the Bureau of Statistics. This is far more than our federal and state governments spend each year on law enforcement, treatment, and harm minimisation combined. That said, it’s difficult to argue that spending more on law enforcement would make too much difference — as it stands, Australia’s drug-dealer scene is messy, chaotic, disorganised, and very difficult to police. Alison Ritter from NDARC told me that she doesn’t think organisations such as the Australian Federal Police have really started to unravel the big operators behind Australia’s crystal-meth trade, unless ‘they have people are currently embedded or working undercover, or perhaps they are collecting evidence — and in that case we might see some bigger convictions in years to come’.

What our federal authorities do seem to have worked out is that illicit-drug trafficking is closely linked to money laundering that is filtered through apparently legitimate businesses. In December 2012, the Australian Crime Commission Board approved the Eligo National Task Force, which it described as ‘an Australian Crime Commission-led special investigation into the use of alternative remittance and Informal Value Transfer Systems by serious and organised crime … Eligo National Task Force is made up of the Australian Crime Commission, the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC) and the Australian Federal Police’.

The taskforce has made several significant drug busts, collecting tens of millions of dollars, and, for instance, leading a joint police operation in Tasmania and Queensland with transnational connections that in July 2014 led to the arrest of six men, including four members of the Rebels motorcycle club, on charges relating to the alleged trafficking, possession, and importation of more than 8 kilograms of amphetamine from the United Kingdom. The drugs were believed to have an estimated street value of at least $20 million. In a press release, Tasmania Police Assistant Commissioner Donna Adams said ‘Criminal entities including OMCGs are developing in sophistication. This is why collaborative efforts by law enforcement agencies are an important element in staying ahead of the game’. In November 2014, the Serious and Organised Crime Branch of South Australia Police launched Operation Jackknife and nabbed an Adelaide crime group distributing methamphetamine from Malaysia to South Australia and Singapore. Police alleged the ringleaders of the importation in South Australia were the Rebels and Finks bikie gangs.

However, contrary to what some may be led to believe, bikies have not been involved in most of the nation’s high-profile meth-dealing arrests. Australia’s second-largest meth bust came in February 2013 after a single phone call to police from an anonymous source sparked a yearlong investigation that netted Australia’s then-largest recorded crystal-meth seizure — 585 kilograms worth an estimated $438 million.

In Philip K. Dick’s 1977 science-fiction masterpiece A Scanner Darkly — set in the not-too-distant future, in a futuristic, totalitarian society — America has lost the war against drugs, and paranoia and big corporations reign. Law enforcement has been completely privatised, and undercover detective Bob Arctor is working with a group of small-time drug users trying to reach the big distributors of a brain-damaging drug called Substance D. Bob starts to take the drug, and begins to lose his mind. His reality shatters into a psychotic matrix, and his identity begins to split in two.

Substance D, the drug in Dick’s novel, is described as being quite amphetamine-like. Dick himself was an enthusiastic speed-user at various points in his life: by 1971, he was ingesting a whopping 1,000 speed pills a week, along with plentiful tranquilisers. Dick wrote A Scanner Darkly after several years of firsthand experience with what he called the ‘street scene’ in the early 1970s.

In the novel, Arctor says that being addicted is like being sentient yet not alive: ‘Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognising but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person’s eyes maybe died back in childhood.’ Dick describes Arctor’s thoughts on the drug thus: ‘Someday, he thought, it’ll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald’s hamburger as well as buy it; we’ll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won’t even have to go outside.’

Dick’s vision is grim, where the collusion of state-corporate power and drug addiction are intimately linked, and where the very ideals of individualism, freedom, and self-possession have not only reached their limits, but become perverse.

Bob Arctor seems to ache so badly from the lack of adventure and meaning in suburban culture that he descends into drug abuse to escape. Dick’s novel was written at a time when the beatnik and hippie movements of the 1950s and 1960s had run their course. Drugs were used within these subcultures to attempt to expand consciousness, but by the 1970s they seemed to people like Dick to be ways of confusing reality for users, so that otherwise revolutionary thinkers were too incoherent to dissent in any meaningful way. Rather than find a way to improve or progress an over-sterilised, over-controlled suburban environment, Bob is so self-focused that he chooses simply to alter his perception of it.

On describing the nihilism of suburban drug addicts, Arctor said: ‘They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed — run over, maimed, destroyed — but they continued to play anyhow.’

There is no apparent choice of a more interesting, fulfilling life. The people Bob meets live in a haze of drug use, and he never gets close to the mysterious drug syndicate, while the corporation’s quest to defeat it seems like an incredibly superficial response to an environment which lends itself so easily to drug addiction. In other words, catching the syndicate — which we get the sense may not even exist — seems fruitless when the demand to deal and use the drug is a cogent response to a culture that has bred this kind of appetite for drugs in the first place.

If you added youth unemployment to Dick’s unstable societal mix, you’d be getting close to a remarkable turn of events that took place in Wangaratta, three hours from Melbourne. In 1999, the town of 17,000 looked like it might have a new sporting hero. Eighteen-year-old Aaron Shane Dalton — tall and strong, with dark brown hair — was restless and rebellious in school, but seemed to have found the right outlet for all his energy: cycling. His father, an abattoir manager and part of a well-respected family in the area, was delighted when his son ditched his pot habit for a sport that required endurance, patience, power, and tactical nous. So delighted was his father, in fact, that he organised for his son to be trained by former Olympic gold medallist Dean Woods. Dalton trained like a demon under Woods; he trained at the Victorian Institute of Sport, and eventually became one of the top ten riders of his age group in Australia. Ultimately, though, like many young men before him, Dalton found that even his best wasn’t enough: he wanted to turn professional, and to do that he almost certainly needed to get a scholarship at the Australian Institute of Sport. Dalton didn’t make the cut. He gave up on cycling and threw himself into drug taking, soon graduating to amphetamines. He began dealing meth, and, despite getting convicted twice — once in 2006 and again in 2009 — he masterminded one of the most sophisticated drug syndicates regional Australia had ever seen. Dalton discovered an ice manufacturer in Grafton, in country New South Wales, and then started recruiting distributors, drivers, ‘logistics’ people, and heavies. Dalton cashed in at the right time — ice was now on the market, and he found plenty of dealers with recurring customers around Shepparton, Wodonga, Yarrawonga, Myrtleford, Corowa, Rutherglen, and Wangaratta. In less than eighteen months, the syndicate — and especially Dalton — was raking in millions. His drivers were known to collect up to $250,000 worth of ice at a time from Grafton. In some cases, they would pick up the gear and then hire expensive hotel rooms in Albury, where they would weigh and package the drug, sometimes burying it in the ground near the hotel to store it for future use. Dalton found a few locals who were desperate to be liked and who desperately wanted friends, including 26-year-old Jai Montgomery, who had a missing limb, and 26-year-old Kruchan Chandler, who had played semi-professional football before a devastating knee injury destroyed his career. Dalton was extremely professional and cautious in his operation. Computer-generated documents were used, but there were protocols for destruction of written materials. When a distributor or driver joined the network, they were given a four-page instruction letter on how to conduct themselves in public. The document instructed that the syndicate was in the ‘business of making money, not power-tripping or disrespecting customers’, and any complaints would be investigated. ‘This is how serious we are about the professionalism of our services which you require.’

Customers were given code words to use on phones when placing orders: ‘catch up for a coffee’ translated into 0.1 of a gram of ice, and ‘catch up for a bourbon’ meant one gram. The instructions included a warning that there would be harsh consequences for anyone who acted unprofessionally or dared commit the ‘vile act’ of going to the police. Dalton ruled with an iron fist: he hired 24-year-old Muay Thai fighter Dean Griggs as the syndicate’s tough guy. Over time, a young butcher was shot at his home in a busy residential street, two homes were firebombed as children slept inside, and cars were set alight. Recovering drug debts and maintaining territory was a vicious process, and often involved weapons. If a person left the syndicate, Griggs was known to interrogate them violently in their home.

Wangaratta Police launched Operation Juliet and eventually caught up with Dalton, who — much to the relief of his own family — was arrested in September 2012. The full extent of his syndicate’s operations were laid out in court nearly two years later, and, in July 2014, he was sentenced to a maximum of nine years in jail after pleading guilty to trafficking a commercial quantity of methamphetamine — known as ice — and ecstasy, as well as recklessly causing serious injury, reckless conduct endangering a person, false imprisonment, and arson. Eight others were charged, and another four, including Dalton’s brother and ex-girlfriend, would later be convicted.

During the trial, Aaron’s father Shane Dalton told the court that he was relieved when his son was arrested: ‘We didn’t know what was going to happen. At least if he was in jail, we knew he was going to be safe.’ He said that he saw his son slip into the problem in mid-2012, after his partner and young daughter left him.

Fleeting, opportunistic, and surprisingly sophisticated: Australia’s meth scene was creating instant criminals — often with little or no prior criminal history — who wanted a slice of the action. It’s not surprising that many people — often youngish men — would be attracted to the idea of being a drug dealer in contemporary society. Drug dealing is one of the few vocations that crosses over between gangster street cred and celebrity, creating a kind of buoyant masculine glamour that can be either a consolation for failure in the mainstream or a suitable alternative to the blisters, bad backs, and slow-burn money-making of most working-class jobs and trades. For others, it might simply be a way of ensuring the phone is always ringing.

Smithy, I often noticed, charged people for drugs based on how sexually attractive he found them — which in my case meant I didn’t get free drugs for standing there looking pretty, like many of the girls who came to the house did. However, when I first moved in, he came up to me one day when I was in the kitchen and whispered ‘I’ll offer you the same deal I offered Beck: you can give money for a hit or you can give me a blow job.’

Beck later denied that this was the set-up, suggesting Smithy might have been joking about the offer, although ‘you can never be 100 per cent sure’.

Dodgy deals aside, I reckon we live in a society that not only expects us to fulfil our duty, but also wants us to discover what our duty is. We must find our own reference for meaning. Many of us long to find it in our daily lives, and eventually we ask ourselves: ‘Can I work hard enough to dream?’

For Smithy, his casual drug dealing had started again, believe it or not, after Beck gave birth to their twin boys in 2009. Beck had fallen pregnant twice before in the first two years they were together, and terminated both pregnancies. Smithy had told her he was not interested in having children because he wanted to keep partying for the rest of his life, and didn’t want the responsibility or financial burden of having kids.

After the birth, Beck went to work in the factory in Dandenong, and found the work a nice break from crying babies and the sight of her lounge-room walls. However, after hour upon hour of screwing together light globes and putting them inside little boxes, she found herself dreading work so much that she was having painful anxiety attacks. She resigned at the six-week mark, and Smithy took this as a serious, disappointing, but not altogether surprising broken promise. He now believed that not only had Beck deliberately fallen pregnant, but he was also faced with the prospect of working all week to feed his children and pay his rent, without a drug-fuelled ‘Smithy Saturday’ to look forward to. This was nothing short of a prison life, surely, though there was one thing he hadn’t counted on: Smithy bonded with those beautiful little boys like a fish does with water, and he quite liked his new life. Nonetheless, he pressed Beck to make money, and she used her encyclopaedic knowledge of welfare law to good effect for a little while, but eventually she ran out of tricks. So Smithy started dealing pot. He’d buy it in bulk — on tick — sell it, smoke it, and then repay the wholesaler with his revenue — meaning all ‘profit’ went up in smoke. This non-profit, consignment model of small-time retail drug dealing was also readily applied when he started selling meth to his friends.

Like so many other young, small-time drug dealers, Smithy and Beck both had parents who never used drugs and were never involved in crime. They saw their parents work day after day, often for relatively long hours, without much pleasure or glory — at least not that they could see. And they grew up to find that getting meaningful employment was far harder for them, and required far more commitment and training — and for what? To spend all their money on a rental, or on a mortgage that required an average working-class person to work two jobs and eat Vegemite sandwiches for dinner every second night? Beck had an easier time applying her brains to mastering Centrelink than she did packing boxes. Smithy could have gone out to work as a labourer and earned $120 a day, or he could sit at home taking drugs, and selling them among his friends, for roughly the same result. I guess you could call it an underclass rebellion: a group of people who aspired to less of the material and career goals they’d seen their lower-middle-class parents struggle to attain. Meth use was a way of living in the moment and rejecting the stoic, disciplined lives of their parents. Instead, this was a group who thought hedonism and fun were the appropriate ways to live their lives — all part of their defiance against the expectations they work in arduous jobs like labouring or aged care.

I met other small-time drug dealers while I was living at Smithy’s: three to be precise. There was ‘Tall’ — a 45-year-old former refrigerator repairman who I think meant well, but whose poor social skills meant he was bound for a lonely life. There was ‘Short’ — a young Italian-looking dude from the suburbs who tried to hide his tiny frame and highly sensitive personality with Adidas-style gangster wear. And there was ‘Skinny’ — a willowy, dark-haired former carpenter who walked in one day to see us watching netball on Foxtel and said ‘Oh, netball. I used to play mixed netball down Knox way. Good on you, mate, good on you’.

All three seemed to come over to Smithy’s at about the same rate. Tall would sometimes stay to socialise, and one day he said he’d found something he thought would be of particular interest to me.

‘This will blow your mind, mate, blow your mind. Have you ever heard of Agenda 21?’

He played me a video on his iPad. The video was of a former South Australian Independent MP called Anne Bressington speaking on a podium at some unnamed event at the Adelaide Convention Centre. Bressington explained that ‘the words of Agenda 21 were never meant to be spoken’. She said it had been created by a secret group called the Club of Rome, which invented a number of ‘imaginary dangers’ like global warming and water shortages as a way of creating globalisation. Australia, in turn, brought in a new economic order, leaving Australia short of technology, a manufacturing base, and jobs.

Tall stood over my shoulder watching it, nodding his head in agreement, and then shaking his head when he thought through the implications.

Agenda 21 is — in case you are wondering — a real thing: a non-binding, voluntarily implemented action plan of the UN with regard to sustainable development. For conspiracy theorists, it is part of a secret global agenda to depopulate the earth.

‘We are constantly having our rights impinged upon,’ Tall said after we’d watched the video. ‘I can never make a profit from work, I can never get ahead, I can’t afford a house, and it’s all because of Agenda 21 — it’s all because of the carbon tax.’

I explained that the carbon tax had been abolished, and oddly that seemed to be just a 24-hour obsession; Tall never mentioned Agenda 21 again. Instead, he began to focus his attention on Short, to whom he had given an amount of crystal meth to sell on consignment. Then — apparently long before the date when Short was supposed to return the profit — Tall started demanding the money back. Smithy told me this was because Tall was in the habit of injecting at our place, and then going around the corner to the oldest building in town — the Pakenham Hotel — and blowing all his money on the pokies. When Short was unable to return the funds on time, conflict ensued. Tall spent hours in our garage, fuelled up on meth, threatening to kill Short: ‘If only I could find where he lives,’ he would say, and then he’d put on his reading glasses and spend hours trawling through the White Pages online, Google maps, and various other websites from which he was convinced he’d be able to learn Short’s whereabouts because he had his phone number. Eventually, he settled on sending threatening text messages.

Tall, Short, and Skinny all knew I was writing a book, so they were very, and understandably, reluctant to give me any information about who they sourced their drugs from, how they did their business, or how the drug-supply hierarchy worked. However, one did introduce me to one guy — I won’t give too much away about him other than to say he worked for a major Melbourne underworld figure a few years back, and he had a number of contacts. One of his ‘cooks’ told me that home-made meth — the world’s most powerful stimulant drug — can be made in our sinks, in our garages, and in our cars by shaking a Coke bottle containing some ingredients that have been blended in a food processor.

Towards the end of A Scanner Darkly, a character who appears fleetingly throughout the book is endlessly antagonised by imaginary bugs he sees all over himself, the floor, and his dog. Driven mad by his abuse of Substance D, he apparently decides to end his life by drinking and sleeping pills. He goes to bed inexplicably clutching a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead while a creature with many eyes all over it, wearing ultra-modern, expensive-looking clothing, rose eight feet high with a scroll to read all his sins. We are told this is going to take a hundred thousand years. Dick writes:

Fixing its many compound eyes on him, the creature from between dimensions said, ‘We are no longer in the mundane universe. Lower-plane categories of material existence such as “space” and “time” no longer apply to you. You have been elevated to the transcendent realm. Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end.’ Know your dealer, Charles Freck thought, and wished he could take back the last half-hour of his life. A thousand years later he was still lying there on his bed with the Ayn Rand book … listening to them read his sins to him.

It is not precisely clear what Dick was intending to convey by placing Rand’s book in this scene. Rand was a supporter of egoism and laissez-faire capitalism, and The Fountainhead is about one man’s choice to live in obscurity to maintain his independence and integrity. Rand’s philosophy was called ‘Objectivism’ — she described its essence as ‘the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute’. Rand’s ideas would later influence a whole generation of libertarians; free marketeers who emphasised the importance of autonomy and individual choice without state or collectivist interference.

There is something to be said here about the connection between meth production and individualism; a person who makes their own meth — particularly an addict who uses their own products — is economically autonomous. The meth producer who works for his or her own self is atomised, has happiness as their central goal, is isolated, and is highly self-sufficient. They do not concern themselves with social expectations or what other people think. It makes me wonder: are they not a warped result of Ayn Rand’s dream?

And as a result of the actions of these autonomous producers, clandestine lab detections — while not rising as quickly as importations of meth — have increased rapidly since 2009, doubling across the last decade. There were 314 detected nationally in 2002; 356 in 2007–08; 449 in 2008–09; 694 in 2009–10; and 744 in 2013–14. Queensland had a particularly monstrous rise: from 121 in 2007–08 to 379 over the 2011–12 period, before dropping back slightly to 340 in 2013–14.

That’s an awful lot of toxic waste, cat-piss odours, and empty brake-fluid containers filling up Australian suburbs. And Australian suburbs are exactly where the police are finding this new wave of meth production. During 2011–12 and 2012–13, 68.2 per cent of clandestine laboratories were located in residential areas, followed by those in vehicles (9 per cent), commercial or industrial areas (8.9 per cent), public places (3.8 per cent), rural areas (2.2 per cent), and other places (7.9 per cent). However, unlike the big industrial-scale labs shown in Breaking Bad (which do exist all over Mexico and parts of South-East Asia) between 2011–12 and 2012–13 in Australia, the majority of detected clandestine laboratories were individual and addict-based (58.8 per cent), whereas others were small-scale labs (23.5 per cent), medium-sized labs (9.7 per cent) and industrial-scale labs (8 per cent), the latter of which had seen an increase from 2.7 per cent in 2011–12. Notable detections included a massive drug factory in Hume and another in South Australia, at a property at Walker Flat, where a drug lab was found in a shack on the banks of the Murray. Two Gold Coast men were jailed for their involvement in one of the most sophisticated ‘factory style’ meth labs ever seen in Australia: Dane Marriott, thirty-nine, and Matthew Smith, thirty-one, who were arrested after police raided their ‘resort-style’ property nestled in the Currumbin Valley back in June 2011.

The increase can be explained by simple supply and demand. However, the rise in individual labs also shows how relatively easy it is for untrained people to learn how to make meth. The method can found on the internet, and that is often where people are buying the ingredients as well. According to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry paper:

The process of manufacturing methamphetamine using ephedrine and pseudoephedrine is not difficult. Extracting the precursor involves simply soaking the tablets in methylated spirits, decanting or filtering to remove sediment, and then evaporating the solvent, leaving the precursor.

Addict-based labs are also very difficult to police; the amount of resources used to find one single addict-lab may not be worth the effort. And even if the police do find one, it won’t take long before another addict — perhaps in the same suburb, or even the same street — is going to learn how to do the same. All of this is in palpable contrast to other heavy drugs like heroin or cocaine, which need entire agricultural fields to grow. And while it has become far more difficult to get pseudoephedrine-based medications from chemists, it is thought that most addict-based labs are still using these medications to make their gear. Jason Ferris, who is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR) at The University of Queensland, told me that all you need as base ingredients to make an entire gram of meth is in just two packets of Sudafed.

While there is now more potent meth on the market — that is, the crystallised form — all forms of methamphetamine are manufactured the same way. The form in which the end product is sold simply depends on how far the manufacturers extend the crystallisation process.

Now to an extremely important point, which is crucial to understanding why meth has risen again as a problem in Australia in the last five years (this being in addition to the growth of Southeast Asian production). In 2010, it came to the attention of police that a new, simple method for making powdered meth had been discovered and was being used widely — the ‘shake and bake’ method that allowed individual users to make meth quickly by shaking ingredients together in a plastic bottle

The ‘shake and bake’ method is a variation on the more traditional ‘Nazi’ method (which was indeed used extensively by the Nazis, and then by OMCGs in the early 1970s). This method retains the majority of crystal meth’s traditional ingredients (pseudoephedrine, lithium, Coleman fuel, hydrochloric acid, etc.), but rather than using glassware and an open flame, they’re mixed by shaking them all together in a regular plastic bottle with water. Nobody is sure who started this method, but it quickly spread from the United States to Australia. The entire process takes less than fifteen minutes, and is fast becoming the method of choice for ten of thousands of meth-producing addicts, creating a phenomenon known as rolling meth-labs: transportable laboratories which are often found in cars, hotel rooms, or rented properties. The end result is not as potent as crystal meth by any stretch of the imagination, however the ease with which it is made is clearly an issue for authorities who are understandably finding such vast, individualised production difficult to police.

One user, Helen, told me she makes her own meth using this home-made method. ‘I guess anybody can make it, but making good stuff is hard,’ she told me. ‘I like to use a lot, so that’s why I make my own batch.’

‘How did you learn how to make it?’

‘From a friend,’ she said, going on to explain the process of making meth via the ‘shake and bake’ method — for obvious reasons, I will provide a mere skeleton view of what she told me.

‘The first step involves grinding everything in a food processor, and then you shake it all up in an empty Coke bottle using lithium from a battery,’ she said. ‘The main ingredients are over-the-counter cold remedies. I know people who case big warehouses for this stuff, but most of the time I don’t need it, because with a few packets I can make about three grams in a few hours.’

There are plenty of strange places where meth labs have been spotted: Melbourne police officers once discovered people cooking crystal meth and selling it from a van in a park, as if it were an ice-cream truck. In Bundaberg, a car was pulled over with smoke rolling out of its windows — the driver was making meth as he drove. At other times, it has been found in bathrooms, car boots, caravan parks, and even retirement homes. Hotel rooms can be the perfect place to make the substance, particularly when booked under false or no ID.

Drug manufacturers more generally seem to favour rented properties, so they don’t have to carry the liability of a property that has become so infested with toxic smoke that it seeps poison out of the walls for months, even after a lab has been removed and the area has been professionally cleaned. First National Real Estate in Queensland even held two specific information sessions at its recent national Property Management Conference to ensure its property managers are fully equipped, both to identify and effectively manage their response to the rise of meth labs.

And in Australia, meth-lab cleaning is becoming a fast-growing industry. In 2011, the Meth Lab Clean-up Conference and mini trade-show, held on the Gold Coast, drew 150 delegates. Other exhibiters at the conference included Real Estate Dynamics, Veda, and AON, who have recently included cover of up to $10,000 for illegal drug production in their landlord insurance. Jena Dyco International, the leading Australasian trainer in carpet and upholstery cleaning and restoration, announced the addition of a new course to their scope aimed at teaching restorers how to clean-up and remediate illegal drug labs.

I spoke with Jenny Boymal from Jena Dyco, who said they had noticed a spike in the number of meth-lab cleaning inquiries from around 2010 onward.

‘Government departments didn’t know about it, nobody knew much about it, we actually had to contact a forensic scientist in New Zealand about it, and we developed the course as a result. It’s not okay to say, “I have been cooking meth in this property — I’m going to paint the walls and she’ll be right”, because it won’t be fine. It will seep right through the paint in many circumstances,’ Jenny told me. She also explained just how toxic the stuff I had been injecting straight into my veins could be — or, at least, how toxic the production process is.

‘The first thing we do is test for mercury and lead … what happens is that the smoke from the chemical process means these substances are in the wall, so if we find mercury and lead we need to more than just a surface clean; if you just do a surface clean then these substances will simply start seeping out every couple of months. If people live in this environment they often come down with colds. We know of one cleaning company that didn’t use masks going in and they all came down with excruciating headaches after inspecting a meth-lab scene,’ she said. ‘Our cleaners usually go in with respirators, Tyvec suits, shoe coverings, gloves, and eye goggles.’

Each kilogram of meth manufactured creates 10 kilograms of waste. Ammonia and hydrogen chloride are both corrosive gases that will affect the eyes and respiratory tract, with damage increasing with concentration, and in a worst-case scenario, the result is pulmonary oedema and death. Currently, there are only state guidelines for meth clean-ups, and there is no obligation for landlords or prior owners to tell new tenants or purchasers that the property was used as a meth lab — a fact that has led to some calls for national disclosure laws.

Making meth is dangerous work. Royal Perth Hospital alone has treated at least 50 patients in the past five years for burns linked to methamphetamine manufacturing. It seems being a meth chemist can be dangerous and messy as well as lucrative.

Aaron Dalton’s father told Fairfax media in May 2014 that he had watched his son transform during his two years in Port Phillip Prison. Aaron went from constantly talking of ‘getting people back’ to telling his father how bad ice was and what it was doing to people. Dalton is now studying behavioural science. Meanwhile, with Dalton behind bars, Wangaratta thought the worst of the crystal storm was behind them. History was, however, determined to tell a different story. Just a few months after Dalton’s syndicate were dismantled, a new, highly sophisticated syndicate sprung up in the town. A few months after Dalton was put in jail, another gang — this time an OMCG — started selling meth in town, and police again went to work, making more arrests and seizing $100,000 of dollars worth of the drug

And as for ‘Hot Wheels’? He was sentenced to eight years jail for drug trafficking on 19 December 2014. The 33-year-old Ryan Salton appeared in a hospital bed for his trial, in which Judge Anthony Serrick rejected any notion of lenience in his sentence because the paraplegic had a history of drug and firearm convictions.