Chapter Nine

Understanding the lure of crystal meth

THIS IS A surprisingly difficult sentence to write, but here goes: meth has a good side. It is a sentence I have to write, though, because if I am going to tell the story of meth, I have to tell you about all the fun times that I and others have had, and continue to have, on the world’s most powerful stimulant.

I spoke with a number of users from different states in Australia, and from different walks of life, about their experience of meth, and each of them said very similar things about its positive qualities. When I asked one user (who wanted to remain anonymous) about meth’s good side, he said it makes him feel ‘giddy, like I’m in love’ and as if every single cell in his brain ‘is more alive than ever before, more awake, more happy than ever before. I feel like the most entertaining, edgy, cool fucker whoever did live’.

One woman who works a 9–5 office job and maintains a marriage and three kids in the western suburbs of Sydney reported that, for her, taking meth feels like ‘getting something done; I feel this immense sense of pride, as if I’m the smartest and most accomplished person … I feel flawless, and that I haven’t made a single mistake in my whole life’.

If we take her line of reasoning a little further, we could arrive at the following: ‘You can do anything and be anything you want in life with just a sprinkle of meth’. From my experience, I would say this is true, provided you don’t want it done particularly well, and provided that nobody rudely taps you on the shoulder to say ‘it’s all in your fucking head’ — which is unlikely to occur if you surround yourself with other meth users.

Using crystal meth makes it difficult to tell the difference between what is real and what is not. It enables you to construct a fantasy that what other people (who, in reality, are all as self-centred as each other) do and think revolves around you and how good you are. Meth psychosis and its self-centred excesses are really just a more extreme version of the individual narcissism that meth creates.

After the initial rush, meth users are often enraptured by fantasies that they experience as either real, imminently real, or a hidden truth that they have finally discovered. The fantasy world creates the impression of a new, higher, more authentic, and ultimately more satisfying form of meaning. A shot of meth effectively goes straight to the brain, where it quickly forms a bubble cushioning you from the banality of the here-and-now, as well as from the failures and shortcomings of your past life and self. The consequence is that users tend to think of themselves as much more successful than their actual lives would suggest. Crystal meth allows you to become pleasantly confused about who you are, and these daydreams of imminent achievement become so real that they are instantly incorporated into your definition of self. The drug allows the construction of a new life narrative — a simplistic, victorious mythology, in which you are not only as beautiful, strong, successful, and popular as you can possibly be, but also that you are more beautiful, stronger, more successful, and more popular than anybody else in the room.

This process of believing your own delusions is what I call being in the world of ‘Fantasia’. I’m not talking about psychosis, or crazy out-there ideas like being able to fly or being a foot taller than you really are; Fantasia is when a waking fantasy means you think you have achieved your ego ideal. It’s almost as if you are a kite, and your ego swells roughly to the level of how high you are flying.

Molly Andrews writes in her book Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life: ‘We know that the not-real might also be the not-yet-real, and that that which is real is never a static category … The real and not-real are not then polar opposites.’

Once you come out of Fantasia, you are presented with a chance to reach genuine revelation — or, at least, it seems that way. It seems, in fact, as if you have a clean slate. You have to pick up the pieces, to find a way to work out what is actually true: where imagination ends and reality begins.

My experience of Fantasia taught me that the ways in which we construct our selves and our egos are built equally on our fantasies of ourselves, our interpretation of the past, and our expectations of the future. Much of our life is given meaning through mythology, fantasy, and imagination, such as, for example, the ‘fantasy’ of currency’s value, the ‘fantasy’ of property rights, of the need for fixed working hours, the ‘fantasy’ of the ideal self in a media- and marketing-saturated world. I hope I haven’t lost you here: please allow me to explain.

Prior to moving into Smithy’s house, I had been living in Darlinghurst, Sydney. I really disliked the city, and I disliked the Oxford Street strip particularly. But when I reflected upon this after coming out of a Fantasia trip, I felt it had become clear to me that it was a place where people were trapped in their own imaginations. In particular, the imagined value of property, both to own and rent, meant people worked long hours in jobs which were not very fun, sacrificing weekends, week nights, and treating their minds like they were working in a nineteenth-century factory. Why? As far as I could tell, the professional middle classes of inner Sydney believed themselves to be in the throes of an imaginary social hierarchy, a bit like professional tennis players who play each week to improve their ranking. Many of those at the upper end of the scale longed to be in the elite — which meant owning a house that they and our society recognised as being of high value, and working in a job that, while not enjoyable, placed them at the top of an invisible ranking. Eventually, everything about the experience led me to believe that the conventions of bourgeois life were a charade; from the homogenised dress code and mannered passive-aggression of it all to the fact that people worked unnecessarily long hours to pay off ridiculously over-inflated mortgages.

As a gay man, I noticed that virtually all the gay men living around Darlinghurst pretty much looked the same and many, including myself, spent hours in the gym after work to maintain muscular bodies so they could feel ‘in the game’ or even that they were ‘winning the game’ — even though, for the most part, nobody spoke a word to each other in the gym. Everyone seemed very self-absorbed, and it was difficult to believe they really cared about anyone else. This was a city where homosexuality was embraced, and yet some homosexuals living within it had found their way into another type of oppression — the prison of the modern citizen. I was living in the gayest area in town, yet there was no sense of community. Then came the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, which was sponsored by a bank that year, and had what seemed to be a majority of corporate floats — corporations, of course, being the essential beneficiaries of this type of society. Now here’s the bit where I admit to something really unpleasant about myself as well: there were many times when I was strolling through the streets of Sydney — with its franchise-filled shopping strips and gay men wearing gangsta-black basketball tops — that I began to fantasise about using meth. Fantasise perhaps isn’t even the right word — crave, water at the mouth. Similarly, one of Chuck Palahniuk’s character in his novel Survivor notes that, ‘You realise that people take drugs because it’s the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.’

Despite meth’s atomising, individualising effects, there is no doubt that drugs also bring people together. One of the major appeals of crystal meth, for me, remained the intimacy and affiliation of using with others. We had sleepless nights and endless private jokes. There is a certain ritualistic spirituality to preparing and injecting drugs. When I shot up, I felt as if I was also shooting down the invisible walls and hierarchies that divide us. I used to love going to Smithy’s room with a few of his straight mates, shutting the door, getting the spoons out, boiling water and mixing the gear — knowing that not only would I get high, but that we would all share in it together, and share that bond for the rest of our lives. (Although, to be honest, there are few things more awkward than meeting a former drug buddy when you’re no longer using. You generally find that not only do you have nothing in common with them, but that you don’t particularly like them.) I would get excited when I heard the kettle boil at 2.00am, knowing Smithy didn’t drink coffee or tea. If I saw a few ratbags going into a room, the door shutting behind them, it was very hard not to gently knock and ask if I could join them. Injections often took place just after midnight — my favourite time — and I loved living in a house that was often a buzz of activity right through the night. There were always people hovering around, feeling that weird mix of trepidation and elation at the prospect of letting a grubby little junkie inject them with a sharp, fresh needle. After taking meth, any social anxiety or awkwardness would be instantly lifted. My confidence would skyrocket, and at times I would even feel superior to those who were too afraid to use syringes — it seems that as one hierarchy disappears, another appears in its place.

All things considered, though, it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether meth experiences such as these are genuinely cathartic, or whether they are, in fact, just re-opening old wounds (or creating new ones). Does drug use expand your consciousness, or shrink it? One group of people who had to ask real questions about themselves and the world because of their experience with drugs was the infamous American Beatniks: by the mid-1940s Beat-Generation writers Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg were sharing a drab apartment on 115th Street on the west side of New York. Searching for a new type of experience and creative flow, one that was free of restrictive thinking, they began to experiment, at first with Benzedrine (benzo) inhalers and pills.

Kerouac was a particular fan. He would write to Ginsberg saying that Benzedrine ‘made me see a lot. The process of intensifying awareness naturally leads to an overflow of old notions and voila, new material wells up like water forming its proper level and makes itself evident at the brim of consciousness’. Kerouac loved to get on the gear and listen to jazz and bebop; he then tried to emulate the sounds in his writing.

Was Kerouac actually becoming more creative? Was it opening his mind? Or was he just becoming over-confident? Well, he would go on to write the poetically titled On The Road on a three-week benzo bender during which he barely slept a wink. There is no question that the Beat Generation enjoyed the glow from the golden age of amphetamines for both creative and social purposes.

And during my first six weeks on the drug, I can’t deny I did a truckload of writing and had an enormous amount of fun while doing it. It helped me write creatively not simply because it enhanced my imagination, but also because it gave me confidence, and silenced that annoying writer-block-inducing voice that was forever telling me ‘your work is shite’. Writing and meth seemed to be a very good combination. Meth might make you more creative, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will also increase the quality of your work; it is effective in producing original ideas, but they won’t always favourably compare to the ideas that will come if you really apply yourself creatively, without drugs. Dopamine is not only characteristic of a psychotic, over-confident brain, but it also characterises a highly creative brain. While there was often very little that separated my experiences of psychosis and controlled creativity, in the end it was over-confidence and infantile delusion that won out.

Psychologist Nicole Lee believes there are six main forms of methamphetamine use — experimental, recreational, circumstantial, binge, regular use, and polydrug use — and has noted that dependence is more likely to be associated with regular use. But the demographics of who uses meth are also revealing. Writing in The Australian Methylamphetamine Market: the national picture, a complementary intelligence report released in March 2015, Chris Dawson (the CEO of the ACC) said the ‘availability and addictive nature’ of crystal meth had ‘created new demand in urban, rural, and disadvantaged communities. Stay-at-home, low-income parents with less education, living in country areas indicated notable levels of trying ice and using it compared to other groups.’

Those who are unemployed are more likely to take meth, as are gay men, labourers, and people who live in regional and rural areas. A 2015 Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) study found that the prevalence of methamphetamine use was likely to be higher in Indigenous than non-Indigenous communities. A 2011 report from the Burnet Institute of Medical Research found that 30 per cent of female meth addicts said that weight loss or maintenance was the primary reason for their first use of the drug. And there is certainly a stage in meth abuse when people consider you at the peak of your attractiveness — this is before the sores develop, and your body shows the signs of malnutrition. I noticed that when I had my quarter-life meth addiction at the age of twenty-seven, people complimented me at first on my weight loss, one person noting I had a ‘boyishly thin’ figure, and another saying I had lovely cheekbones. It is impossible to sustain this state, however; before long, I began to look like Skeletor with acne.

Many people use meth to help them work. This provides the perfect counter to any suggestion they have a drug problem, or that the drug is detrimental to their life. Because, of course, if you hold down a job and earn money, then, in theory, nobody can criticise what you do to either maintain or unwind in your spare time. The Victorian parliamentary inquiry said that it found ‘witnesses presenting to the Committee have spoken of the use of methamphetamine to get through tight deadlines, long hours including double and triple shifts, and just to “get through their working day”.’

In an article published in August 2015, Nicole Lee wrote that:

Most people who use methamphetamine are employed (nearly 70%) … Some industries have a higher level of use than the general population. These include wholesale trade, construction, mining, hospitality and manufacturing, and people in trade, technical and unskilled workers are also more likely to use. Some people start to use methamphetamine to manage workplace conditions, such as long or late night working hours or jobs that require a lot of focus or a lot of confidence.

What I noticed when I was using (and still non-psychotic) is that when I was high on meth, I would do a lot of certain types of work, like moving stuff around and organising files. I would become completely shut off; I could do repetitive work for hours on end without feeling bored — I wouldn’t need to eat, drink, sleep, or even go to the toilet.

In essence, meth makes you like a machine — exactly the kind of machine that would fit neatly as a cog in a capitalist economy. In his book Methland: the death and life of an American small town, Nick Reding examines the collapse of small town mid-west America in the face of globalisation via the prism of how meth slowly came to grip the region. Noting that meth and amphetamines were born pretty much at the same time as industrialisation, Reding asserts that poor and working-class Americans had been consuming the drug since the 1930s, whether it was marketed as Benzedrine, Methedrine, or Obedrin, for the simple reason that meth made them feel good and allowed them to work hard — a valuable part of the American liberal ethos of ‘superseding class through hard work’.

It is worth asking, though, whether meth is genuinely performance enhancing, or whether it is only effort, or even just confidence, enhancing. A drug counsellor told me she once worked in a hotel overlooking a ‘gorgeous Sydney beach’, where she worked alongside a woman who always came to work on speed. This woman always seemed extremely busy, contented, and productive. One day, when my counsellor sat down on a break with her boss, he whispered to her, ‘She [the speedy one] seems to be working hard all the time. But when I actually look at what she has done, she is doing far less than everyone else.’

So does meth improve performance or does it turn people into ratty robots who put in twice as much effort for half the result? While some studies have shown that meth’s performance-enhancing features are more perception than reality, there are a number of dissenters to this view: Carl Hart (the Columbia University associate professor we met in Chapter 2) not only thinks that the harms of meth are often exaggerated, but he also suggests that meth can actually improve brain function, at least in the short term. His research, he says, shows that:

Low to moderate doses of amphetamine can improve mood, enhance performance, and delay the need for sleep. But repeated administration of large doses of the drug can severely disrupt sleep and lead to psychological disturbances, including paranoia.

I have noticed that among many meth users there is the sense that when they take crystal meth — as illegal and taboo as it is — they are asserting their freedom and autonomy in a media-saturated world where our minds are constantly at risk of being colonised by marketers, talking heads, trite TV show plot-lines, and terrible newspaper articles. It is a way of feeling in control. And yet, for me, when I was up, I was about as authentic as someone in an advertisement.That said, though, meth can make you feel as if you are fulfilling the goals prescribed by capitalist society. You are left feeling as if you are winning by cheating, and that everyone else is stupid. You feel as though you have unleashed your productivity, and your creativity, and your self-actualising potential. Perhaps this is where the feeling of liberation comes from — the feeling that there is only you, and that what you feel is all that matters. Users get this feeling because meth allows them to think of life as their own personal dream — and in a dream, the dreamer is the only one who is truly alive.

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek says fantasy is the central stuff of ideology, and that in psychoanalysis, fantasy is a lie that covers up holes in our existence. He says the ‘tragedy of our predicament’ is that at the very moment when we think we are free, when we escape into our dreams and fantasies, ‘it is at that very moment that we are within ideology itself’. Many drug users associate taking drugs with liberation from conventional ways of thinking, and as a way of generating new ideas. This can certainly be true, although crystal meth often makes people’s fantasies of themselves and their life-narrative mere reproductions of the societal ideals that they think they are transcending. So while I did experience a breakdown of illusions, I went on to form a far more simplistic, self-serving imaginary world. Meth made me self-obsessed, atomised, work-focused, and egomaniacal — traits that many might describe as the defining tenets of our age.

And of course, when the advertisement ended, and the laughter at thinking I was living in such a world had died down, I would be miserable for at least half a week, in stark contrast to that world where all my dreams were coming true. Most of the time, a person’s descent from meth-user to meth-addict isn’t a dramatic one: at first, it’s a series of thoughts or feelings, rather than an abject act of destruction or negligence. The user-come-addict will most likely attribute the cause of these feelings to something other than the drug, and if questioned about their addiction, they will be quick to assure you their use is not problematic: they still work, haven’t raped a cat, and haven’t mutilated their genitals. When my dream bubble burst, I was left lying on the couch with the curtains shut, emotionless and sombre, as if a nuclear holocaust were occurring outdoors. And who wouldn’t want to live full-time in a television advertisement when the alternative is a constant feeling that you have the flu, and in which the easiest way to deal with your negative feelings is to take more crystal meth?