3: THE HIGH LIFE
This is the score at Box Hill. You step straight off the train and go up into the shopping centre just past Maccas. If you’re really hanging out – which is most times – you’ll do a hard left out through the automatic doors and into the plaza.
Less often you might take a more circuitous route, wandering round past Pete And Rosie’s, Cheesecake Heaven and the Nutshack then out through the next set of doors near Healthy Appetite. Heading out to feed your own unhealthy one.
You catch the eye of the Asian guys by the fountain or squatting by Timezone. (You don’t trust the skip dealers, because, like you, they’re junkies supporting a habit, and half the time you’ll get ripped off.)
Anyway, one of them will give you a look, maybe a little whistle. So you turn around and follow them – not too close – and they’ll go out the other end of the plaza near the needle exchange. You might want to duck through the supermarket, dive into a shop, because that’s where you’ll lose the UCs: the undercover coppers.
Come out, and jump into a car for a quick run around the block, or perhaps they’ll do the deal right there and disappear. And so do you: back on the train or off to a mate’s flat that doubles as a shooting gallery. If you’re really hanging you’ll nick down the Box Hill gardens to whack up under a tree. And you’re sweet, for one more day.
Frank and Tiana, 18- and 19-year-olds going nowhere, work the Ringwood line nearly every day, scoring just enough heroin to get by and then a little bit more to deal and make their money back. They boast they’ve been off the stuff for four days: ‘Except we had a little tiny taste yesterday, like a real small one.’
This afternoon, in return for a freebie, they’ve helped Adam and Emily buy a quarter-gram down by Nunawading station. Only took five or 10 minutes to do the business, but it’s just a little too fraught out there in the open. They’d much rather be at Box Hill, where you can blend in and out of the crowd – and where there’s both the supply and the demand.
For decades Melbourne’s Box Hill has suffered the reputation of the sober-sided suburb. Epicentre of the inner-eastern dry belt, it has remained prim, parched and prohibitionist since the Local Option vote of 1920 banned licensed premises from operating within its borders. Alcoholically at least, it is a place of happy abstention.
But down in the suburb’s CBD, in a brick strip between the Box Hill Central and Whitehorse Plaza shopping centres, you can buy a cap of heroin for $20. If you are known to the dealer you might haggle him down to $15. And, if you’re just starting out, a likely prospect, you might even pick up a hit for next to nothing.
Recently a young man was taken to Box Hill Hospital, comatose and diagnosed as brain dead after a massive overdose. ‘His partner told us that they’d bought that heroin supply that put him down for $5 a cap,’ says local ambulance paramedic Steve Wood. ‘Five lousy bucks.’
Local youth and drug workers say that despite the suburb’s genteel image, Box Hill ranks alongside Springvale, Fitzroy, Footscray and Dandenong as one of the four or five biggest heroin-dealing centres in Melbourne.
‘It’s a major battle all the time to convince people that there’s a heroin problem over this side,’ says Peter Nixon, youth worker with Open Family. ‘In the east we’ve got just as many hassles as Broadmeadows or Footscray or whatever.’
Box Hill police Senior Sergeant Laurie Wilkes disputes the picture of the suburb as a heroin hot spot. ‘I asked the drug taskforce people last year how we rated against those other places and they said we were well down the scale,’ he says. But he admits the area around Box Hill Central has a longstanding problem with dealing and may now be going through another upsurge.
In November 1996, in response to a rash of street-level drug offences, a Victoria Police taskforce launched a 12-month crackdown on dealers and users in the area. ‘By and large, that special operation was a success and really stood on that area for some time,’ says Senior Sergeant Wilkes. ‘But I have noticed that some of the people who were charged originally now seem to be drifting back again.’
Rachel Burns, co-ordinator of the Youth Adult Bureau in Nunawading, says the main effect of the crackdown was simply to move the problem elsewhere: ‘What the police and all the workers in the area realise is it just gets moved up the train line. As Box Hill was getting cleaned up and the drugs pushed out, suddenly there was a problem in Mitcham, in Ringwood or Nunawading.’
Ironically, the things that make Box Hill Central work so well as a transport and shopping hub are the same things that make it hard to control drug trafficking there.
A big suburban shopping mall sandwiched between a railway station and a bus interchange, it is Melbourne’s second biggest transport hub after Flinders Street Station. About 47,000 people live in the suburb but up to 30,000 pass through the complex every day.
‘It’s quite unique,’ says Peter Nixon. ‘Trains underneath, buses on top, transport in and out. Two different modes of easy access and people hanging around to do deals. You can be in and out of the centre in 10 minutes and have scored or dealt in the meantime.’
The plaza between the complex was designed as a meeting place, somewhere to soak up the sun between shopping trips. But with easy access – and escape – from three directions and the anonymity offered by the crowds, it has attractions for street-level heroin dealer and buyer.
There is also a large Asian population trading on Maroondah Highway, Station Street and Carrington Road, leading to talk of triad and Vietnamese dominance of the heroin trade. But figures from last year’s crackdown showed that well over half of heroin-related arrests were of non-Asians.
Box Hill’s experience shows heroin is making its way into the homes and veins of middle-class Melbourne, maybe because it is fashionable but more likely because it is cheap and plentiful right now.
‘People don’t believe it happens in the so-called better suburbs and they’ve got to be woken up to the fact that it does, and that it’s a universal problem right across Melbourne,’ says paramedic Steve Wood.
Two weeks ago, says Wood, he and his partner had to revive an overdose victim who passed out at the wheel of his car in the middle of Riversdale Road, Camberwell – the very heart of conservative Melbourne.
‘There are lots of nice young yuppie people in very nice Victorian cottages, using socially and overdoing it and being caught out,’ says fellow paramedic Tony Armour.
‘They’re out there – initially at least – using recreationally They’ll all sit around, have a glass of wine and a hit of heroin,’ Armour says.
Senior Sergeant Wilkes doesn’t know about that. ‘Our drug offenders around here could hardly be described as middle-class or yuppies,’ he says.
It doesn’t mean they didn’t start out that way. Take Frank and Tiana, Emily and Adam here, sitting out in the sun having their ritual post-hit smoke. They’re all from good, if fractured, families.
Frank’s mum and dad are ex-police, he says. Now divorced, his father’s a manager with a communications firm, his mother a church-going social worker. Tiana’s mum has a property in Gippsland and her dad’s a mechanical engineer. He shot through from home when she was 15, she left at 16.
Tiana got into the smack while living in a house full of users. ‘It was really intriguing,’ she says. ‘They’d all go down the end of the house when their hit got there and they’d go, like: “Wicked.” And they’d come back stoned, noddin’ off in this dream. And they’d all go, “Don’t touch it, it’s bad shit” and of course you’d really want to.’ She gave Frank his first taste: ‘I knew if she put it in front of me I’d say, “Gimme some.” And she did and I did and that’s why I’m here. That quick.’
Adam and Emily, in their early 20s, began using last August after their daughter, born three months prematurely, died. ‘We’d used a little bit before, but we got flat out into it after she died,’ says Adam. ‘Just to stop the grieving,’ says Emily.
Now they’ve each got a $100-a-day habit and are dealing around Box Hill and Ringwood to support it. Adam is out on bail pending burglary charges. Their families have disowned them.
None of them is under any illusions about the future; most likely they’ll wind up dead. ‘But it’s everywhere,’ says Frank. ‘If you’re a junkie you can’t hide from this stuff, you’ll run into it wherever you go.
‘It’s amazing how different it’ll change your life. When I met Tiana, I had a full-time job and everything was sweet. All of a sudden I was living in some dump in Healesville, I lost my job, all these people were just coming in and shooting up all over the house. We were sleepin’ on our wallets and cigarettes ’cos people are just scumballs, they were just rippin’ us off. But that’s heroin. It’s the drug you love to hate.
‘I love the stuff personally, I reckon it’s great. I mean you’re freezing cold if you don’t have it, then you go and have this whack and you feel so normal, so good.
‘But then, shit, on the other hand it’ll kill you.’