Panic!
I GREW UP in a small, hilly, damp, conservative town called Emerald and I went to school in Pakenham, where Smithy’s house is, and where much of this story takes place. I moved back to ‘Packy’ when I was twenty-eight, and I moved back again at thirty-four to write this book. How would I describe the place? Well, I quite like it; it’s close to nature, but just an hour’s train ride to the city. What does it look like? Well, it’s … pretty. It’s a reasonably affluent working-class town, the last stop on the suburban train line, with mixed terrain and a mixture of people. It’s not for everyone; one local suggested it’s ‘a place for fuckwits who can’t afford to live anywhere else’. All personal taste aside, it’s essentially a flatland, surrounded on its northern side by mile upon mile of damp, tough, mossy, fern-covered mountains.
In fact, two hundred years ago the Pakenham district was a marshy, fertile hunting ground for indigenous tribes, full of eels, and roos, and wallabies that would come down from the mountains to drink from the seemingly endless puzzle of lakes and swamplands. When the first white settlers arrived in the 1830s, they found nothing much but copperhead snakes, impenetrable bushland, swampy fields, and holes in the ground that were full of nasty, stinging bull ants.
The first commercial enterprise in town was a pub run by the original landowners, which was fittingly placed along what is now a major highway, then little more than a goat track, in an area of Pakenham called the Toomuc Valley. Eventually, more bushland would be cleared, and the kangaroos would leave and be replaced by acres of pig farms and quarries. In years to come, Pakenham — named after a British war general — was far enough away from ‘civilisation’ to attract a steady mix of anti-establishment entrepreneurs, rebels, misfits, working-class individualists, murderers, and people who wanted to live by their own rules.
The most dramatic event in the town’s history — the 1879 Sly Grog Riot — seems perfectly fitting when considered today, as Pakenham had a significant number of home-brewers who made their living selling grog to the inhabitants of the shanty town that sat on the small rise in the middle of town. In March 1879, the police turned up with a plan to seize the illicit spirits, only to be confronted by a hundred-strong mob armed with pick handles, sticks, and anything else they could find. The police retreated, and decided to simply ignore the illegal grog trade from then onwards.
For a long time, Pakenham had a reputation as a bogan farm-town. In the last fifteen years, however, its open grasslands have been filled with monotonous, homogenised, terracotta-roofed housing with multiple living areas and tiny backyards. Between 2007 and 2012, the suburb’s population grew from 20,000 to 34,000. The towns surrounding Pakenham also grew quickly, and in the last five years Pakenham has become connected to part of the mass suburbia of south-east Melbourne.
Today, a single creek runs through town, creating a dividing line between new Pakenham’s sparkling suburban areas, which have their own wetlands and cultural centre, and old Pakenham’s simple, nostalgic, even earthy mix of old farmhouses, commission houses, crab apple trees, 1980s rentals, and big, beautiful white gums.
One of the last areas to be eaten up was the Toomuc Valley, which had remained a farmland for around a hundred and fifty years until it was sold to a massive corporate property developer in 2010. Now a residential village tucked away from the rest of Pakenham, the valley is still surrounded by beautiful hills that are covered in a combination of virgin bush and hobby farms. Most of the hills are so steep that it takes a very fit person (or, in my case, a highly psychotic meth-flushed person, contemplating how he was going to counter a murderous plot or expose a sadistic paedophile ring) to climb them. But if you did manage to climb to the top of one of them, you would see Pakenham’s latest housing development. From a distance, the suburban outpost looks like a 1990s Sim City village with just enough parks to stop the locals from rioting. This is new Pakenham with a distinctive old Pakenham flavour: a mixture of rental properties and mortgaged houses, occupied by tradesmen, child-care workers, labourers, and the odd drug dealer. The little village is pleasant to look at, though if you look over the valley with a critical eye you will notice there is no community centre, oval, or anything that might resemble a means for people to run around or get together.
If you had been on one of the hills as the sun rose across the flatlands one Tuesday morning in the early autumn of 2014, you would have seen a half-moon lingering in the sky over the valley containing 30-or-so houses. If you had looked at one particular house, you might have seen that all the lights were on. Inside, sitting on his bed, was 42-year-old Rob Smith (Smithy), holding a syringe full of promise against the light cast by his bedroom lamp. An unskilled labourer in his everyday life, with needles the tools of his trade, he flicked the syringe with care and precision. Pouring white crystals from a clear, plastic sachet bag into a tablespoon full of boiling water, he mixed it with the end of the syringe, which he then used to crush the crystals until they became a white liquid. He tore off part of a cigarette and placed it in the mixture, took the lid off the fit, put the needle into the mixture, and drew it into the needle. He was a figure of concentration and purpose: efficient, careful, and productive.
I was also in that house, asleep. Beck, Smithy’s ex-girlfriend, and near-permanent houseguest, was waiting outside my door, having had a shot of meth not long before. The buzz had sent her first into a talking spin, and then to the hallway cupboard, where she pulled out the vacuum cleaner and began vacuuming all the floors enthusiastically, a thin trail of blood dripping from her arm. Beck was letting me — her best friend of nearly twenty years — sleep for an extra hour before delivering the good news: Smithy had decided to give me tick.
I had been living in the house for three weeks at this stage, and I’d had just one shot of meth so far — due to both my desire to keep my usage irregular and to my lack of money.
She woke me with a couple of taps, saying: ‘I told Smithy you were avoiding going over there because you owed him money and felt guilty taking more of his drugs. So he’s happy to shout you until you get paid.’
‘Okay, that’s really nice. Thanks, mate,’ I said, not wanting to give away that I’d hoped that by not asking for tick, Smithy would eventually get so horny and off-his-face that he’d offer me some anyway. I also didn’t want to give away how excited I was about taking the drug. After all, I was there on assignment — work wasn’t supposed to be so much fun.
I walked into the bedroom to see Smithy putting the finishing touches on my shot.
‘Packin’ ’em in Pakenham,’ he said.
I rolled my eyes at his failed attempt at humour, and thanked him for the tick. He was ready to inject me, so I pumped up my arm and smacked the underside of my elbow to make a vein visible.
As the syringe was brought forward, I felt as if I was waiting for a Christmas present. Not every meth trip is the same, though they are almost always good if you don’t do it all the time — even then, the effect of a syringe full of meth will always be better that doing your taxes, or working out how much of your pay will go on your rent. On this morning, my mouth watered, my throat tickled, and I took a deep breath in anticipation. He slipped the needle in painlessly; as it hit the vein, the syringe filled with deep, red blood — signifying that an exciting taboo had been broken.
As I later learned, when crystal meth enters the brain, it affects those neurons that contain dopamine, a feel-good chemical. On this day, the meth travelled up the blood in my arm, and was quickly absorbed into my brain’s grey matter, going directly to its reward centre. My brain was flushed with dopamine; at the same time, my serotonin levels increased, improving my mood, while my noradrenalin levels dropped, drastically reducing my feeling of stress and anxiety. Until I took meth, I didn’t believe it was possible for a human to feel so relaxed, alert, confident, euphoric, calm, and energised at the same time. I felt love, sex, danger, and mystery, right through my skin, all over my sk
in, enlarging my heart to the size of a balloon as I floated off into a land of dream and dance and immortality, excited by my rejection of everything I’d been taught about hard work being the only thing that can bring real happiness. With morning light just starting to seep through the bottom of the closed curtains, I put the stereo on in the lounge room and danced like a muppet. I felt energised by an edgy feeling of superiority, as if all the stupid, ordinary straights getting up for work were being ‘left behind’.
The rest of the day went pretty much the same way (full of rampant stupidity), and is difficult to piece together as a coherent story. So let me explain it as best I can:
•Beck asked everyone who entered the house that day whether they liked penises, but so softly that none of them could hear her.
•Smithy asked me at least a dozen times whether Beck had been sneaking off at night to have sex with men in the bushes.
•A large refrigerator-repair man visiting from Kalgoorlie tried to convince me of a secret UN plan called ‘Agenda 21’ to reduce the world’s population to less than 500,000.
•Beck spent approximately six hours playing Zombie Apocalypse on her iPad.
But — as they say — ‘it was all just a dream’. All good things must come to an end, everything that goes up must come down, and so on. Eventually, the balloon ran out of its proverbial helium, and I slowly floated back to earth. Before a big meth crash, you often find yourself just on the right level — not too up and not too down, the perfect time to get back to work. I was, after all, living in that house to find out how my friends had become hooked on meth (and, no, in retrospect, the irony of asking this after having such an outrageous time on meth is not lost on me).
Later that day, Smithy was sitting on the edge of his bed, wearing an Adidas tracksuit and a look of concentrated fury, discussing his theories of what had gone on during New Year’s Eve behind his back (which I shall explain shortly), and going to the mirror every now and then to squint, and rub his face. It seemed as good a time as any for me to raise the issue of meth addiction.
‘So, Smithy, I guess what I wanted to ask you about is how you fell into meth in that two years or so I didn’t see you?’
Smithy gave me a look of horror, followed by one of suspicion.
‘Well, you used to just use a bit of truckie speed on the weekends, and smoke bongs during the week, and now you use meth all the time,’ I continued. ‘I’m just wondering how that happened.’
Smithy kept staring at me silently.
‘Y’know, no judgement here, mate. I just want to know how you managed to get so into meth,’ I said.
His suspicion turned to mild aggression: ‘I don’t fucking use it all the time — who told you that? You always listen to everyone else, you always take everybody else’s side, you’ll listen to what everyone else has to say before asking me whether it’s true.’
‘Well,’ I said, slowly and carefully, like a dog-catcher cautiously approaching a pit-bull. ‘It’s kind of obvious—’
‘How?’
I looked at Smithy with his blotchy skin, a confused expression on his face, and the swabs, two used syringes, and used spoons sitting on either side of him.
‘I can tell you this, Smithy, because you’re a good bloke and my friend, and I can be honest with you: your skin, the way you look, you’ve lost so much weight, you don’t work anymore — ’
‘There’s nothing wrong with the way I look,’ he said, his face flushed with blood. ‘All this boils down to is people talking about me. I knew it, I knew it, I had a feeling this was going on. Arseholes saying shit about me behind my back, spreading shit, saying I’m a fucking paedophile, Beck telling people not to visit me. Why does no fucking cunt visit me? Because people are fucking spreading shit, that’s why. So next time someone says Smithy is a junkie, why not, rather than just accept it as gospel, come and ask me if it’s true?’
‘So are you?’
‘Am I what?’
‘Y’know, a junkie?’
‘No!’ he roars. ‘It’s fucking Beck. She’s just trying to fucking cover for her own fuck-ups—’
‘You mean cover for her own meth use?’
‘No fuckwit — to cover-up for New Year’s Eve,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’re going to take her side about that as well?’
And so we moved on to the topic of New Year’s Eve, when he was convinced Beck stole his acid, and had sex with one of his friends in the bushes.
Before I moved into the house, I had asked Beck about her meth use as well. Like Smithy, she would ask for evidence, and when I provided it she would dispute it. At other times, she wouldn’t answer directly, but would instead put her hand on my knee and say something like, ‘I know your heart’s in the right place, mate.’ Then she’d change the topic to something she knew would interest me, before I had the chance to realise that that was what she’d done.
Meth users are often highly paranoid, and genuinely lose track of the ‘truth’ somewhere along the way. In most circumstances, they wouldn’t answer a trusted friend honestly about how much they were using, even if they did have the self-awareness to monitor it. And it’s extremely difficult to keep track of meth use, as a user’s perception of time speeds up at the same time as their reasoning skills slow down.
Beck and Smithy would not be the kind of people to answer government surveys — or, at least, not honestly — and nor did they ever get medical treatment for their addictions. I wonder how many other meth addicts answer phone surveys by saying they either don’t use meth very much or perhaps not at all, while they are surrounded by their used needles, with tin foil wrapped around their heads. I know from my own experience that meth can eat away at your self-awareness — to put it mildly — so the idea that there are accurate national records about how many people use meth, how much meth is used, and the harm that arises from it, makes me deeply suspicious. And when I see how low the most respected survey, the government’s National Drug Strategy Household Survey (NDSHS), shows meth use to be, my suspicions are heightened. Why? The NDSHS, which is carried out by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), reports that the prevalence of methamphetamine use in Australia and Victoria has remained relatively stable since 2001. This puts meth use at around 2.5 per cent of the population.
This raises a critical question: why would the NDSHS indicate no increase in the number of people using meth, when we are all so convinced it is such a problem? Are their surveys unreliable? Or is it the case that we are in the grip of a moral panic over meth that’s affecting a far smaller cohort than we assume, and that I, for instance, was always wrong to assume that, just because I had known people who were addicted and didn’t want to admit it, this was a broad social problem?
Indeed, on the other side of the debate, there are those who suggest that there is no ‘meth epidemic’ — that meth is not a disease or virus-like problem that is spreading uncontrollably around the community. Some suggest that the sense of crisis we have about the drug is driven by a media beat-up, self-interested bureaucracies, and health agencies trying to get more funding, and by politicians driving their own agendas. Professor David Moore, for example, says that the public conversation around methamphetamine tends to be simplistic, panic-driven, and hyperbolic, leading to the perception that methamphetamine use is more prevalent and dangerous than the evidence suggests it is.
Could it be that our collective understanding of the ‘meth problem’ is being driven by a panicked approach that fails to take into account individual responsibility and pre-existing human foibles? Or, conversely, is this perspective a kind of relativist, media-studies framework that waters down the reality that meth abuse causes genuine human suffering?
Moore and his co-author Robin Dwyer, in an article published in the International Journal of Drug Policy in 2013, do not definitively answer this question, but they do argue that catastrophising messages not only sti
gmatise users and reduce their willingness to get treatment, but also that disproportionate attitudes may lead to hard-line, punitive legal approaches to drugs that will inevitably make the situation worse. The pair also suggest that:
Policy and health promotion concerning methamphetamine should: (i) develop a less alarmist and more nuanced portrayal of the relationship between methamphetamine use and psychosis; (ii) avoid portraying psychosis (or hallucinations, visions and paranoia) as always and inevitably distressing and pathological — such messages are unlikely to resonate with consumers … and (iii) avoid representing methamphetamine consumers as out-of-control, dangerous, threatening, and irrational.
Another viewpoint is that of Columbia University’s charismatic, dreadlocked associate professor of psychiatry Carl Hart, who Moore cites as a significant influence on his work. ‘Drug panics are a natural response to any threatening problem, but such panics are often exploited to advance the power, prestige, or financial interests of individuals and institutions claiming ownership of the problem,’ Hart says.
Hart argues that it is moral panic and media hysteria that distorts the truth about meth, and not the attitudes of the users themselves. One of the most salient points about the meth phenomenon is that the ‘vast majority of meth users are not addicted,’ he says, and that when a drug user is doing poorly in life, drugs become the scapegoat. ‘People stop looking for other reasons for problems once they know drugs are involved … that way, you don’t have to look at more complicated problems.’
Bearing all this in mind, there is nevertheless strong evidence about increasing meth use in Australia that is hard to repudiate. When we look at the health figures, and hear stories from people working on the front line, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the meth problem is getting worse. Nationally, the number of amphetamine-related hospital admissions recorded in 2011–12 (2,895) was the highest since 1993–94 (which was, incidentally, the year that the first shipments of powdered methamphetamine arrived in Australia, as well as the year that ecstasy reached its peak popularity). What’s more, these admissions had steadily increased over the previous three years. The figures from the health department are backed up not just by dozens of anecdotal reports by frontline workers, but by the crime statistics: the number of national arrests for all amphetamines (including ecstasy and speed) in Australia reached an all-time high of 22,189 over the 2012–13 period, which was a 32 per cent increase on the previous year. The number of clandestine laboratories detected nationally had more than doubled within a decade, increasing from 358 in 2003–04 to 757 in 2012–13. There was a 6.4 per cent decrease in the number of clandestine laboratories detected in Australia late in this period — from 809 in 2011–12 to 757 a year later — which was the first decrease since 2006–07. Despite this decrease, it was still the second-highest number of detections per year on record. Statistics and figures from state health departments also back the idea that the meth problem is ascending, as do the stories from rehab managers who say they now have a greater proportion of people seeking help because of methamphetamine.
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