The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  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?

  Chapter Ten

  Into the Vortex

  A FEW YEARS back, I met a 60-year-old guy named Bernard; he was smoking crystal meth in a public area in a gay sauna. I was between addictions, and so I didn’t join in — I just listened.

  Bernard was a very skinny, extremely well spoken, former private-school teacher. He was, first and foremost, polite and dignified. He talked in a kind of pure poetry, with just the right amount of detail, poise, and rhythm. He was old-fashioned, genteel; it was almost as if I had met the ghost of Patrick White. As he smoked more meth, though, he began to resemble Mr Burns from The Simpsons, specifically the episode in which Mr Burns is found in the woods and mistaken for an alien. His voice became higher-pitched as he told me: ‘I had a good job, I was on a very good salary, I had a nice house, and I was very well-respected in the community. Then I met Crystal, and she wrapped her sweet, toxic tentacles around my heart and never let go.’

  As the night wore on, he explained to me that when he smoked crystal meth, he could sit for hours on end with his eyes shut, imagining himself climbing mountains and surviving snow avalanches, or going on heroic journeys through deep tropical jungles. ‘Once, I sat there for three straight days and explored these caves until I found the ruins of an ancient underground kingdom with huge castles and pyramids. When Crystal ran out of her love, I went and got more so I could continue with the adventure.’

  This would often continue for up to eighteen hours at a time. After years of going on these adventures, Bernard woke up to find he no longer had his job, or his salary, or his house — all of which, in turn, led him to smoke more meth.

  Jack Nagle was a
tall blond basketball-mad 19-year-old living in Melbourne’s south-east suburbs when he decided it was time to broaden his horizons.

  ‘I wanted to get out in the world, start mixing with people who weren’t from my high school,’ he told me. ‘I guess there wasn’t really anything missing in my life, I just wanted to try new stuff, meet new girls, that kind of thing.’

  Along the way, Jack stumbled across crystal meth. Curious — having already dabbled in other amphetamines — he smoked a bit, and then a little bit more, and then the next weekend, and the one after that, and then during the week, until he was lost in a fog of thoughts, ideas, and theories.

  At one stage, he went on a 10-day binge, where he smoked more than $7,500 worth of meth and was consumed by fantasies, starting with the recurring belief that he was at the airport waiting to get on a plane to Thailand, when he was, in fact, in his bedroom. He told me that after a while, ‘I became convinced it was all part of a TV show plot, and that my life was a TV show, and I was being filmed all the time.’

  ‘Like The Truman Show?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Jack replied, ‘exactly like The Truman Show,’ and he went on to relate how he had once confronted a girl (who had rejected him) about her role on this TV show — she, quite naturally, freaked out.

  ‘Eventually I started kind of performing for the camera,’ he explained. ‘So one day I got home after a day of smoking, believing that the cameras were on me, and I thought to myself what a boring day it had been, and that the viewers probably would have been really annoyed with me. So I stood up in my lounge room and broke out in this mad dance for fifteen minutes just so the audience would be entertained.’

  One winter evening in Perth, in 2014, Cassy McDonald took an intravenous shot of crystal meth in her suburban home and, almost immediately afterwards, heard her phone ringing. ‘For some reason, I felt really desperate to answer it, like it was some king of emergency,’ she said. ‘I had this feeling it was my mum calling to tell me something really important.’ Having decided that the phone must be somewhere in her car, she went out to the car, which was sitting unlocked in her driveway, and began to search.

  ‘All I remember was fear; I was terrified, I locked all the doors and refused to get out, and ripped open all my dashboard and seats looking for the phone. It seemed like I was only in there a few hours, but I was in there for two whole days. I only came out when my partner’s sister pulled up with my son.’

  After a long conversation with her sister-in-law, Cassy realised that not only had she been in the car for almost forty-eight hours, but also that she didn’t even own a mobile phone. Cassy had been experiencing a drug-induced psychosis, and in fact, as a former dealer, she has seen more than her fair share of people having psychotic episodes.

  ‘There was one girl who came over and started plucking out all her eyebrow hairs. At first her eyebrows looked pretty good, but she just couldn’t stop. When she had not a single eyebrow hair left, she started on her hairline.’

  I put these three stories together to begin to illustrate the link between crystal meth and what we might call, at its simplest, imagination. In broad terms, this refers to the ability to form new images and sensations in the mind that are not perceived through the five senses.

  What Bernard, Jack, and Cassy describe is neither a daydream, nor mild paranoia — instead, these experiences are all encompassing and self-generating, and produce complicated narratives and/or visions within a state that often blends, and then sometimes confuses, metaphor for reality.

  I call this state the Vortex: powerful, self-perpetuating, highly graphic, highly detailed, highly imaginative, rolling-stream images and ideas that flow in your mind whether you like it or not. They can be utilised for creative purposes; alternatively, one can get stuck in the ‘movie’, or fall into error, thereby taking them literally and entering what modern medicine would describe as a psychotic break.

  The Vortex can be an irresistible force, often offering a visual narrative that is far more exciting than the here and now, and sometimes far more exciting than what some users will otherwise do in their entire lives. When I met Bernard, I hadn’t experienced the Vortex but I had experienced psychosis in the form of delusion.

  By contrast, when you’re ‘up’ in the ‘Fantasia’ of crystal meth you re-imagine yourself, and often your life, in a more favourable light: you become your ego-ideal. This, however, can also lead to a sense of victimhood. As you lose your sense of empathy and perspective, you may also begin to perceive the bad things that have happened to you, or the bad things you have done, as being the fault of other people. You may become egotistical and extroverted, often sharing inflated stories of achievements, as well as stories of how other people harmed you, in an exaggerated and paranoid fashion.

  In my experience, the Vortex — at least in the early days of my crystal-meth use and abuse — followed Fantasia; it usually occurred when I was alone. The images and ideas are far more vivid than Fantasia, so vivid that you almost can’t do anything other than experience them — they don’t just float in the background like they do in Fantasia, and they are often hard to articulate, especially during the experience. The Vortex is a highly individualised and usually compulsive experience; fantasies rage through your head without the slightest bit of effort — but often these fantasies are not about yourself, your fears, or your desires, although they can be. There is often a waking, lucid-dream-like feeling to the Vortex, and not long after moving into Smithy’s, I entered this strange new world.

  On one of the first nights at Smithy’s during which I took crystal meth, I remember he was entertaining three guests in his bedroom, one of whom was Beck. He had music playing loudly, and I could hear them talking over the top of it. The smell of bleach from a hard-core cleaning session was hovering in the air. I had the overhead light off, the lamp on, and I was typing away at old notes from my rehab days, trying to pull together an article. I was typing away effortlessly, rhythmically, quickly, and without judgement. Soon there were 1,000 words on the screen, then 2,000, and then, as two hours passed in a few heartbeats, I had 4,000 words written.

  I had a break to make a cup of tea. As I was standing in the kitchen, leaning against the bench, I started seeing very vivid images of people I had once met at Mardi Gras. They were living in an alternate dimension that looked like rural Queensland centuries ago. A few minutes later and I had written up these images as best as I could, but I was struggling to keep up with them as they joined together, becoming more like a movie. As the night passed, I would either be trying to write these images down, though often struggling to articulate the detail, or I would become so enraptured with them that I would just stop and sit on the couch to enjoy the show. People would appear in elaborate, original costumes; the valley and surrounds created themselves, conversations began, and plots thickened.

  This was my first experience of the Vortex, and I loved it. When I started to become conscious of what was happening, though, I got into a bit of a panic. I began to see this process as a kind of creative ecstasy that could yield very positive results; but then it seemed that the more I willed it, the more I wanted it, the more I brought my ego into it, the less vivid and self-generating it became.

  To return to the night in question, though — at around four in the morning, I became aware that Smithy’s guests had left. This occurred to me because Smithy was hovering around me, pinching his crotch. He was hovering like … let’s say, a cat that had just swallowed a bird, or a kid about to ask their parents for money.

  Smithy had a tendency to mumble when he was on crystal meth, though it was nonetheless clear to me that he, too, was having wildly vivid fantasies of his own. At this early stage of me living in the house, though, he seemed hesitant to give away the detail of his visions; it was almost as if he were giving me bits and pieces of what he was thinking to either get me to fill in the gaps or to get me interested.

  Eventua
lly, these hyper-sexed images of his broke into my already dwindling creative stream, and in turn started another self-perpetuating, perhaps even clearer, image stream that I struggled to switch off — a rolling movie of crazy, hot, sex. The Vortex, it seemed, had grown a libido, and the images even had a Fantasia-like quality, featuring me performing as a sexual champion with various lost and unrequited lovers.

  After a short time, I moved into my bedroom and started masturbating to this self-generating porn that seemed as if it had been made just for me, with all the people I liked best, performing the most erotic acts I could imagine.

  I found these images totally captivating, ‘even better than the real thing’. In the ‘real thing’, people weren’t at my beck and call; the actual world, with its limited opportunities, rules, and actual other human beings was always going to run a distant second place to a magical alternate reality where I was the star and nearly anything — and everything — was possible.

  So there I was under the blanket; the light was off, and I was pulling and pulling, and I didn’t want these movies to stop, and I kept pulling, but I couldn’t seem to ejaculate. So I kept going, and then I saw, from under the plastic blind in my tiny bedroom with nothing in it but my bed, that it was starting to get light outside.

  I remember thinking that it must have been at least an hour that I had been masturbating because it had become day. No matter how hard I tried, though, I couldn’t ejaculate. The ‘movies’ just kept getting better, and I couldn’t stop watching them: for one thing, it felt as if I wasn’t actually in control of them or of anything I was doing. And, naturally, I was also enjoying being there.