The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  When I eventually complained to the hospital about my treatment, not only did they deny that staff had done anything wrong, but the hospital also said — and this despite the obvious fact that I was on crystal meth, as demonstrated by their referral for me to go a drug-counselling centre — that ‘there was no evidence’ I was affected by crystal meth at the time. They also implied that I pretended to be suicidal just so I could stay in the hospital. It appears that rather than attempt to fix problems, hospitals instead throw money at lawyers and law firms, and work from the point of view that a mentally unwell patient is unreliable as a witness.

  On the night in question, confused about why I’d left Smithy’s house and no longer sure of exactly what had occurred, I went back there, and went to bed.

  When I got up the next day, my mind had once again changed direction — I was feeling scared again, too scared to leave my bedroom, so I texted Beck about what had happened, but she never texted back. Another day passed, which I spent in the library, and when I got home, Smithy glared at me, deliberately and savagely. Feeling unsafe, and paranoid that he was plotting something, I asked a friend, Sarah, if I could stay at her place for the night. She said yes, so I hopped on a train.

  When the train rolled into Noble Park, I got a message from Sarah that said: ‘Sorry babe, I wish I could help you, but tonight isn’t a good night’. ‘Sarah, I have nowhere else to go, I am scared to go home’; ‘Just not tonight, me and David are breaking up’, and so I got off the train, and now I wasn’t so much scared as just plain furious.

  The short winter day had come to an end, and I started to feel cold and scared. I had about $50 left. It was dark, and I was convinced that Smithy wanted to kill me, and this time I believed he had friends who were waiting at his house to do it. I rang my parents, but the combination of my drug-induced psychosis and what I perceived as their indifference to my plight was a toxic one. After a series of increasingly aggressive calls, my parents stopped answering their phones.

  By the time I got back to Smithy’s, it was nearly 11.00pm. Beck and Smithy had been discussing something; it seemed that there was a kind of peace or closeness between them. Beck said she wanted to talk to me about something, and we went for a drive. Once in the car, she began defending Smithy against the accusations of various women who’d said he’d been touching them inappropriately, or harassing them by text. I tried to stay as neutral as I could, but my own experience told me there was something in what these women were saying. Eventually, Beck got to the point: Smithy had accused me of stealing his pot, and wanted me out of the house. The ensuing fight escalated to the point where I punched the dashboard, and she threw me out of the car. When I’d walked back to Smithy’s, I found them cuddled together on the couch.

  I snuck into my bedroom, packed my things, and snuck out the back door. I took my suitcase to the local high school, made myself a makeshift bed, and settled down to sleep.

  Perhaps I can just live like this, I thought. No illusions, no walls, no people, no stupid dreams; I can just survive like a wild animal. The next day, I hid my suitcase, and stole chocolate from Kmart. I had no money left. Then the next night came, and it was far colder. I was so tired, but I couldn’t sleep; every time I did manage to have a micro-sleep, I dreamt about being close to a fire, but the fire kept going out. When I woke up I was freezing, and I realised that this was a terrible idea.

  I wanted warmth so badly I felt as if I could knock on a stranger’s door. I plucked up the courage to ask my estranged ex if I could stay with him in his dilapidated terrace house in Footscray. Much to my surprise, he agreed and was now a chronic meth-head himself. He lived with a guy named Sammy, also called Mr Sheen, a frankly terrifying human being. Mr Sheen was built like a brick shithouse; he was a big-time steroid user, and old-school intravenous ice user, and it was no surprise to me when to hear he had spent time in both jail and a psych ward.

  One night Mr Sheen cracked, like, really cracked. He was cleaning when he told me I was not allowed to leave my ex’s room. ‘You’re dirty,’ he told me. ‘You’re spreading germs around the house.’ When he caught me going to the toilet at 5.00am, he lit up an angry red and started screaming in my face: ‘Get the fuck out now, you dirty fucking cunt — I’ll fucking bash the fuck out of you.’

  So I left, wandering around South Yarra for a while before heading for the train station, which even at 6.00am had government-hired ‘protective officers’ hanging about. With nowhere else to go, I returned to Pakenham, where I sat by a big lake, carved out of the wetlands, a sheet of mist sitting on the top, and started to cry, thinking, ‘I need to go the police’.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Bundaberg

  ‘THIS STATEMENT IS off the record,’ a male officer at the Pakenham police station told me in a small, windowless interview room. ‘Nothing you will say will be used to implicate you in any crime. This is just a chat between us.’

  And I told them everything that happened.

  ‘So, what about you? Where are you at now?’ another officer asked.

  ‘I have nowhere to live, nowhere to go; I have no money, and I’ve been sleeping rough.’

  ‘What about your parents?’ he asked.

  ‘I abused them, I threatened to kill them, they want nothing to do with me.’

  ‘You’re welcome to ring them now and tell them where you are,’ he told me.

  So I did, and Dad answered. Straightaway I said, ‘I am sorry, I don’t know what came over me.’

  ‘That’s alright, mate, we’re relieved you’re back to yourself — I’ll put Mum on.’

  Mum answered and I apologised to her as well; she echoed Dad’s sentiment that they were glad to have me back to normal. But I still didn’t have anywhere to stay. So I went to a friend’s house, where I stayed for a few nights. In the meantime, I emailed Mum and told her I had nowhere to go; she suggested a rehab, then a homeless shelter, and then my uncle’s house. I rang her one night to ask her if I could come back and live with them while I recovered, but she said she didn’t feel safe around me after phone calls I had made, and emails I had sent — which I actually don’t even remember sending (though it turns out I did) — saying that I hated her and I wished she was dead.

  The conversation ended abruptly, and I went to stay with my schizophrenic uncle, who also lived in Pakenham — a charming character who would interrupt my story of what had happened every time I mentioned a female to ask what her breasts looked like. After two days, he rang my dad to say he didn’t want me living with him anymore, because my clothes stank. So I had to ring Mum again; this time, I agreed with everything she said, because I did not fancy sleeping outside in the winter, and not long after, I was on a plane back to sunny Bundaberg.

  And then there I was: I had the sunshine, and my books, and the gyms, and the time to try to work out where it so wrong. ‘I fucked up’ was the simplest answer. Yet ‘I fucked up again, aged thirty-four, with two university degrees under my belt and a world of opportunity ahead of me, all the while believing I was on a mystical journey, and had to move back home to live with my parents in central Queensland’ raised some serious questions.

  That said, under the circumstances that preceded my escape, quitting meth wasn’t actually that hard — in fact, it was a relief. The possession passed quickly and painlessly, even joyously. I got to my parents’ house at the best time of the year: winter. It was a relief not to be surrounded by unpredictable meth-heads; to have my own bed, and to be left alone to do my own thing. I felt happy. Maybe it’s as simple as that I was sick to death of taking the drug, and of everything that went with it, by the time I arrived in Bundaberg. I would write in The Saturday Paper just a few weeks after I quit:

  For me, my foray into meth showed that liberalism has its limits. I learnt that meth use is not merely a transgressive and misunderstood rebellion against the pressures of working life and the banality of Australian suburbia
. It does kill, and when it doesn’t it can be almost Faustian when taken in large doses.

  I say almost because meth doesn’t take away people’s ‘souls’ — the drug delivers self-centered hedonism. Many addicts have often told me life can’t compare to the pleasure the drug provides. But meth can never deliver the things that make us tick.

  So I can admit I was feeling pretty damn good. But the longer my recovery lasted, the more I started to believe that not only I had developed an insatiable itch which I really needed to scratch, but I recognised that I wasn’t feeling much of anything if I wasn’t itchy, which caused me to wonder: Being itchy is better than not feeling anything at all, isn’t it?

  According to former addict and author Joseph Sharp, the best thing an addict can do in the first month after getting off crystal meth is to eat, hydrate, take vitamins, and eat some more. In this way, the initial recovery period can be enjoyable; you can gorge yourself on food knowing you are not going to put on any weight, and you can often do nothing except look after yourself. Everyone tends to be extra nice to you during this period, because they are so glad you quit, which also helps. Sharp says the first eight weeks of crystal meth can actually be a bit of a ‘honeymoon period’ where the crash has lifted, and you get a little natural high as you restore yourself to optimal physical health. Then after this honeymoon period, about forty-five days in to sobriety, you hit a ‘seemingly insurmountable Wall of depression, boredom and despair’.

  Dr Nicole Lee told me that one of the biggest problems ice addicts face is that because crystal meth releases so much dopamine, it makes it hard for recovering users and abusers to experience pleasure in everyday life. She said that many users don’t just run out of dopamine, they actually destroy their dopamine receptors, which means that their bodies can no longer produce it. It can take twelve to eighteen months before those systems are functioning again.

  Poor thinking habits, as well as paranoia, that were created during long crystal-meth sessions can linger, too; when you come out of the fog of drug addiction, you find new wounds and pains and obsessions, and re-discover old ones, as well as focus on age-old questions of meaning and purpose. When you’re on crystal meth, or in psychosis, these problems can seem abstract and exciting — but once you stop using, life can seem predictable, slow, and dull.

  In the aftermath, I not only had the feeling that nothing was quite hitting the spot, but also the struggle to re-make a narrative for my life when the old one had almost been wiped clean. After six weeks had passed, I began to have recurring memories about my exclusion in high school which cut and re-cut me over and over: the teachers who told me to leave school because my written work was ‘so crap’; the fact that my creative flourishes were constantly treated as medical and disciplinary issues at home and at school (I had compulsory counselling at high school because I wrote freaky short stories and gave them to other students); getting kicked out of home shortly thereafter, and my mother’s persistent denial of those events. For months on end, one angry thought lead to another, until they all seemed interrelated and all had the same cause: I had been wronged — and now there was no escape hatch, no eject button.

  There are some ‘simple’ theories of addiction: negative reinforcement — drug use can become addictive because withdrawal causes dysphoria; positive reinforcement — people take drugs because they like using them; and incentive salience — drug use is caused by cravings caused by the drug-induced sensitisation of brain systems. Addiction is generally thought to stem from a complex relationship between genes, environment, one’s upbringing, and life trauma. People who have a mental illness are, for instance, far more likely to develop an addiction than those who do not. One increasingly popular theory is disease theory, which suggests drug addiction is the result of biology, but even that idea has come under scrutiny lately: Dr Marc Lewis argues in his book The Biology of Desire: why addiction is not a disease, that addiction is a behavioural problem that requires willpower and motivation to change.

  Dr Carl Hart suggests drug addiction may be related to social opportunity. Hart watched relatives become crack addicts living in squalor and stealing from their mothers, and observed childhood friends ending up in prisons and morgues. Dr Hart says his research shows that people in poor communities have fewer ‘competing reinforces’ to provide them pleasure and gratification, thus leading many people to choose drugs through lack of opportunity, and leading him to what we might recognise as a rather familiar-sounding left-liberal conclusion on drug abuse:

  What I now know is that the drugs themselves are not the real problem. The real problems are: poverty, unemployment, selective drug law enforcement, ignorance, and the dismissal of science surrounding these drugs.

  Another potentially complementary theory, advanced by Harvard psychiatrist Edward J. Khantzian, says that drug addicts typically show a profound inability to calm and soothe themselves when stressed. Furthermore, many drug addicts tend to have had mothers, and no doubt many fathers, who they describe as ‘relatively cold, unresponsive, and under protective’, and who, despite seeming to be very interested in their child’s performance, send very mixed messages when it comes to celebrating their achievements. On the other hand, the far-right ‘moral model’ of addiction theory presupposes that drug abusers are morally deficient and need to be punished for their use of illicit drugs.

  During my recovery at my parent’s house, the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into crystal meth delivered its very extensive two-part report, stating first and foremost that while most people use methamphetamine don’t need intensive treatment, when treatment was required, there were a number of interventions that had been shown to work: brief interventions; cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT); acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), motivational enhancement, contingency management, and residential rehabilitation.

  The report also said that many working on the frontline had a lack of expertise in the area of crystal-methamphetamine use, and that many frontline agencies reported feeling pessimistic about their ability to treat crystal-meth addicts. This isn’t uncommon, though: professor of criminal justice at Illinois State University Ralph Weisheit writes in his book Methamphetamine: its history, pharmacology, and treatment that pessimism about treatments for a problem drug is often prevalent in the early and peak stages of a drug surge. His review of research showed that about 50 per cent of crystal-meth addicts remained clean for twelve months after completing a residential treatment — about the same rate as for other drugs.

  Research by Rebecca McKetin compared 248 former crystal-meth users treated in a rehabilitation program, 112 in a detox program, and 101 meth users who weren’t undergoing any treatment at the time, but were still attempting to give up the drug. Over a three-year period, McKetin and her researchers estimated that rehab resulted in 48 per cent of people remaining abstinent from the drug, compared to 15 per cent in the other groups. This tallies with research undertaken by health journalist and former alcoholic Anne Fletcher. In her spectacularly comprehensive book, Inside Rehab: the surprising truth about addiction treatment and how to get help that works, she details the high dropout rates of rehab, reporting that 40–60 per cent of those who complete a program end up relapsing. Alcoholic Anonymous’ rates are even lower, she says, with some studies showing that just 10 per cent of people who go through the program stay clean.

  One gets the sense that many of us, even the experts, are still very much learning about what works for all sorts of drug addictions. Perhaps this is because for so long, drug addiction was treated as a crime or a type of vagrancy (perhaps it still is in an indirect sense), and so medical treatment approaches don’t have a particularly long history. And, given that they are medical approaches, they tend to focus on the individual rather than on the social or cultural factors surrounding them. One also gets the feeling that nobody really knows yet what the best approach to drug addiction is. Many people regard drug use as a simple choice, and drug addictio
n as a moral failing. On the other hand, drug use is also the domain of celebrities and artists — making it seem vaguely glamorous, and even an assertion of autonomy and identity in some circumstances.

  And as crystal meth is a relatively recent drug, particularly in Australia, individual treatment solutions are still in their early stages. Along with a lack of rehab services (discussed in detail in Chapter 15) many professionals are unsure of the best way to treat crystal-meth addicts. As a result, many recovering addicts are writing their own scripts about how best to recover, with varying results.

  I had been through rehab before and it helped, but ultimately it didn’t work; one of the mistakes I made was believing that once the ‘problem drug’ was gone, then most of my other problems would also disappear. I learnt the benefits of exercise, reading, helping others, and getting fully absorbed into doing something that I loved — but things still had this bitter taste, and there were ripple effects from my time in the house which seemed as if they would never still.

  Then came my book deal, this wonderful book deal, and somehow it seemed that my struggles had managed to fulfil a purpose. Many people suddenly found me fascinating and insightful, and I was contacted by national media outlets from all over the country.

  In the weeks after I moved to Bundaberg, I had hoped that Nathaniel and I might be able to rekindle our relationship. I sent him seven emails telling him how much I missed him, and that I was worried about him. After six weeks of not replying he sent an email asking, ‘Do you have any money I can have?’

  Beck had not responded to any of my messages since I left the house, and was reportedly very angry I was writing this book. My mum initially seemed pleased, but soon took to Facebook, linking to my article in The Saturday Paper and sharing details of my life that I felt breached my privacy.

  I was also fielding calls from Stacey, Beck’s sister, in which she said, ‘I’ve seen what is going on Luke, and I know you’ve seen what is going on. I’m going to ring child protection and I think you should do the same.’