The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  Not being dominated by sour thoughts all the time gave me an increased appetite for life, and I found myself bouncing around the streets of Kathmandu in happiness most days — I had no desire to escape from my responsibility to interpet reality.

  Of course, a dose of healthy cynicism dictates that my sense of liberation and happiness may merely have been the result of enjoying travel, and that these ‘epiphanies’ would turn to dust once I returned to my regular life in Australia, among old temptations and old friends.

  I considered this, too, but it also occurred to me that I had come to pretty much what I wanted to in life. I could work full time on writing. There had been some very real economic impediments to my freedom in Australia — my career had, at the very least, stalled after having the Great Breakdown of 2008. Then I ran into conflict with my managers because of the lack of opportunity, and then I had back and neck problems that kept me out of the workforce for a long time. Combined with my reputation for being mentally unstable, the legal actions against the ABC only served to further tarnish my employment prospects, and even former peers who’d backed me stepped away. In 2009 and 2010, I had spent nearly eighteen months on unemployment benefits; I applied for jobs at a nursery and DVD store because I couldn’t get a job, and even then I didn’t get shortlisted. While most of my legal actions were eventually successful (I was homeless, in pain, and living on the dole in between them) I found it nearly impossible to get another job — in fact, most people at the ABC thought I was a ‘disgruntled former employee’ and many others believed I had been sacked. My main skill-set was in radio, and I was left high and dry and living on rice and sweet potatoes for a long time. Then my new career in law didn’t turn out quite as I’d expected: first, I got low marks, which limited my career opportunities; besides which, I didn’t have the temperament to be involved in litigation without a constant feeling of wanting to kill the most annoying person from the other party (or sometimes myself), and I just couldn’t get excited at the prospect of a career working twelve hours a day in an oppressive office environment to have about half of my pay each week go on rent.

  By 2015, though, I was writing full time and I loved it — it meant I could keep travelling around in a semi-nomadic manner, learning new things and meeting new people. And I thought, What a wonderful thing life is! I could choose which projects I wanted to work on, I didn’t have to get up to an alarm, I didn’t have annoying work colleagues I had to put up with year after year, and I had found a new direction, which, I realised, I hadn’t really done since my radio career ended. I was doing what I loved every day in beautiful surrounds — it would take a hard-hearted person not to be happy.

  I wondered if the great feeling I’d had when I’d left Bundaberg, about the promise of my new life emerging, hadn’t been hope but intuition. In Buddhism, being paid to write, even writing itself is, I guess, what you might call an ‘optimal Bardo experience’ — a great experience of life, but still on a more superficial level than spirituality. The more I paid attention to these dreams, the more I noticed I was searching for areas of missing bush land, wondering where the bush had gone, wondering what it might mean for the wildlife — and I decided then in Kathmandu to take these dreams literally, and organised with The Good Weekend to travel to Sumatra to spend some months writing and researching a piece on palm oil, forest fires, and deforestation.

  Amid all this — and I was conscious that I’d had many ‘big ideas’ when I left rehab in 2008 — I had lived through my longest period of not having any amphetamines since my drug-free spell from 2002 to 2006. Never smoking pot again would be my next goal.

  I met several inspiring young Australian men, all in their early twenties, who were in Nepal to volunteer: young men who seemed to know already what it had taken me thirty-five years to learn — the value of selflessness. They knew I was gay, and they didn’t treat me in any way differently in the slightest. It was about then that I decided that Buddhism had helped me a lot, but to call myself a Buddhist and fully adopt a Buddhist way of life was not quite for me — many cultural Buddhists meditate from a very young age, and I concluded that we can learn from Buddhism, but ultimately, unless you become a monk, it is designed for eastern cultures and people who have developed a unique space in their mind to experience its teachings.

  As the year wore on, research into use and abuse of crystal meth in the community would foster a mixed message. A National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre drug survey about crystal-meth use released in October 2015 would reveal that the drug had more or less stabilised in use among most drug populations, except for intravenous drug users who increased their crystal-meth use by six per cent between 2014 and 2015. The survey also showed that among people who used traditional ‘party drugs’ like MDMA as well as crystal meth were also cutting down, albeit slightly, on their crystal meth use. NDARC researchers concluded that users who are younger, university educated, and unlikely to have a prison history were the ones cutting down; for the most serious drug users, though, use was going up.

  There were also some trials in Australia by the end of 2015 into the use of two drugs — naltrexone and N-acetylcysteine — to help people wean off crystal meth.

  And then, in December 2015, the Turnbull government announced a $300 million plan to combat crystal meth. The vast bulk of the money — $241 million — was dedicated to treatment, and would be administered through Australia’s newly created 31 Primary Health Networks (bureaucratically organised areas of primary health care around Australia). These primary health networks will now be given discretion about how they spend this money. Additionally, new money was given to doctors, and specialists would also be paid $13 million to treat ice users with a new Medicare payment to increase the availability of treatment. $24 million was dedicated to ‘help families and communities by providing the resources, information and support they need to respond to ice’, and $18.8 million was allocated to setting up a new Centre for Clinical Excellence for Emerging Drugs of Concern.

  Just $16 million of the $300 million package was dedicated to law enforcement, including $5 million for the Australian Crime Commission to deploy officers internationally, and $10 million, taken from the proceeds-of-crime fund, to ‘inform the design and development of a National Criminal Intelligence System and enhance our ability to share intelligence with state and territory partners’.

  In the week following the announcement, the government almost universally approved the ice plan: St Vincent’s Health Australia CEO, Toby Hall told The Guardian Australia: ‘The government has clearly listened to the taskforce and those working on the front line of the problem.’ The same article quoted the head of the Public Health Association of Australia, Michael Moore: ‘This announcement marks the first steps in a sensible return to realign funding, focus and efforts into moving away from a largely prohibitionist approach to the much more effective approach of harm minimisation.’ Matt Noffs, chief executive of the Noffs Foundation and part of the ice taskforce consultations, told Fairfax Media it was Ken Lay who supplied the ‘oxygen’ that Malcolm Turnbull needed to take a ‘giant step forward’.

  Noffs would later tell Fairfax Media he didn’t think $250 million was enough, and it could potentially mean that less than a quarter of the staff members required would be funded. Other concerns expressed by groups such as the Australian Medical Association and providers of alcohol and drug treatment was whether or not the primary health networks would spend the money appropriately, and whether or not they have should have been given the money to begin with.

  When the Liberal National Party Abbott government was elected in 2013, one of the first things it did was defund the Australian Drug and Alcohol Commission Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia (ADCA) — so the body no longer exists. The council was Australia’s peak body for organisations working to minimise the harm caused by drugs and alcohol, and had an annual budget of $1.6 million from the federal health department. The council ran the p
ublic awareness ‘Drug week’ campaign, which also no longer exists. From 2002 to 2005, Australia also had a National School Drug Education Program, but it was dismantled in 2007. In her 20-year timeline of Australian drug policy, Dr Caitlin Hughes pointed out that drug-crime related asset seizures are put into general revenue rather than put back into spend for tackling the drug problem:

  The Federal Government announced that from 1 July 2012 it would return all money from its Confiscated Assets Account (an estimated $58.3 million over four years) to consolidated revenue. Since 2002 proceeds of crime has been a key source of funding crime prevention initiatives, drug treatment provision, illicit drug diversion programs and law enforcement projects such as DUMA & the development of an Enhanced National Intelligence Picture on Illicit Drugs.

  This move already puts Australia at odds with the New Zealand approach which uses forfeited funds to help problematic drug users.

  Despite these criticisms, there is no doubt the federal government’s plan — which is the result of appointing Ken Lay as taskforce chief under the Abbott government — is a surprisingly progressive one. It should also be remembered that Ritter’s 2011 study showed the total state and federal government funding for drug treatment was just $361 million — an additional $250 million to provide treatment for one drug is nothing to be sneezed at. Given the status quo and the weight of public opinion, it was not without risk for the federal government to follow expert advice on creating a new crystal-meth policy. At the same time, it is consistent with a nation that has been flexible, relatively sensible (often despite the rhetoric), and effective with drug policy at a federal level. It remains an ongoing issue, however, that our state and territory governments continue to run with populist law-and-order lines rather than evidence-based policy in dealing with a range of social problems — including illicit drug use.

  Tellingly, the federal government’s emphasis on treatment was received reasonably well by Australia’s right-wing tabloids. The Herald Sun even published an opinion piece by Alan Tudge, assistant minister to the prime minister:

  The executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime stated in 2007 that societies have the drug problem that they deserve … Australia deserves better than being seen as the biggest ice users. Our ice plan will hopefully be the start of that change.

  It is, of course, perfectly possible that crystal meth will come and go and linger and come again. Although, its lesson is surely that the next heavy drug to come along will almost certainly be wholly synthetic — perhaps even another variation on the methamphetamine formula.

  And Australia’s crystal-meth problem has, if nothing else, shown the gaps in the dominant-to-date policy approach. It has also provided new challenges to both treatment providers, and users and abusers of party drugs. It seems, for the most part, that drug policy in Australia is turning in the direction that drug policy experts say it should be going. While rehabs and drug counselling centres are still citing long waiting lists, there is hope that with the federal government emphasis on treatment, more of the people who are struggling with crystal meth will find the resources they need.

  Life can be mundane once you stop dreaming; many recovering crystal-meth addicts may find that waking life calls them to examine themselves in challenging and exciting ways that they have never imagined before.

  For me, crystal meth set into place thinking patterns that were often exaggerations of myself, and our culture, at its worst, and what is particularly hard to recognise is the way in which these linger afterwards. For many months after, even long after the cravings have passed, the ways of seeing I developed on crystal meth continued, and continued in a way that was not only hard for me to notice — because I was in the midst of them — but also because they were magnifications of things already in my personality. This made it extremely difficult for others around me to notice as well. I can be self-absorbed, self-victimising, nasty, suspicious, grandiose, owned by ambition, manipulative, reckless, and extremely judgmental of others. Ice made this worse, but it was already within me.

  It also became obvious to me after seven months after I stopped using how little shame I had for my own transgressions — I had, in a sense, been walking around naked during and after the addiction — and unabashedly so. But I also can’t help but wonder whether I needed to tear off my old clothes, and go into the depths of madness to see where my life and self were lacking. It was only through this process, and then through coming to a resolution about how to be completely abstinent, that the lack of meaning in my life and my deepest callings became clear.

  Drug-treatment programs are there to show you how can stop using drugs and find other ways to enjoy life — however, I think many of us in recovery need to realise that there is more to life than mere pleasure.

  Carl Jung published 40 books on psychoanalysis before he died in 1961. The Red Book, a notebook of Jung’s inner experiences, was not released to the public until 2009. These notebooks were written over a period of roughly sixteen years, starting in his late thirties just before the Second World War. After his death, the family refused to allow these notebooks to be published — Jung had never wanted the books published during his lifetime, and there are some perfectly legitimate reasons for that. Jung was worried his notebooks would destroy his credibility; in his own words, he wondered if he was ‘menaced by a psychosis’ or ‘doing schizophrenia’. The select few people who saw his notebooks, stored in a vault in Switzerland after his death, often regarded it as the work of a psychotic.

  The notebook that would become The Red Book first began when Jung began to face a kind of inexplicable lack in his experience of life. He had started to feel that his life was in some kind of spiritual crisis — that he had lost his soul.

  Jung, a prolific daydreamer, began fantasising about digging a hole in the ground. As he kept imagining, he found that these fantasies took on a life of their own; when he dug deeper and deeper into this imaginary hole in the ground, he eventually reached a strange, self-perpetuating symbolic land.

  Intrigued by what he found, he began practising this descent into the imaginary underworld each night. Soon after, he began recording what this world presented, and when his journal was finally taken out of a Swiss vault at the turn of the new millennium, it would be filled with intricate drawings of strange serpentine beasts with dozens of legs, encounters with old mystics in castles, winged humans, mandalas and sea monsters. He writes that he travelled to the ‘Land of the Dead’, where magnanimous plots developed. He described his visions as coming in an ‘incessant stream’ as a result of deliberately switching off his unconscious.

  Jung later wrote that he felt he had travelled the same borderlands as both great artists and lunatics; he knew that he had to let himself ‘plummet down into them’. Throughout these experiences, a female figure resurfaces — she tells him not to fear madness but to accept it, even to tap into it as a source of creativity. ‘If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature.’

  Just prior to sinking into these depths, Jung felt that he had accomplished everything he had ever set out to do in the world: professional success, fame, marriage, children, wealth, prestige, etc. He felt that what he was doing in these imaginary experiences was going deep into the underground of his unconscious, and it was here that he rediscovered meaning in his life, and a kind of collective meaning in all human life. He felt that going into the dark allowed him to find the things that were missing from his consciousness, and he was able to integrate them; by doing so, he restored meaning to his life.

  The most recent photo I’ve seen of Smithy was a picture of him with his new, young girlfriend who lay, smirking, sticking up her middle finger as Smithy slept like a dead man, with his sickly, grey skin and marks on his face. By some reports, he was now easing off the meth and taking GHB — a cheaper, less exhausting drug — regularly instead. He was moved on b
y the landlord from his place in Pakenham — that house in the Toomuc Valley — and eventually he lost contact with everybody who knew him. I don’t know where he ended up or what became of him.

  Twelve months after the order giving custody of the twins to Smithy’s father and stepmother, the Children’s Court would make an order for the boys to stay with them indefinitely. It was hard not to conclude, that all things considered, it was the best choice of several bad options.

  Beck has given up crystal meth, though. She’s worked in some odd jobs as a waitress and a food server. She has remained living with her parents, and settled into a long-term relationship with a mechanic who lived interstate — a man she met on a dating app.

  Other than that, I didn’t know the details of how she lives her life. By calling the Child Protection Unit, I knew that was the end of the friendship. Eighteen months after I left the house, Beck and I still haven’t spoken. This, I have to admit, makes me feel incredibly relieved. I wonder how much I went back to Beck again and again out of habit, out of a drug habit, and also to make sure the kids were being looked after properly. I wonder if we actually had anything in common other than our drug use, born in that cold valley together in a state of teenage-angst isolation. I decided to cut contact with most of her family — all of them, except for Hayley.

  Hayley finished Year 11; she had no specific plans about what to do. However, she told me she was determined to make something big of her life. She stayed living with a family in an area right near her high school. Two years had passed by this stage, and she still hadn’t spoken a word to her mum. She still spoke with other members of the family — her aunties and Beck’s parents — but she never saw them. She smoked cigarettes for a little while and then quit. She told me that she drinks only sometimes. She jogs most days, and eats a very salad-heavy diet. She takes vitamins every day. The last photo I saw of her, she was in her school uniform, flashing her teeth, holding up two fingers with a caption saying ‘I love education’.