by Malcolm Knox
Bennett’s nostrils were destroyed from years of snorting drugs, and, as an asthmatic bearing the damage from two decades of smoking, he couldn’t take smoking crystal in the glass pipes his mates used. Instead he drank it, mixing it with alcoholic or nonalcoholic drinks. The onset was slower than smoking or snorting, but equally powerful.
He would drink pure before work, during the day, and after work. Playing pool, he had delusions of genius: ‘I rarely missed. I’d see the sweet spot and kapow! . . . It also gave me the libido of a teenager.
‘When I first hooked into the methamphetamine, it was full speed ahead. I was sharp as a tack with a wicked sense of humour and a sexual appetite like a rampant rabbit, so it’s no surprise that that was my drug of choice. I had never known such a euphoric high, and it led to an addiction like no other I had known.’
But as a long-term drug user, just as the upside came quickly for Paul Bennett, so did the downside.
‘I never got the same clean, clear buzz as the first time, because by now I was truly fried. At first users think this shit gives you mana because you believe you are smart and irresistible. In fact you’re an egotistical, annoying, motor-mouthed know-it-all, who would sell his soul for the next fix.’
Within months, the partnership of crystal meth and massive alcohol consumption was eating away at Bennett’s sanity.
‘Most times on the meth we’d get on the piss something wicked, and it wasn’t just because we got the dry-horrors from the meth. Alcohol seemed to take the edge off my anxiety, and sometimes before I knew it I was on a binge and would lose another 48 hours plus . . . I couldn’t relax or sleep properly because my mind was still racing. Night-time was the pits, lying alone in the dark, trying to handle being depressed, thinking what a fuck-up I was. I would make myself crazier, rolling things over and over in my mind. Depending on how hard I went, it would take me two to four days at least to come down properly, and then the cycle began again . . .’
He was hiding his addiction from his girlfriend, but she caught him once and started crying.
‘We talked later and she told me she could notice the changes in my personality. I knew I was losing it, especially when I went too hard for too long. I’d get paranoid, and spin out with close friends over the smallest thing. I almost cut a flatmate’s nose off with a broken mussel shell; it was right under his nostrils. I was at my worst when I was coming down, with mood swings and depression. I had all the personalities of Snow White’s seven dwarfs . . .’
Bennett also noticed the spread of dangerous paranoid behaviour among his acquaintances.
‘You had to watch your back, because you couldn’t trust these speed freaks. Some of them were like attack dogs, and would take you out or rip you off without batting an eyelid. No honour amongst thieves with this lot.’
Then came the last of a succession of wake-up calls. Bennett had a friend who had been buying pure on tick; like a junkie, he could not afford his habit in cash, but could sustain it by dealing and taking a cut for himself. Like many a junkie, he got into trouble, using too much and not selling enough to pay back his supplier. ‘It was,’ says Bennett, ‘like putting an alcoholic in charge of a pub.’
Bennett’s friend began to suffer an unending paranoia—not without reason, perhaps. But as a result, he began to carry a gun.
‘I hadn’t seen him for a while,’ Bennett recalls, ‘and one day when I spotted him, I snuck up behind to give him a fright. The poor bugger was tripping out with fear and the next thing I saw was a gun in his hand . . . I could literally feel the blood draining from my face, and it must have taken twenty years off my life. I had been wanting to get out of the scene for a long time, as my health was failing, and that moment made the decision easier.’
It was 1997 when Paul Bennett left the Gold Coast. The next year he fell critically ill with a range of ailments, and was put on a waiting list for a double lung transplant. He returned to New Zealand to try to rebuild his health, and his life.
Crystal meth had barely hit Australia. Paul Bennett might have been the first man in this country to go through the entire cycle of use, abuse and organ failure; he might have been the first to give up ice.
The National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC) is in a nondescript modern building on the campus of the University of New South Wales in Kensington, eastern Sydney. When they blow, northerly breezes carry the scent of horse manure over the university from the neighbouring Royal Randwick racetrack and stables. NDARC itself, funded by the federal government, is an unpretentious warren of small offices and shelves overcrowded with files. Researchers sit at computers quietly absorbing and collating data, or conducting one-on-one interviews with people from the outside who inform their studies.
Notwithstanding its quiet atmosphere, NDARC has become the country’s leading research centre on drugs and alcohol. Partly this is because it is situated in Sydney, close to the action. While other capital cities have developed their signature drug cultures over time, Sydney remains the most highly populated drug capital and the main gateway for imported substances such as heroin and cocaine. It is home to drug users, researchers and legal and health workers, who have been around the scene for several generations.
In mid-1996, researchers Shane Darke and Julie Hando were tapping into this network, surveying 154 injecting drug users for the centre’s annual NSW Drug Trends report. Injecting drug users are sampled because of their importance as a ‘sentinel group’—they take whatever drugs are washing around on the street in central and south-western Sydney, and if a new drug turns up in Australia it usually shows up among Sydney’s injectors first.
For that 1996 survey, Darke and Hando also interviewed other ‘key informants’, including health and outreach workers, police and a researcher. The researcher told them that drug injectors were claiming to use ‘ice’, or the crystalline form of methamphetamine, rather than old-fashioned powder ‘speed’, or amphetamine sulphate.
This was the first time ice had been named in local Australian research, and it crept in more or less without comment. Injecting drug users, while connoisseurs in detecting the purity and effect of what they are taking, are notoriously loose in their terminology. A second-hand report of one user claiming to take ‘ice’ could mean anything. It could have been a marketing term promoted by a dealer; it could have been the user’s way of describing some speed hybrid that didn’t behave quite like the speed they were used to.
NDARC published its report, but the first mention of ice in Sydney passed inconspicuously. It certainly wasn’t picked up by the media. That was soon to change. In 1997, a young PhD student joined the NDARC team working on the next NSW Drug Trends report. Rebecca McKetin had studied animal behaviour as an undergraduate, and became interested in the psychotic reactions of rodents to injections of amphetamines.
‘I wanted to do my PhD on [amphetamine-induced] psychosis,’ she now recalls, ‘but there weren’t enough people to form a sample.’ She modified her subject to ‘proneness to psychosis’, and began asking amphetamine users during the NDARC surveys if they had suffered psychotic reactions to the drug.
‘Some said they did,’ she says, ‘but when we talked about it further it was more likely to be mild paranoia or panic attacks.’
There was scarce grant money around for a study on amphetamine psychosis in the mid-1990s, as the problem wasn’t widespread enough. As it turned out, McKetin’s interest was a few years ahead of its time. She had correctly anticipated the crisis, but its trigger—a form of amphetamine sufficiently potent, cheap and quickly absorbed into the bloodstream—had yet to fully hit the streets.
In her first year at NDARC, she interviewed a Sydney health worker who reported that one drug user claimed to have smoked shabu. Another user reported having used ‘crank’—one of the drug’s American pseudonyms—which he believed to be a mixture of amphetamine and cocaine. The effect was different from the normal amphetamine high, he said. An extreme euphoria came on very quickly, like with coca
ine, but rather than lasting cocaine’s usual half hour or so it lasted several hours, like an amphetamine. He thought it was so good, it could be dangerous if it got around. And it was cheap—$100 a gram compared with $200–$240 a gram for cocaine.
Still, these reports were sporadic at best.
While Rebecca McKetin was exploring the first glimmers of ice among Sydney drug users, Mohammed Kerbatieh was rotting in jail in Queensland. In the early 1990s, Kerbatieh—who as a young adult had already been convicted twice of unlawful assault—had lived in a flat in Windsor, a northern suburb of Brisbane, with his wife, Runda.
Kerbatieh and Runda were a far from happy couple. Runda was severely hearing-impaired and Kerbatieh, then in his mid-twenties, complained that he had been pressured into marrying her, by family and social expectations, after she fell pregnant in 1994.
On 10 March 1995, Runda gave birth to their first child, a daughter. The volatile Kerbatieh visited the hospital, had an argument with Runda, and shook the baby. Runda remonstrated with him, later showing a nurse how he had shaken the days-old girl.
Runda and the baby went home to a worsening cyclone of arguments with Kerbatieh. Neighbours would hear him shouting at her and throwing things. On the night of 29 March 1995, they had a furious row. Kerbatieh would often accuse Runda of cheating on him, and claimed the baby was not his. That night he punched and shook Runda and stormed around the flat carrying the baby roughly in his arms, before leaving at 3 am.
At 3.30 am he turned up at the Fortitude Valley police station. In an interview with two officers he claimed that he had been in a domestic fight with Runda—she had attacked him, he said—but when pressed to make a formal complaint, he decided he did not want any further action taken against her. He told the police that he wanted to leave her, but if he did she would make trouble for him. He also said, ‘I never touched her or the baby’— in retrospect a brazen attempt to deflect the serious trouble heading his way.
Returning to the flat at around 5 am, Kerbatieh took the nineteen-day-old baby out of her cot and shook her so hard her eyes went wobbly and she stopped breathing. Runda screamed at him to stop. Only at 6.15 am, with his daughter yellow and short of breath, did Kerbatieh call an ambulance.
The daughter survived, but Runda was courageous enough to tell police what had happened.
Charged with causing his daughter grievous bodily harm, Kerbatieh said at his trial that Runda, not he, had been the one who shook the baby. The jury didn’t believe him, and he was convicted and sentenced to see the end of the twentieth century behind bars.
Through those years, Kerbatieh sat in jail, behaving himself, and talked the talk of fresh starts.
It was while Dudley Mark Aslett was in Lithgow Correctional Centre in 1997, as a 26-year-old, that he started smoking heroin, sprinkling it on marijuana cones. The next year, while still in jail, he tried to commit suicide by slashing his wrists, and required blood transfusions to save his life.
To anyone looking at him from the outside, it would seem that Dudley Aslett had every reason to end it all. Since the age of eleven he had spent only one Christmas and one birthday out of jail or some kind of detention. Fifteen Christmases, fifteen birthdays, right through adolescence, past voting age, into what should have been the prime of his life, Aslett was behind bars.
Dudley Aslett was one of eleven children of an Aboriginal mother, Rita, who worked as a nurse, and a white father who was a removalist. Living in the Granville and Mount Druitt areas of western Sydney, the Aslett parents were in a stable relationship; life for Dudley was anything but.
At the age of eight, he would tell psychiatrists, he was sexually molested by an older brother. This lasted up to two years, during which Dudley ran away from home and stopped attending school, spending his time with a group of delinquent older boys. From time to time he was rounded up by state services and put in foster homes. He returned to school, but only intermittently. The majority of his education, it seems, was in the science of stealing cars and taking drugs.
Aslett had sniffed glue and petrol at eight—the age when he was first molested—though he suffered a bad reaction while sniffing glue in a detention centre and turned to smoking cannabis on a daily basis in his early adolescence. Being incarcerated didn’t stop him from getting as much dope as he wanted.
By 1997, he had the rap sheet to end all rap sheets.
At eleven, he was sentenced to four years’ probation for stealing property and cars, breaking and entering, and malicious injury.
Before he turned twelve, he was put in a children’s detention centre for break and enter.
He got out, and as a twelve-year-old was placed on probation for larceny.
At thirteen he was given a suspended sentence for malicious injury, break and enter, and stealing. Within two months he was put in detention for stealing again.
After he got out, still only thirteen, he stole another car and was put back in detention.
At fourteen he was convicted for two years for thirteen new offences, including stealing a car, malicious injury, escaping lawful custody and dangerous driving. He received further convictions that year for stealing cars and absconding.
In the course of the next year, 1986, he was convicted for 27 similar offences.
After escaping from custody, he stole more cars and injured more victims. His brief releases through 1987 and 1988 resulted in further convictions. By the time he graduated out of the children’s criminal system, he had been sentenced by courts at Cobham, Yasmar, Minda, Bidura, Yass, Orange, Kempsey and Tamworth.
Little changed when Aslett turned eighteen. In March 1989, a few days after his eighteenth birthday, he was convicted for assault. In July he was convicted for dangerous driving. In September he was imprisoned for four years for stealing and other offences. The next year, more charges and convictions followed for offences committed during his brief time outside: break and enter, malicious damage, stealing a car, larceny, dangerous driving.
After his release he was soon put away again. The repetition of his crimes continued: break and enter, stealing cars, larceny, possession of housebreaking implements, malicious wounding, assault with intent to rob. He served the next decade, more or less, in jail for a string of different offences. He just couldn’t make it on the outside. Stealing cars was all he could do, all he had a gift for.
And then, in Lithgow, he found heroin.
In the decade up to 1998, the drug ice had been mentioned in the Australian print media—all newspapers and magazines—a grand total of ten times. Old-fashioned speed amphetamine was part of the furniture, a recreational drug never carrying the fatal and chaotic baggage of heroin or the fear factor associated with more recent party drugs like ecstasy. Ice, when it was mentioned at all, was seen as a synonym for amphetamine sulphate.
Overseas, however, the drug was entering its hey-day. In 1989, the first year ice was mentioned in the Australian print media—a South Sydney drug unit detective, Brent Martin, said ice might one day replace the more expensive cocaine as a problem stimulant—there were 20 000 arrests for ice possession and sale in Japan. Japan is where we must go for the genesis of the crystal methamphetamine story.
Basic amphetamine was first synthesised by a German chemist, L. Edeleano, on 18 January 1887, under the name phenylisopropylamine. Japanese chemists also synthesised it six years later, though it was to remain a drug without an application for several decades.
In 1919, Japanese chemists added the methyl molecule to amphetamine, making methamphetamine. Chemically, there is little difference between methamphetamine and amphetamine; the methyl molecule simply greases the wheels for absorption in the human brain.
It was in the 1920s that amphetamine and methamphetamine found their first use. Dissolved in water and administered intravenously, the drug was found to be effective in treating asthma, nasal congestion and hay fever. It dilated the bronchial passages and relaxed the patient. In 1932, the drug company Smith Kline and French marketed it in over-the-c
ounter asthma inhalers under the name Benzedrine.
During the 1930s, Benzedrine was found to have some significant side effects. The American Medical Association noted in 1937: ‘A feeling of exhilaration and sense of well-being was a consistent effect, and patients volunteered that there had been a definite increase in mental activity and efficiency.’
Word passed around about the zip in these inhalers. Each inhaler carried a strip that was enriched with amphetamine, and users without asthma or any other bronchial disorder would pull off the nasal strips and dip them in drinks. Jazz great Charlie Parker claimed to get high by dunking nasal inhaler strips in his coffee.
Now available in pill form by prescription, Benzedrine was mobilised in the 1930s to treat the sleeping disorder narcolepsy, depression, Parkinson’s disease and attention disorders among children. The research snowballed: narcolepsy patients were reporting that as well as keeping them awake, Benzedrine was taming their appetite and they were losing weight. And so the drug was prescribed for patients struggling with obesity. In all cases, it was marketed and prescribed as non-addictive.
War is a laboratory for innovation, and the spread of amphetamines into the broader culture was ignited by the Second World War. Benzedrine’s effectiveness in elevating concentration and wakefulness among children had been noted by the military in more than one country. The United States distributed dextroamphetamine—marketed under the brand name Dexedrine, colloquially called dexies or ‘pep pills’—to soldiers and pilots in the Pacific and European theatres. Japan distributed methamphetamine (Philopon) not only to soldiers and airmen (including Kamikaze pilots) but to war-industry factory workers. German, Commonwealth and Russian troops were less well supplied, but Dr Theodor Morell injected Adolf Hitler with amphetamines daily to treat the Parkinson’s disease that had surfaced in the early 1930s and worsened during the war. Although a vegetarian, non-smoker and something of a health fanatic, Hitler was by his last days a full-blown speed addict.