by Malcolm Knox
Just as they would two decades later, after Vietnam, many soldiers came home from the war with drug habits. In Japan, veterans’ demand for Philopon was satisfied by pharmaceutical companies needing to offload giant stockpiles built up during the war and a government that allowed them to be sold without regulation or prescription. It is unknown how many Japanese became addicted to methamphetamine in the years before 1948, when the government woke up to the problem and prohibited the production of tablet and powder Philopon, but it was certainly epidemic. Unusually, however, production of the liquid injectable form remained unregulated. Commerce in the drug spread from pharmacies to unlicensed dealers. In 1951, Japanese police confiscated 4.6 million vials of methamphetamine and arrested 17 000 suspects for illegally selling the drug. In 1954, as many as 55 000 such arrests were made.
The Japanese methamphetamine rage was uncontrollable by border policing. The drug was made locally, often in improvised laboratories in rural areas. Ephedrine, common in many medications, was obtained as a precursor chemical and turned into methamphetamine by the barrowload. We will see later how easily methamphetamine is manufactured, and how the ‘home cooking’ nature of this drug makes it such a challenge for law enforcement.
In America, amphetamine use was not so much cultural as subcultural. Long-distance truck drivers, Beatniks (Jack Kerouac claimed to have written On the Road during a three-week Benzedrine high, typing on a single long spool of paper), and veterans and athletes took bennies and dexies within their own circles, unknown to each other. Housewives, prescribed the pep pills by their doctors for depression and weight control, took them unknown even to their husbands. Geographically, problem amphetamine usage was mostly confined to California (in San Francisco amphetamine injections were used to treat heroin addiction) with a few notable exceptions: President John F. Kennedy received three amphetamine injections each day from his personal ‘Dr Feelgood’, Dr Max Jacobson. From the top down, American doctors handed out amphetamines like lollies.
The confluence of amphetamine-addicted servicemen returning from Korea (where American soldiers used more speed than in the entirety of World War II) and Vietnam with the rising counterculture brought the drug a higher profile in the 1960s, though amphetamine, the defining drug of the Beat movement, was overshadowed by the use of cannabis, LSD and eventually heroin.
The cultural differences between the drugs are a reflection of the properties of the substances themselves. LSD, opiates and cannabis have always produced a dreamy, slow-moving, colour-filled kind of literature, art and music, whereas amphetamines are aligned more with thrash metal, Beat poetry and gestural painting. It’s a generalisation, of course, but Paul Bennett captures the distinction succinctly when he says: ‘On the smack some refer to the buzz as going downtown. If someone overdosed, the central nervous system got so smacked out, it eventually shut down. Hard-core methamphetamine users experience the total opposite. You go uptown. Going so fast for so long, you inevitably go out of your mind, and start imagining things. Then you crash!’
The clash between two drug cultures—uptown meeting downtown—had certain signal moments. One was the passing of Beat icons like Kerouac, dead of complications from his Benzedrine addiction. Another was the Altamont Free Concert, the 1969 event when the Rolling Stones hired Hells Angels as security guards. The bikies, revved up on speed, let loose their contempt for spaced-out hippies and attacked some of the musicians from the Jefferson Airplane before murdering an eighteen-year-old man, Meredith Hunter, while the Stones were playing ‘Under My Thumb’. (Hunter, it has to be said, drew a gun on the bouncers and was believed to have been high on methamphetamine himself.)
American law enforcement was already responding. The 1965 Drug Abuse Control Act restricted access to amphetamines, and the Drug Abuse Regulation and Control Act (the so-called Controlled Substances Act) five years later established five different ‘schedules’ classifying drugs according to their harmfulness and appropriate use. Schedule I substances—illegal drugs with no medicinal value—were deemed the hardest, while Schedule V drugs were the least controlled. Heroin and mescaline were among the Schedule I drugs. Amphetamines, along with cocaine and codeine, fell into Schedule II, defined as dangerous drugs that did have medicinal value but only under prescribed guidelines. By this stage, more than 12 billion amphetamine-containing pills were produced legally in America each year. Their wholesale cost was as little as 75 cents per thousand tablets.
Under the 1970 Act, injectable liquid methamphetamine was virtually prohibited. Like previous prohibitions, this gave rise to underground improvisation, with bikie-backed labs springing up in northern California to produce P2P, or phenyl-2-propanone, an easily cooked methamphetamine variant. Now that amphetamines were restricted in pharmacies, over-the-counter cold medications containing ephedrine were bought in large amounts and cooked with other ingredients to produce street speed, an altogether more toxic and harmful substance.
Australian amphetamine use up to the 1990s might be best described as a weak echo of what was happening in America. Truck drivers, students and some returned servicemen were, in small numbers, the amphetamine-using subcultures, while doctors also prescribed the drug for obesity, depression and attention disorders. A recreational drug subculture sprang up in the 1960s but, as in America, speed bore the stigma of a cheap, bikie-favoured pill.
Dr Nicolas Rasmussen, a University of NSW academic who has written about the history of amphetamines, says that there was a ‘quiet epidemic’ of amphetamine use here in the late 1960s and early 1970s. ‘As early as 1967, the Medical Journal of Australia had reported on addiction to stimulants prescribed under the brand names Methedrine and Desoxyn,’ he says. ‘Doctors who had been prescribing it were seeing addiction and psychosis.’
In 1971, Australia and the United States were signatories to the United Nations Convention on Psychotropics, which led to a crackdown on amphetamines. The signatory nations enacted laws to regulate the sale of the drug by ‘scheduling’ it, making it available only under strict medical conditions. In the signatory countries, however, Dr Rasmussen says that ‘scheduling created the market’ for criminal manufacturers. Overall amphetamine use in the population fell, but a new black market was born.
The rise of cocaine in the 1980s—again, nowhere near as prevalent in Australia as in the United States—did have a rejuvenating effect on amphetamine use, if only as a by-product. Cocaine was mostly snorted off a flat shiny surface, often a mirror, via a straw, metal tube or rolled-up paper money. Dealers of speed, the old unglamorous pill, captured some of cocaine’s reflected glory by grinding it up and selling it as a powder. If you could not afford cocaine, speed was about a quarter of the price and produced a rough copy of the effect.
On the other hand, the marketing of speed in powder form only entrenched the ‘brand’ differentiation between the two stimulants. Cocaine was the expensive, shorter-lasting, ‘cleaner’ high; coke users could later go to sleep. Speed users, on the other hand, spent less money but paid the price in drawn-out, depressing post-high crashes.
In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, however, it was alterations in cocaine use that eventually led to the reinvention of amphetamine in a new, dangerously glamorous context.
In the 1980s, heavily addicted cocaine users began to prepare the drug in a different way. Instead of snorting it in powder form, users bought the drug in purer, crystalline form and smoked it in water pipes, or ‘freebased’. This form of cocaine, known as crack, fast became the most destructive drug in modern American history, mostly because crack was cheaper, more concentrated and more accessible to the poor.
The allure of crack lay partly in the method of delivery. Smoking had a quicker and more exciting effect than snorting, yet it didn’t carry the stigma or threat of blood-borne diseases that came with injection. Snorted speed takes effect within three to five minutes. Smoked, it hits within seconds. Snorted speed comes on without an extreme rush. Smoked, it fires the user up like a rocket.
/> The crystal, smokable form of methamphetamine, the crack to speed’s coke, also had a new name, owing to its appearance. It was called ice.
Around the Pacific, in Japan and south-east Asia, methamphetamine had been sold as crystals and smoked since the 1960s. As early as 1968, the smoking of crystalline methamphetamine was reported in Hawaii. But it was in South Korea and Taiwan that the production and distribution of crystalline methamphetamine was taken on by large organised-crime concerns and turned into a profitable international trade.
One reason for the production shift to Asia was the long history of the ephedra plant in China. Known also as mahuang, ephedra had been used as a herbal stimulant for more than five thousand years. When reduced in a laboratory with hydriodic acid, ephedra derivatives make methamphetamine. Most of the drug factories converting ephedra into precursor chemicals such as ephedrine and pseudoephedrine were, by the 1990s, in India and China—convenient for the east Asian drug cartels who were fighting a worldwide war against law enforcement officials over the heroin trade. In manufacturing methamphetamine, they saw an opportunity to reap higher profits at lower risk. America was already being serviced by speed cartels based in Mexico. For the south-east Asian traders, the natural orbit of their market was their neighbouring countries: the prosperous, fast-growing, pacy urbanised centres in Thailand, South Korea, China, Taiwan and Indonesia. The United Nations 1997 World Drug Report said methamphetamine, with 260 000 addicts, had overtaken opiates in Thailand. A gram of meth sold for as little as ten dollars. The International Narcotics Board said Thai police had seized 500 000 ice hits in six months, and a raid in the Philippines uncovered 600 kilograms of meth and 1.6 tonnes of ephedrine.
Further south, there was another market—small, to be sure, but with many of the same characteristics as America, which by 1995 had taken to crystal meth with a vengeance. Within two years, ice was starting to trickle from south-east Asia into Australia.
In 1998, Damien Peters turned 29. Not for the first time in his adult life, Peters was nurturing a new hope for the future. He felt he had turned a corner. He felt that he might have fallen in love.
Peters’s teenage and adult history was a sorry one. The youngest of four children, he had always struggled to live up to the high expectations of his suburban pharmacist father. Suffering from attention deficit disorder and consequently a poor academic performer, Peters left school after year ten hoping to gain an apprenticeship as a chef. Buffeted by what he perceived as his father’s bullying and teasing, he soon lost that job. His mother died of cancer in 1987, when Peters was eighteen.
Around that time, Peters began using cannabis, but his drug of choice soon became amphetamines. While amphetamines will normally elevate the user’s mood, inducing euphoria and high activity, the ADD-affected Peters found they calmed him down and enabled him to concentrate. Little did he know it, but he 23 was self-medicating along the same regime that doctors had once prescribed for ADD-affected children in the United States.
Soon he was using speed regularly as he bounced from job to job. He lived at home until 1996, but grew more and more withdrawn and secretive. He and his father had a final falling-out when Peters was 27; he left the suburbs and moved to inner Sydney, where he added heroin and prescription pills to his regular drug diet of speed and cannabis.
Like many young gay men moving in from the suburbs with the hope of finding some sort of like-minded community, not to mention excitement, the shy, callow and slightly built Peters found himself intimidated by the inner-city scene. Other men were smarter, stronger, more handsome. To make up for what he saw as his physical deficits, he worked out in gymnasiums and took body-building drugs on top of his recreational input.
He couldn’t hold down a job. Either he would lose his temper with a boss and blow his chance, or his difficulties with concentration led to some failure or harassment. He still needed money, though, and during the 1990s he built up a record of stealing, break-and-enter and assault convictions, followed by court-ordered stints in rehab.
In 1998 he was sent by a court to the Langton Clinic, a halfway house for recovering drug abusers in South Sydney. There he met an older man, Tereaupii Akai, known as Andre. Akai offered protection and love for Peters, as well as somewhere to live. They moved into Akai’s housing department flat in Surry Hills.
When they first slept together Andre Akai assured Peters that he had no sexually transmitted infections. Soon after, however, Damien Peters contracted both gonorrhoea and HIV He was, of course, devastated; HIV was tantamount to a death sentence. As Akai had been his only recent sexual partner, he was able to get Akai to confess that he did, in fact, have AIDS.
Damien Peters was shattered. He would stay with his lover, and nurse him, but he would never forgive him.
In 1998, Darren Jason Blackburn received his first criminal conviction for behaving wildly while drunk on a train in Melbourne. It would be the start of a series of offences over the next three years: theft, possession of stolen property, obtaining property by deception, theft again, drunken behaviour again.
Petty crime was part of his birthright. Born in 1972 on New Zealand’s North Island, Blackburn grew up in a family destabilised by his father’s heavy drinking, dope smoking and violence. Blackburn’s father left the household when Darren was six, but the old man’s shadow fell darkly over his four children, even when he was serving time in jail—which he often was.
Darren loved his father and was upset, from a young age, by the schoolyard teasing about being the son of a prisoner. His three siblings fared little better, if for different reasons. One, a sister, was severely intellectually disabled, but got married and had children whom she could not look after. Darren’s mother, who’d brought up four children single-handedly, now also had to look after her grandchildren. A brother developed a drug addiction early in life and followed his father into jail for committing violent crimes. Another brother, with whom Darren was closest in his early years, died of cancer the same year that the father walked out on the family.
Unsurprisingly, Darren Blackburn showed little interest in school. He wagged repeatedly and paid no attention to his classes when he did attend. His school moved him up each year, but he ended his secondary education without any functional ability to read or write.
What he really liked doing was getting stoned and drunk. From twelve years old, Blackburn was smoking marijuana—a joint each day at first, gradually moving up to half an ounce a week, a prodigious amount when started in adolescence and sustained over years. He also popped anti-psychotic pills which another boy had given him: they made him feel calm. And at the end of the day he would also put away up to five or six bottles of wine before passing out. Pot, wine and pills—a standard day for Darren Blackburn by the time he was fifteen.
On leaving school, he held a variety of jobs that would have done Jack London proud. He worked as a window tinter, Venetian blind maker, and cobblestone paver. He worked in a textiles factory assembling jackets. None of the jobs lasted. His real passion, for drink and drugs, formed a symbiotic relationship with the paranoid schizophrenia he was diagnosed with after leaving school. Whether the schizophrenia resulted from the drug use, or the drug use was a self-medication against the schizophrenia, is impossible to untangle. Both the substance abuse and the mental illness started from too early an age to separate into cause and effect. He saw psychiatrists and other doctors, taking medication from time to time until he left New Zealand in 1996, at the age of 24, and moved to Australia with his girlfriend, Louise. Darren Blackburn wanted very much to be saved by the love of a good woman. He and Louise had a baby together, and were expecting their second when they arrived in Melbourne.
Once in Australia, Blackburn stopped seeking medical attention. He didn’t see the need; booze and pot made him feel better.
His first job in his new home was a case of a fox being put in charge of the henhouse: working for a bottle shop, an Aussie Liquor Mart in Melbourne’s western suburbs, as a labourer carting bo
xes of beer and wine. He tried not to drink so much, but now, instead of drinking steadily each night, he would sober up for days or weeks and then go on massive benders, sometimes lasting for weeks. He’d consume two to four casks of wine each day and a slab of beer. Drunk, his taste for dope rose again.
For eighteen months he kept going at the bottle shop—the longest he’d ever held down a single job. He could drink right through the day and, being an experienced alcoholic, he was capable of putting away enormous amounts without getting falling-down drunk. He was reprimanded for stealing alcohol, and for being intoxicated at work, but when he left it was his own choice rather than his employer’s. On a binge, he simply didn’t turn up one day.
Louise, having had enough of his drinking, kicked him out of home. He moved to Werribee and lived in a tent on the riverbank. One day he came back to find his tent destroyed; he moved on, sleeping behind a church until his niche was boarded up to stop him staying there. He wandered around western Melbourne, sometimes sleeping in parks, sometimes in a hostel for homeless men in Footscray. He received unemployment benefits and spent them on alcohol and, on happy days when he could score, marijuana.
So this was Darren Jason Blackburn at the age of 26, in the late 1990s: homeless, unemployed, separated from his girlfriend and two young children. Hopeless, suffering from untreated paranoid schizophrenia, his days revolved entirely around getting drunk and stoned. Nothing else mattered. He was existing, just, in western Melbourne and outlying towns like Werribee, simply waiting for the fates to pick him up and drag him by the scruff of his neck into the future.
Back in July 1989, a former US serviceman and his wife had been busted in Honolulu for receiving 10 kilograms of ice from an Asian syndicate. A police crackdown on marijuana plantations in Hawaii was having a predictable effect: the drug trade shifted from the high-risk but less dangerous pot plantation to the lower-risk and more profitable methamphetamine lab. By the mid-1990s, Hawaii had a crystal meth problem as bad as the mainland US West Coast. Though originally synthesised in Japan, East Asian ice was now being made cheaply and less riskily in Taiwan and South Korea, then smuggled down the east Asian archipelago and across the Pacific. Ice was also being manufactured in the Philippines and trafficked directly to the nearest American states: Hawaii, California and Oregon.