by Malcolm Knox
‘Crystal was performance-enhancing in every way,’ he says significantly. ‘It made me feel like a porn star. But that was the thing about it that made it a bit weird, like I was watching myself doing it, and I could do it for hours and hours, and it was more like watching than doing. In a funny way that was arousing, watching yourselves in a porn video, but it also got in the way of a sort of satisfaction. When it was over, you didn’t just flop over on the bed and have a chat or go to sleep. You wanted to get up and watch TV, or go out, or do it again. It was kind of weird, because it was the best sex you could ever have and at the same time it was completely unsatisfying.’
The rules within which Mark and Vicki operated had another drawback: they were at the mercy of friends who were supplying them. Crystal was so cheap that nobody ever asked for money. The pipe was passed, and it was understood that they were getting high for a night on about fifty bucks’ worth. It wasn’t like coke, where you had to pitch in two or three hundred dollars for a big night. Crystal was free.
But there was also a powerlessness about the set-up that agitated both Mark and Vicki. They couldn’t decide to have a ‘crystal night’ off their own bat. They’d go to a party and hope they were included in the invitations to the bathroom. After one party, where for some reason their crystal friends didn’t show, Mark and Vicki left early and had a fight. The fight wasn’t about anything important, but they both knew, without confessing it to each other, that it grew out of disappointment at being wound up for a crystal night and it not happening.
That was the last such quarrel, because at a small party the following month (a certain type of party was becoming more regular, and smaller; instead of six or seven crystal users at a party of sixty or seventy people, they now went to parties of just fifteen or twenty, all crystal users), a dealer came along. Mark put down some money, he and Vicki smoked at the coffee table with everyone else, and the dealer said to Mark: ‘Can I have your wife’s mobile number?’ Mark looked at Vicki. They’d say yes to anything, in this mood, to this guy.
‘Why?’ Mark said.
‘You’ll see,’ the dealer said.
Vicki piped up, telling the dealer her number. Immediately the dealer called her and hung up. His number registered on Vicki’s ‘Received Calls’ list.
‘Now you have me,’ the dealer said, looking at Vicki.
She and Mark found it funny, and not the least bit sleazy, as the dealer was only about twenty and wore slightly ridiculous oversized clothes. What Vicki and Mark both saw was the main prize.
So a fortnight later, when they were going to a wedding on a Saturday night, they called him and he gave them two points of crystal for a hundred and twenty dollars. It wasn’t the usual crystal night: it was a dull family wedding, an excruciating prospect alleviated only by the promise of crystal enhancement. It was a Saturday night, not a Friday, but exceptions had to be made. Vicki and Mark had the overnight babysitting arranged.
The wedding was a riot, as enjoyable as any wedding they’d ever been to, but Vicki and Mark smoked the whole deal by midnight and had to call the dealer again. He turned up at the function centre within the hour and gave Vicki a kiss on the cheek as he handed over another two points.
‘That weekend was a kind of a breakthrough,’ Vicki says. She and Mark smoked a little on the Sunday morning, ‘just like a strong coffee to get through the day’, and then—‘only because we had some left’—they both had a smoke after dropping their daughters at school and preschool on the Monday morning. ‘We decided we couldn’t go back to work with some of it still in the house,’ Vicki says. ‘It’d be burning a hole in our heads while it sat there, so we thought it was best just to get rid of it, and make Monday bearable at the same time. Two birds with one stone kind of thing.’
Once they owned the direct line to the dealer, Vicki and Mark had the freedom to use crystal as and when they wanted. They bought their own ice pipe which they christened ‘Tax’, the nickname of one of their friends back in Thailand who’d introduced them to shabu. They loved the way the smoke curled up through Tax, and how bringing Tax out of his cubby-hole in the garage after the children had gone to bed was invariably a herald of good times.
Through 2003, life was still good; in fact, better than ever. They kept their crystal use within limits, though those limits were more rubbery than they used to be. Once Vicki had a smoke by herself—the first time—but it was when she’d landed after a red-eye trans-Pacific flight at 6 am, dropped in at home at 8.30, and had to get herself ready for a day at work. If that wasn’t a good reason to spark up, what was? And Mark had told her that he’d had a smoke one night while she was away, so he owed her one.
Not that she told him she’d had that pre-work smoke. In fact, not telling Mark was part of the buzz of it, she thought as she packed Tax away ‘exactly as I’d found him’. Some days, when Mark was giving her the shits on the phone, she’d pretend the line was bad and hang up. Sometimes she left her mobile switched off when she knew he’d be calling. There wasn’t any point to it; it was just for the sake of having that place for herself, to be somewhere no one, not even Mark, could go. She’d always had a secretive streak, and the longer she’d been married and a mother the more she craved this private place. Even though that place only belonged to her imagination—switching her phone off or pretending not to hear it wasn’t a real place—it was important to her. Increasingly important. One day Vicki told Mark she was going out to the shops. She got in the car, drove to a park, turned the car stereo to maximum volume, and had a ‘very, very, very small puff’. It wasn’t that she needed the high. She needed to be alone. She had read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which gave her little secret puffs an intellectual underpinning. ‘I wasn’t forming a drug habit; I was doing something that all married women need to do,’ she says. Then, drily, not believing herself for a moment: ‘Ha, ha, ha.’
Substance abuse has always been a consequence, as much as a cause, of family breakdown. Melbourne brickie Novica Jakimov, who we last saw separating from his wife in 2001 after three years of marriage, had for a long time been a casual, weekend drug user. Once he was single again, he dived headfirst into his version of the bachelor lifestyle.
Jakimov, now 34, was an experienced amphetamine user whose behaviour was taken to a new, supercharged level with ice. It revved him up, making him feel invincible. It cleared his head of the guilt he’d felt over how he’d treated his wife. It helped him forget the frustration of trying, so hard yet without success, to win her back. It also pumped up his sexual appetite.
His routine became Janus-faced: one day he would visit his wife to try to make up with her, and then he would go out and score some ice, roam the streets of St Kilda or the Crown Casino in search of a prostitute, and take his new friend home to smoke some more.
It was on one of these nocturnal roamings that Jakimov met Kelly Hodge. On 18 August 2003, a cold Melbourne winter’s night, he left his rented flat in Erinbank Crescent in the suburb of West Meadows and cruised the St Kilda area. He would later tell a court that he met Kelly Hodge while he was gambling at Crown Casino, but Hodge had been seen in St Kilda that night and Jakimov’s evidence in court was so inconsistent that his trial judge concluded that it was impossible to say exactly where Jakimov picked up Hodge.
Hodge, 26, was a heroin addict who lived with her grandmother. On 18 August, she said goodnight to her grandmother at about 10.30 pm and went out to work. She was a slim young woman with dyed blonde hair, going to work in tight-fitting black knitted tops and short skirts or jeans.
At around midnight, Hodge met a client and had sex with him. The assignation lasted about 45 minutes, and he left her back in St Kilda where he’d picked her up. Some time later that night, she met Novica Jakimov. It’s unknown whether or not this was the first time they had crossed paths.
Eight days later, a motorist spotted a bundle in a gully beside Old Sydney Road in Beveridge, just outside Melbourne. The police were called. Trussed up inside a bl
ack plastic sheet, further insulated by a red blanket, was the decomposing body of Kelly Hodge.
A police forensic pathologist performed a post-mortem examination on Hodge that day, finding some terrible injuries. Her right forehead had been punctured, leaving a bloody dent, ‘like something done by a cookie cutter’. Whatever had caused the injury had also punched into her temple and her nose. Her face bore other lacerations and bruises, including two black eyes and a cut in her left lower eyelid. The inside of her mouth was bruised and abraded, as was her right ear. There was a patterned graze on the right side of her face.
Her knees and hips were bruised, and there were tears inside her vagina, ‘implying blunt force, stretching’, which the pathologist thought could not have been the result of normal sexual intercourse but rather from a foreign object.
Her airways were clogged with vomit, which might, the doctor said, have resulted from the head trauma. She had received eleven blows to the head. The ‘punched-out’ wounds were unlike anything the doctor had seen before; ditto his colleagues. They might have been caused, the doctor said, by something like the shaft of a broken umbrella. The vaginal injuries might have been caused by wooden furniture.
All of these injuries appeared to have been sustained in a very short period of time, perhaps only minutes: an assault of pure frenzy.
It was only by accident that the police began to suspect that Novica Jakimov had anything to do with Kelly Hodge’s death. On 10 October, seven weeks after Kelly’s body was found, police had to interview Jakimov about a stolen mobile phone. The phone was in the possession of a man called Julio Gamo, who worked with Jakimov. Gamo told police that Jakimov had given it to him in late August. When the police caught up with Jakimov, he spilt out a story that he and another man, Pat Zaffina, had met Kelly Hodge on 19 August and had taken her to his house in West Meadows. He and Zaffina had both taken drugs with her and had consensual sex with her, he said, and then all three went their separate ways.
Because the murder was unsolved, the police tracked down Pat Zaffina, who told them that he’d been with neither Jakimov nor Hodge on 19 August.
When the police returned to Jakimov’s house in Erinbank Crescent, he’d cleared out, even though he was only three months into a twelve-month lease. After obtaining a warrant to search the house on 17 November, police found Kelly Hodge’s blood on the carpet in a bedroom and the hallway. They also found a smashed windowpane that might have caused some of her lacerations.
All they had to do now was find Novica Jakimov.
Everett Ellinwood had predicted the shortcoming of later studies of the methamphetamine–crime link. He predicted that information would be hard to come by because ‘amphetamine abuse [is] not even considered in the initial evaluation. One wonders whether the reported incidents of amphetamine-induced assault and homicide would not be much higher if physicians were more fully aware of the problem’.
In Australia by the beginning of the twenty-first century, it would be physicians, nurses and paramedics who were at the frontline, and consequently best able to illuminate the true extent of methamphetamine use and its consequences.
Beaver Hudson was a new arrival from Wales when he started work in the emergency department of St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney in 1998. A nurse, Hudson had the size and build of a back-row forward for one of the great Welsh rugby-playing provinces of Llanelli or Pontypridd. And he came with a rugby forward’s no-nonsense attitude, which he needed; emergency departments are no place for the faint-hearted at the best of times, and things at St Vincent’s emergency were about to turn rough.
‘When I first came here, the prominent drugs of abuse were alcohol and opiates,’ Hudson says. ‘Ecstasy was around, but crystal meth was not noticeable. We didn’t have a great need for mental health professionals, because they weren’t too involved in opiate cases.’
It was in 2002 and 2003 that Hudson and other nurses, as well as their department director, Dr Gordian Fulde, started talking among themselves about a new type of presentation that was becoming more and more prevalent.
‘The amount of agitated people requiring higher levels of sedation was increasing,’ Hudson remembers. ‘We began noticing bizarre side effects—the parasitation, feeling itchy under their skins, scratching until they had scabs. An Aboriginal girl who was frequently in here was digging into her temple with nail scissors, saying she had to get a worm that was in there.
‘There was all this new kind of physical damage. People with burns on their hands from smoking, sores, a man with an abscess in his penis who was trying to drain it by cutting it with a Stanley knife.’
Hudson’s initial guess was that these episodes were caused by cocaine. There was the agitation, the nervous energy, and sometimes the patients said they had smoked or snorted ‘crack’.
‘I thought it was cocaine, but how could these people get so much of it? Cocaine would have been too expensive for these people to take enough to produce these kinds of reactions.’
What was most worrying about these patients, for a nurse, was how resistant they were to sedation. Normally, sedatives are the emergency nurse’s best friend. But somehow, sedatives weren’t working as well.
‘People were presenting much more aggressive and agitated, and police presentations were on the increase, so they were more serious matters,’ Hudson says. ‘To sedate someone, 20 milligrams of intravenous Valium should be sufficient. Now we were needing 80–200 milligrams.’
The nurses and doctors discussed what was causing it.
‘We started thinking these people were totally barking. Why were they benzo-tolerant? There was no surefire, cost-effective, accurate way of finding out what they’d been taking, so we couldn’t develop responses.’
The incidents worsened; while the worst flare-ups of violence might usually have been restricted to Friday and Saturday nights, patients were now coming into the hospital every day and night of the week, throwing chairs, screaming at staff, launching themselves at walls. Stories of ‘Incredible Hulk’ episodes began to spread: patients displaying superhuman strength to break out of restraints or escape from the hospital. It wasn’t cocaine, and it certainly wasn’t heroin. Alcohol seemed to be playing some part in it, but it couldn’t be alcohol alone.
The users themselves, eventually, provided the key.
‘They told us they’d been smoking amphetamines in crystal form,’ Hudson says. ‘Smoking is an accessible way of getting it into your system. It’s socially acceptable, compared with injecting, and efficient, and not as painful as snorting can be. And it was a purer form. The purer forms last longer and hit harder. You can take either the expressway to destruction or the scenic route. They were all suddenly on the expressway.’
The resistance to sedatives, the hospital’s staff discovered, was both a consequence and part and parcel of the ice user’s routine.
‘Ice users are polydrug users. They use depressants to come down. Benzodiazepines. They develop a tolerance for that, and need higher doses. So this was why normal doses that we were giving them weren’t sedating them. But we had to be careful, because higher doses bring in a risk of respiratory arrest. We can’t dose people too highly, or we’ll kill them.’
The medical staff were walking a fine line, but circumstances were quickly spinning out of their control. Unsedated, uncontrolled ice users were going berserk in the ward.
‘We had a man come in suffering auditory hallucinations— he’d ploughed into a line outside a club. There were meth users who’d crashed their cars. They’d come in with ambulance officers and, even though they had head injuries, they’d be in a combative state.
‘There was a general concern, even alarm, among emergency staff about the amount of violence we were seeing,’ Hudson says.
‘At that time, staff were desensitised to violence—the name-calling and the destruction from the patients were seen as all part of being in emergency at St Vincent’s. I was absolutely appalled at what the staff had to put up with, and what they
accepted.’
Hudson wasn’t the only medical worker in the country astonished by the upsurge in violence. St Vincent’s in Darlinghurst is at the epicentre of illicit drug use in Australia’s biggest city, but the emergency department’s concerns were by no means unique. Not only were other hospitals feeling the threat, but so were individual general practitioners. One, Dr Chris Towie, from the outer-Melbourne suburb of Broadmeadows, told the ABC that while alcoholics posed the most regular day-in, day-out problem with violence, ‘the severity of the violence with the ice users is the issue’.
‘Probably, at the moment, once every three months I get physically assaulted and have to take fairly drastic measures to defend myself. But I’m a fairly big fellow and I can deal with it. It really troubles me, what happens to other doctors who are less burly and self-confident. The level of violence is so terrifying. The worst attack I had, I really thought I was going to get killed. I was absolutely ready to die. And that was just in the waiting room, in the clinic. I shouldn’t be feeling like that. And so, [ice] takes on more importance than the alcoholics, who are rarely violent to that degree. But these people are on an adrenalin rush—it’s an adrenalin rush on steroids, if you like—they’re really souped up and they don’t stop.’
Awareness of the threat to frontline health workers was spreading. A well-known Victorian drug counsellor, Richard Smith from the Raymond Hader Clinic, said that whereas in sixteen years of counselling he had never been physically threatened, in 2003 and 2004 he was seriously menaced four times by violent ice users. Research at Monash University found that 39 per cent of GPs suffered work-related violence. In response, some had resorted to using security cameras, panic buttons, and even guard dogs and capsicum spray to protect themselves. The Australian Medical Association recommended that GPs install furniture that could not be easily thrown, and position their desks where they could make a quick escape from a violent patient. ‘We try to have the doctor sitting closer to the door than the patient so they can get out quicker if they need to,’ said AMA (NSW) vice-president Dr Brian Morton.