The Ice Age
THE ICE AGE
Luke Williams is an Australian journalist. He has previously worked as a reporter and broadcaster at ABC radio. His written work has been published in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Saturday Paper, the Brisbane Times, Crikey, The Global Mail, The Weekend Australian, and Eureka Street. In 2013 he was nominated for a Human Rights Media Award for a long-form investigative piece in The Global Mail, and in 2014 his article on ice addiction, ‘Life as a Crystal Meth Addict’, was a finalist in the Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism.
Scribe Publications
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2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom
First published by Scribe 2016
Copyright © Luke Williams 2016
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.
Earlier versions of parts of this manuscript have appeared in various publications, including The Saturday Paper, Good Weekend, and SBS Online.
9781925106848 (pbk.)
9781925307115 (e-book)
A CiP entry for this title is available from the National Library of Australia
scribepublications.com.au
scribepublications.co.uk
CONTENTS
Author’s note
Prologue
One: Ice monsters
Two: Panic!
Three: Converging paths
Four: The hazardous bush
Five: Rise and fall
Six: Every creature has its soft spots
Seven: Ridgey didge
Eight: Wheeling and dealing
Nine: Understanding the lure of crystal meth
Ten: Into the Vortex
Eleven: Parents and thieves
Twelve: The devil
Thirteen: Winter
Fourteen: Bundaberg
Fifteen: Two steps forward, one step back
Sixteen: Beyond excess
Select bibliography
Acknowledgements
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I HAVE DONE my best to recreate events, locales, and conversations from my memories of them, and from my notes. I have in many instances changed the names of individuals, and may also have changed some identifying characteristics and details.
I have recalled the events in this book to the best of my ability, and with the best of intentions. However, at the time of experiencing them, and occasionally at the time of writing about them, I was affected by drugs. At other times, as I recount in the pages that follow, I was experiencing drug-induced psychosis.
As a result, it may be that other peoples’ memories of these events will differ from my own.
Prologue
02/05/2014 12:06
From: Luke Williams
Matt, I wanted to ask you something. I have growing extra-sensory powers since I have started The Journey and have been practising telepathy, I just wanted to see if you or anybody you know have been sending me messages.
02/05/2014 12:08
From: Matt F
Not that I know of.
THE CHEMICAL N-METHYL-1-PHENYL-PROPAN-2-AMINE (C10H15N) better known as ‘crystal meth’ or ‘ice’, is a highly addictive drug that has been linked to murder, violence, savage sadism, and woeful child-neglect. It’s a drug that feels better than sex; a drug made in Nigeria, Iran, Thailand, and in our own kitchen sinks, which is often sent here from southern China. Meth is the world’s strongest stimulant.
Crystal methamphetamine was created in 1919. Thereafter it was sold in pharmacies to treat depression, fatigue, and obesity. It was also used in the military for performance enhancement in several major wars. It was made more or less completely illegal throughout the western world in the 1970s as the result of a particular UN convention. Since then, the black market for crystal meth has grown rapidly. By the 1980s, crystal-meth production and distribution was dominated by American biker gangs, who then joined up with a Mexican cartel, who in turn provided factories to manufacture meth and its precursors.
Powdered meth (also known as speed) has been available in Australia since the mid-1990s, but rates of meth use really started to increase around 2001 — when Asian illicit-drug crime gangs based in the Golden Triangle wound back their heroin production and started producing meth. The gangs appeared to see meth as a more reliable source of income than heroin because the former would not be affected by increasingly unstable weather.
While researching a story about crystal meth in early 2014, I became addicted to the drug, and began using it heavily. I rapidly descended into psychosis.
During that time, I would sometimes send people online messages and emails.
Correspondence with my Aunty
Date: 02/03/14
Subject: My Mum has got dementia
To: AnneXX@yahoo.com.au
From: Luke Williams
Aunty Anne. I know we haven’t spoken in over 10 years. Please I need to talk to you. I know we haven’t spoken in a long time, but I need to tell you how much I miss having your family in my life. Also, I need to talk to you about my Mum, I think she might be dying of dementia. I am very worried about her. I had somebody try to bash me the other day and I rang my parents. They didn’t believe me and said I was on drugs and hung up on me and I was very scared. I am not on any drugs. They keep on using that as an excuse so they don’t have to face up to the issues I had growing up.
Luke
Date: 08/03/14
Re: My Mum has got dementia
To: Luke Williams
From: AnneXX@yahoo.com.au
Luke, I just spoke to your Mum, she is very worried that you are using drugs. Don’t believe that Janet has dementia in any form. I think you probably think that because of the drugs you are taking. She also mentioned you have been threatening to kill your father, and that you left over 20 threatening messages on her phone the other day. I don’t know what to suggest. I think you need help urgently.
Aunty Anne
XXX
Unlike cocaine or heroin, which come from plants, meth is a wholly synthetic drug. Meth is commonly manufactured in illegal, hidden laboratories. Common ingredients include cold and flu tablets, battery acid, drain cleaner, and lantern fuel. Some of the meth that is used in Australia is made in ‘backyard labs’, and often by individual users in their own sinks and bathtubs. In recent times, an increasing proportion of Australia’s crystal meth has been produced overseas, usually smuggled in through air cargo shipped from China and Hong Kong.
Drug manufacturers are getting better at creating purer, stronger meth. The popularity of the drug on the black market meant that a diverse range of international crime gangs got on board to produce and distribute the drug. A more potent variety of crystallised meth began to flood Australia’s illicit-drug market in 2011, and harms caused by crystal meth have been rising all over the nation ever since. User deaths, arrests, homicides, and hospital admissions have all been rising sharply.
Crystal meth is highly addictive, and in Australia it is relatively cheap and easy to obtain. For $50 you can buy a high that lasts for up to twenty-four hours. In low doses, methamphetamine can cause a heightened mood as well as increased alertness, concentration, and energy. At higher doses, it can induce obsessive behaviour, aggressive behaviour, homicidal ideation, psychosis, heart atta
cks, and cerebral haemorrhages.
It is believed that crystal meth (like ecstasy and LSD) causes a rise in a user’s serotonin levels when they first take it. These serotonin levels drop sharply when you are withdrawing from the drug, but during the high — and contrary to popular belief — a person on crystal meth can actually be extremely nice.
Email to my estranged ex (he never replied)
Dear Nats,
I know we had a big, bad break up a few years ago. I know we haven’t spoken since. But I just to let you know that I harbor no ill-feeling toward you, and I think you are a wonderful person.
And don’t forget what an excellent hairdresser you are — your styles are always years ahead of trend.
If you ever need any help with anything let me know.
Luke
X
As my meth addiction grew, I began obsessing over Nathaniel all the time, and began to feel more and more as if it was my fault that we broke up. I felt that we should be back together again.
Over time, I believed he was living near me, sending me telepathic messages, and then that people who visited the house were him in disguise and that people had been hiding this information from me. In particular, a girl who I swore was Nate was sleeping with one of my roommates, and I became enraged with envy at times — I felt homicidal toward him — because I believed he had stolen my ex, and then made him have a sex change.
Correspondence with a former triple j work colleague I hadn’t spoken with in a long time
One of the key affects of meth is that it floods the brain with dopamine.
Dopamine plays an important role in how the brain experiences and interprets pleasure, motivation, and reward. Dopamine also leads to psychotic symptoms, similar to that which someone with paranoid schizophrenia goes through when they are unwell.
One of the most common forms of psychosis I experienced was delusions of reference — from the outset, meth can make you very self-absorbed. I would google myself and find blogs written by people with the same name, and I would have a recurring delusion that these blogs were parodies of me set up by people I used to work with — as you can see from the correspondence below:
15/02/2014
From: Luke Williams
Kate, people are making fun of me everywhere. There is a blog named Luke Williams which has been set up by people to ridicule me and the way I write.
From: Kate Spears
Are you sure you’re not reading into things the wrong way? How are you feeling?
From: Luke Williams
No Kate, people are making fun of me all over the internet. People are using my name and sending me in blogs and videos. It’s because I have been such a nasty, vindictive person all my life. Somebody has even made an entire parody of me, a guy who reckons he is ‘Luke Williams’ has made this ted-ex video.
From: Kate Spears
Mate that’s a different Luke Williams. You have a very very common name. Not everyone on the internet named Luke Williams is you. You are having a psychotic episode where you think everything is related to you when its not. Go for a walk, get some sunshine, get off the internet, I think you are reading things the wrong way.
The other frequent delusion I had was that there was a paedophile ring operating in my suburb, that my roommates were in on it, that the headquarters were located at the local Coffee Club, and that it was my purpose in life to expose it. Then, at other times, I had positive delusions — such as the belief that something mystical was happening in my life, and that my crystal-meth use played no role in these feelings.
Correspondence with a guy I’d met in a nightclub three weeks earlier
02/05/2014
From: Luke Williams
Hi Matt, it was great meeting you in Sydney last month — you and your friends were all very welcoming. I just wanted to tell you — and please don’t freak out about this — I have been using crystal meth.
It’s actually part of a thing called The Journey. I suspect you might have something to do with this, given your interest in mysticism.
I am onto something good, I know it. I have had a couple of ‘episodes’ and some horrible memories came out and now I feel so confident and free. I really feel like I am becoming a better, kinder, more open person through The Journey.
02/05/2014 12:05
From: Matt F
Hey Luke, Thanks for the message, Is everything okay? Do you want to talk on the phone later this arvo?
02/05/2014 12:06
From: Luke Williams
Yes please, thanks, because I wanted to ask you something. I have growing extra-sensory powers since I have started The Journey and have been practising telepathy, I just wanted to see if you or anybody you know have been sending me messages.
02/05/2014 12:08
From: Matt F
Not that I know of.
02/05/2014 12:06
From: Luke Williams
Okay. Do you know anybody who practises witchcraft, because I think one of your friends has cast a spell on me. I feel like I am under some sort of spell, and it is making me change in some way.
Correspondence with my mum
More than 500,000 Australians take powdered and crystallised meth each year, and between 10 per cent and 20 per cent of those are considered to be either abusers of the drug or addicted to it.
The Victorian and Northern Territory parliaments have both held official inquiries into the crystal-meth problem in their communities. The New South Wales Police Commissioner, Andrew Scipione, has said that if we don’t adequately address this problem, it’s not an overstatement to say that ‘[crystal meth] could bring us to our knees as a nation’. Gordian Fulde, the head of emergency at Sydney’s St Vincent Hospital, says he finds ice users to be the ‘most violent human beings I have seen’. In New South Wales, Australia’s most populated state, places such as western New South Wales, Nowra, and Mt Druitt are showing signs of having the highest rates of harm caused by meth. While Western Australia has the highest per-capita meth use, Queensland remains Australia’s meth-production capital, and crystal-meth use is increasing across all of South Australia and Tasmania.
There have been extraordinarily long waiting lists to get into rehabs and even to see a drug counsellor in many parts of the country — particularly in regional Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory. This often leaves users in the hands of family members, who are in turn at a loss as to what to do.
Date: 02/06/14
Subject: Please Help
To: janetwilliamsXX@dodo.com.au
From: Luke Williams
Mum,
I am sorry about everything. Please help me, please I am scared.
Please help me.
Chapter One
Ice monsters
I SMELT LIKE a dead pig. My hair looked awful. There were dark rings around my eyes, and dog-shit on my teeth. Smithy wouldn’t stop masturbating. Daytime television was blaring all over the house — NYPD Blue, Hawaii-50, JAG. There were never-ending television programs running in our heads, too. Smithy’s sexual fantasies were particularly vivid and enduring, full of highly skilled method actors who knew his tastes perfectly well — right down to the costumes, and the lack of dialogue and backstory. There were all kinds of different people in guest-star roles, in long-running plots, doing whatever Smithy wanted and liking whatever he liked: saucy librarians, the people next-door, a horny, rough-necked bisexual couple, and so on.
Smithy was in a sexual-fantasy world that released him from his most pressing, most unpleasant, and most urgent real-life problems as the father of three kids. But on this day, these fantasies were being used for another, more deliberate purpose — distraction and metaphor. Things seemed normal — dare I say, suspiciously normal. I’d just worked out that Smithy had been conspiring to kill me for months, and that my parents were
paying him to do it.
Here’s how it panned out: it was a bright Tuesday autumn afternoon, and we were in the middle of a meth binge. Just another day in Pakenham, really. Smithy was wearing a red T-shirt and white tracksuit pants; I was in my tartan ‘daytime’ pyjamas. We were sitting in the lounge room of Smithy’s neat, new, spotlessly clean home. Three bedrooms, two living areas, furniture assembled around televisions, a 1997 computer with no internet, and smooth white walls, one with a framed picture of the 1991 Collingwood football team posing and smiling as if they were in a school photo.
As usual, the curtains were closed, and the scent of bleach (and bong smoke) was in the air. Clean carpets, filthy minds: when Smithy wasn’t cleaning, he was usually masturbating, for six to eight hours at a time, stopping only to pull a bong. Having visitors rarely stopped him.
Smithy masturbated so much because he shot up meth. I suppose you could call him a junkie. He was also an occasional drug-dealer, a long-time friend, and a full-time house cleaner — a cricket-loving, needle-using, dole-bludging Collingwood fan. He’d adapted poorly to new technology, feminism, and the demand for high-skilled workers — in fact, I could probably save some time by just referring to him as ‘Smithy from the 80s’, because in many ways it’s as if he never left them. A graduate of rehab and the army, he had also, about three years earlier, graduated from ‘truckie speed’ to using meth full-time. He had a track mark that looked like a chunky, purple birthmark.
He was constantly pulling shady little scams to get by, and he must have sensed the opportunity for another one a few weeks earlier when I’d pissed my parents off. He and my dad must have discussed the plot at length over the phone at night, while I was in bed. My dad would hand over $5,000 now, and then another $5,000 when the deed was done.
Smithy had been dropping hints all day that there was a plot to kill me. He’d been yelling at me about the state of my skin, my odour, the fact I hadn’t shaved in over a month, and my tendency to put my plates away in the bookshelf instead of in the sink. What this meant, though, was that Mum and Dad were paying him to slip me small, untraceable bits of arsenic mixed with doses of crystal meth. They knew full well that I had a history of drug addiction, loved living in a fantasy world, and that I couldn’t say no to the world’s most powerful stimulant — the perfect potion to hide your poison in. Smithy had been giving my dad regular updates on my ‘progress’ for weeks, and every time I left the room, my roommates would snicker. The plan was all falling into place — I had been so off-my-face for the past month, I hadn’t even noticed what was going on.