Scattered by Malcolm Knox

Author:Malcolm Knox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRU000000
ISBN: 9781741763393
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2008-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

COMING DOWN

2004–2008

By the beginning of 2004, much new knowledge was being accumulated about how ice was used in Australia. While attention was drawn to bizarre and horrific crimes, attacks on paramedics, wild behaviour in hospital emergency rooms, and police busts of meth labs and importation rings, surveys were showing that the vast majority of Australians smoking ice were doing it occasionally, with the purpose of enhancing their weekend party experience.

The Victorian Youth Alcohol and Drug Survey 2003 found that 52 per cent of under-25s had used cannabis at some time in their life, 18.6 per cent had used ecstasy or designer drugs and 16 per cent had used methamphetamine. Meth use was increasing most dramatically, but it’s likely that the figure was understated, as often young party-goers didn’t know what they were taking. At the Enchanted Forest rave at Angaston, South Australia, in December 2003, three hundred people who bought what they thought was ecstasy consented to having their pills tested. A majority contained methamphetamine, and six people at the rave were taken to hospital suffering its effects.

The Australian Drug Foundation reported that 60 per cent of Melbourne clubbers said they had recently taken some kind of party drug. An NDARC study found that ‘party drug’ users established a pattern of smoking the drug on Friday nights, staying up throughout Saturday, winding down on Sunday afternoons, and then crashing. These users didn’t like Mondays, sometimes known as ‘eccie Monday’ for the cause of the crash. And the NDARC report threw some more useful light on who the average ice user was. Contradicting the alarmist picture of a homeless junkie, the median clubbing user was 27 years old, male, employed, and with secondary qualifications.

Until he killed Giuseppe Vitale, Trent Jennings had been one of a large population of young adults who enjoyed dance parties and nightclubs with the help of ice and ecstasy. A British researcher, Gary Leigh, observed that ice was having an effect on dance-floor trends. He noted ‘darker, much more aggressive music’ between the hours of 2 and 6 am, when ‘the crystal vibe sets in’.

Among specific party subcultures, urban gay communities were at the leading edge of using crystal meth, the first cohort to discover its consequences and the first to take action to combat it. The commander of the NSW drug squad, David Laidlaw, believes members of the Australian gay community had been smoking crystal as early as 1998, ‘but they have now become aware of its highly addictive nature and impact due to the increased risk-taking behaviour associated with the drug, including the likelihood of contracting blood-borne viruses such as HIV and hepatitis C’.

In a Sydney Morning Herald article published on 12 January 2004, Jock Cheetham wrote that gay men were combining crystal with Viagra to produce ‘hypersexual activity’. One of his subjects, ‘Ricardo’, spoke of having been anally raped while on crystal meth. Meanwhile a central Sydney doctor, John Byrne, told me that his gay patients reported an overwhelming and sometimes out-of-character desire to be the ‘bottom’ in a sex act while on ice.

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