The Australian, 12 October 2006, journalist Cameron Stewart
Scourge of the ice age
SOME walk stark naked into the emergency ward. Others throw furniture and abuse nursing staff, taking up to five people to restrain them. The quiet ones will sometimes sit banging their head repeatedly against the wall, oblivious to their blood pooling on the floor. When it comes to drug-induced psychosis, ice has earned a grim reputation for transforming rational office workers into raving lunatics.
Several years ago, such scenes were rare. The surge in amphetamine use in the early 2000s, following the heroin drought, did not leave the trail of mental psychosis that is now confronting medical workers across the country. But several years on, the synthetic drug boom is taking its toll, forcing the nation to confront the cost and look for answers.
No drug is causing more concern than crystal methamphetamine, known on the streets as ice, which claims more addicts across Australia than heroin. "The physical and mental manifestations of this drug are absolutely horrific: it has the potential to destroy generations," NSW Police Commissioner Ken Moroney says.
Ice has become the federal Government's primary target in the war against drugs, with a key frontbencher describing it as the nation's worst drug problem. Christopher Pyne, who as parliamentary secretary for health is responsible for drug policy, says ice is causing more community problems than heroin. "Ice is a scourge on Australian society," Pyne says. "It is, in our war on drugs, our first and No.1 enemy."
The head of the Australian National Council on Drugs, former Howard minister John Herron, who admits his organisation had underestimated the severity of the problem, will release a report with recommendations by the end of next month outlining national policy options for the federal Government to tackle the drug. The Government is planning a tough new advertising campaign specifically targeting the deadly addictive drug as part of a $37million plan announced in the 2006-07 budget to focus on amphetamines in general.
In the meantime, medical staff and police are in the firing line. Such is the violent, wild state of addicts who have overdosed on ice, NSW police will receive special instructions on how to deal with those under its destructive spell. Hospitals are also taking special precautions to ensure the safety of their employees in the face of the uncontrolled rage of some ice users.
Ice, or crystal methamphetamine, is a crystalline form of an illicit drug made from a variety of chemicals that are commonly available. The chief ingredient is pseudoephedrine, which is used in some cold and flu tablets. It is produced by reducing the ephedrine in a process that uses other commonly available chemicals but is often highly flammable and possibly explosive.
It has a street price of $400 a gram and is highly addictive. In a social setting, users smoke the crystals with a pipe. However, many regular users prefer to heat and dissolve the crystals and inject the drug intravenously. It enhances feelings of enjoyment but can lead to drug-induced psychosis, paranoia, delirium, anger and extreme random violence.
On Queensland's Gold Coast, where ice use is rampant, the main hospital puts ice victims in specially designed rooms with foam furniture. "They're paranoid, they're angry, they're delirious, they're disoriented and they can be psychotic," emergency department deputy director David Spain says. "There are specially designed rooms that we use. We have furniture that is made out of foam so they can't throw it at people or at windows or at the doors. The walls have been reinforced because they continually used to get broken by them putting their fists or their feet through them."
More than 100,000 Australians are thought to have used amphetamines in the past 12 months and more than 1000 are believed to have been hospitalised for mental or behavioural disorders. The surge in the use of ice has been known for years but only now is the nation confronting the medical, criminal and social fallout.
At the Australasian Amphetamine Conference in Sydney last month, the first national conference on amphetamine use, experts painted an alarming picture of the costs to the community of the ice age.
The conference findings shocked many, including Herron. "There was a lot of debate as to whether there was a real problem with amphetamines," he says. "(Until) that was put together we didn't realise the real problem: it's a huge problem."
There are no easy solutions to wean addicts off ice or to deal with their destructive psychotic tendencies. Unlike the amphetamine speed, which has a purity of 10 per cent to 20 per cent, crystal methamphetamine has a purity of about 80per cent. It can be smoked, snorted or injected and gives the user a quick and euphoric high, described as a feeling of invincibility. But the comedown from the drug, especially if used in large quantities, can be devastating. Depression, anxiety and sleeplessness are common.
In more extreme cases, psychosis takes over, stripping the user of rationality and control over their behaviour. The psychosis is rarely passive. Ice users who show no signs of violence in their normal lives can fly into a rage without warning.
This is proving to be a burden on the hospital system, which is ill-equipped to deal with the upsurge in violent patients in emergency departments. It is also proving to be a safety issue for a range of emergency workers, including ambulance drivers, who are often the first to come in contact with people suffering ice-induced rages. Police are finding themselves at the coalface of the ice problem, having to restrain violent users on a regular basis. Such is the effect on behaviour that courts are increasingly hearing about crimes committed by ice-abusers. So far, courts have rejected legal argument that being on ice exonerates a person from their crimes.
In July, Sydney financier Brendan McMahon was jailed for 16 months after he blamed his ice addiction for his behaviour in mutilating 17 rabbits and a guinea pig.
"Someone should not be allowed to commit such offences of aggravated cruelty on animals and then say, 'Well, I was using ice at the time, I've been taking cannabis most of my life and I'm sorry'," magistrate Ian Barnett told the court.
Last week a district court judge in Sydney was asked to decide if ice use had caused 28-year-old Canan Eken to bash and order the gang-rape of a teenager. For six months leading up to the assault, Eken said, he had been smoking up to 70 glass pipes of ice a day and claimed his behaviour was the result of a psychotic episode caused by the drug.
The scourge of ice is less tangible and obvious than heroin because it rarely claims the lives of those who overdose. Instead, it creates mental problems that can be long-lasting and debilitating for long-term users of the drug. Unlike heroin, there is no easily available drug to bring relief to ice addicts and wean them off it.
"The real challenge of this drug is that we don't have the treatment options available that we have for heroin and other drugs we encounter," says Gino Vumbaca, executive officer of the Australian National Council on Drugs. "And we are now seeing the problematic drug users coming through the system so we need to be addressing these problems. The (ANCD) will give concrete recommendations to the Government so we can say: 'This is the evidence, this is what we recommend."'
Nick Crofts, director of the Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre in Melbourne, says there are no easy answers to help ice addicts. "When you come to the phenomenon of amphetamine dependence, we don't have ready answers," he says. "You need psychiatric intervention, you need intensive psychological counselling and then there are a range of drugs useful for managing sleep deprivation and depression. It is a package."
The war against ice is complicated by not being confined to one spectrum of the community. The use of ice goes well beyond the party drug, celebrity scene characterised by Hollywood actor Robert Downey Jr, who has been arrested for possession of ice. It is commonly used by bus and truck drivers, taxi drivers and other night-shift workers to help them stay awake and alert.
Unlike heroin, which is largely a working-class drug, ice is also hugely popular among white-collar middle and upper-class professionals. "With heroin you find that generally the same sort of people use it but amphetamines are used by a very wide range of people," says Crofts. He says many of these white-collar ice users are less likely to admit they have a problem until they suffer some sort of psychotic episode. "There are not many alcohol and drug agencies that see people high on ice because many of those people don't tend to think that they have a drug problem so they don't seek treatment," Crofts says. "The places you see them in the acute stages are in emergency departments of hospitals."
Police are addressing the ice scourge by cracking down on suppliers and importers. In Australia the ice market is largely controlled by ethnic and bikie gangs, although in Melbourne the crime families involved in the recent underworld war were also big players. Most of the ice on the streets traditionally has been imported and the supply is plentiful because Asian nations have upped their production of the drug.
"In Asia, production has increased markedly. We cannot ignore what is happening globally, where there is a real shift towards methamphetamines," Vumbaca says.
But, increasingly, local suppliers are skating on to the ice market. According to the Australian Crime Commission, police detected 358 clandestine amphetamine laboratories in Australia last year compared with just 58 in 1996.
On these figures, police face a daunting challenge and hospitals and police across the country can expect to deal with a growing number of victims from the ice age.
