The ice town where meth use is so rampant it has been nicknamed the ‘South Pole’

[poledriver]

The ice town where meth use is so rampant it has been nicknamed the ‘South Pole’

A DISTURBING interim report into methamphetamine use has revealed Australians consume more ice than any other country.
But the residents of one central New South Wales town aren’t prepared to wait for the National Ice Taskforce to act. They’re taking matters into their own hands.
The ice scourge is so bad in Wellington, population 4540, it has earned the nicknamed the South Pole.
“We all walk past drug dealers every day. You know, we’re related to drug dealers, we have associations with them, we love — we love our people ... we just don’t love what they do,” Wellington Land Countil’s Leanne Stanley told ABC’s 7.30.
“We’ve just become immune to it and that it’s not something that — it’s not like, ‘Oh, my goodness!,’ a big deal. It’s like, ‘Oh, there’s a syringe.’ Go and grab a bottle, what have you, to pick it up.”

The methamphetamine epidemic is felt so widely that neighbours and friends in Wellington are being encouraged to dob one another in. Police and locals have set up a hotline so those with information don’t even have to report to a police station.
“The emerging theme over the last 12, 18 months especially in Wellington has been the ice problem,” said Senior Sergeant Simon Madgwick.
“But I think what’s important is Wellington is we’re not sticking our heads in the sand. We’re not just gonna stand idly by and accept that drugs are a problem. This community has taken control and that’s what’s important.”

A TV crew filmed one routine encounter with a suspected ice user, who was pulled off a train with his badly injured girlfriend after reports of a disturbance on board.
The highly agitated man, known as John, can be seen arguing with Senior Sergeant Madgwick, who searches him for evidence of drug use.
As officers assist his partner Candy, who has a fractured eye socket, John wrestles free from the policeman’s grip and makes a run for it.
“He’s under the influence of ice, so he’s got superhuman, like, running speed. That’s what it felt like to me,” Senior Sergeant Madgwick said.

Wellington local Ed Daley was addicted to ice for nearly a decade. He has been clean for a year but fears he’ll be lured back without more support.
“It’s so cheap, you know. 50 bucks, 100 bucks could keep you up for three or four days,” he told the program.
“I could probably get $2,200, $2,300 on my pay cheque at six o’clock and it’d be gone by nine o’clock, without buying myself a can of drink or a packet of chips.”
The National Ice Taskforce, led by former police chief commissioner of Victoria Ken Lay, has received 1300 submissions on the problem.
The taskforce has admitted there is no single approach to tackle it, but will instead focus on a six-point strategy covering law enforcement, prevention, early intervention and treatment, support and services, including for frontline workers, and better research and data.
It is due to had its final report to the Council of Australian Government before the end of the year.

http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/he...d-the-south-pole/story-fneuzlbd-1227454993765

 

[S.J.B.]

A DISTURBING interim report into methamphetamine use has revealed Australians consume more ice than any other country.

Anyone know which report is being referred to here? I am sceptical of this claim, especially given the fact that this website has misinterpreted and misrepresented statistics in other stories I have read.

 

[poledriver]

I'm not sure, but also from the same online news site today they also have this (I wont bother with a new thread) -

Growing up in rehab: Parents battling ice addictions bring children to treatment

WHEN eight-year-old Sally* gets home from school she changes out of her clothes and heads downstairs to play in the well-equipped playground-sized backyard outside the family’s homely two-bedroom unit.
She might watch TV for a while or play with her two younger siblings before dinner, usually cooked by her dad and shared with the neighbours. She’ll draw a picture or two to be stuck on the crowded fridge beside more of her artwork and perhaps read the latest story she’s written to the younger kids.

“She loves reading, she reads everything,” her dad Mark, 36, says. “Books, letters, and the signs. There’s signs everywhere. You try and keep it away from them but they still pick it up.”
“Residential rehabilition”, “Therapeutic community”, “A calm in the sea of addiction” read signs dotted around the Western Sydney property where this and other families live, and when Sally reads them out it’s a reminder of exactly where they are. These kids are growing up in rehab.

IT’S THE BEST THING FOR US

“My mum thinks I live in a hospital full of junkies and that I’ve taken the kids to a jail — a jail full of junkies,” Mark says.
“She thinks the kids don’t need to be here, but as much as I didn’t want to come, I know now that I need to be here and that this is the best thing for me and for them as well.”

Mark moved in to Odyssey House residential rehabilitation facility in Eagle Vale after Sally, Tom*, 5, and Claire*, 1, were removed from his care in April last year. He’d broken the ice habit that had consumed him since his teens but had developed a strong dependence on alcohol and weed and was ordered to go to rehab — for the fourth time.

Even though he fought the admission order, Mark was eventually struck with the realisation he had to really turn his life around if he wanted to keep his kids. It was after he started his treatment at the facility’s detox unit and was informed of its Parents and Children’s Program he found a new motivation to.

Mark’s three youngest kids moved in to Odyssey House in September of last year after with the help of a staff member from the facility the department of Family and Community Services decided it was suitable for them to be there with their dad.
They entered the centre, one of only a handful in Australia that cater for patients with dependent children, subscribing to its goals of “breaking the generational cycle of drug misuse” and “nurturing family relationships to help children and parents to realise their full potential”.

“When I lost them it was a nightmare really, I didn’t know what to do,” Mark says from inside the shared living room of the unit he’s called home for 15 months now.
It’s spacious and light and clean and comfortable and doesn’t look like the sort of place you’d fight to stay out of.

“It took me a while to realise that I needed to be in here. It’s not wanting to lose them again and wanting to set a good example. Even though they’re sort of starting off here I don’t want them to end up in a place like this, and I feel like I owe it to my parents to be good now,” he says.

“I’m just over it. I want to set a good example for the kids and have a normal life. I’ve had enough of all the hecticness.”

IT JUST TAKES OVER YOUR LIFE

Mark’s life turned hectic when he joined a gang at the age of 14. He started selling the drug ice at 16 and after a few months wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
That was back in 1996 when “ice wasn’t big”, he says, and while he says it was a different drug back then it was just as dangerous.

“Not many people really knew about it and everyone was only smoking it, no one was really injecting. It was a lot better, as in, more pure than what’s around now and it was cheaper too. You wouldn’t burn out so quickly,” he says.
“I was hooked and I kept going back but I mainly got myself into trouble selling. I’ve been stabbed a couple of times, robbed, I’ve been caught by the police and nearly ended up in jail and owed bikies thousands of dollars.”
But Mark didn’t mind the hectic lifestyle. He fit in and made good money. It took a few major roadblocks and years of crime and addiction for him to even think about breaking the cycle.

It was only ever when forced that the young dad entered rehab programs and never finished one. The first time was after he was arrested for kidnapping one of his mates and went to rehab to fight charges.
Each time he’d leave a program he’d stay clean for a while then relapse after a year or so and start selling again until he was caught by police and sent to another facility.
Although he tried to avoid it at all costs Mark now finally realises rehab is what he needed, and he realises the need for others more and more as the ice epidemic he says he was once an instigator of, spreads and destroys families in its path.

I DIDN’T JUMP IN AT THE SHALLOW END

It was ice that destroyed Sam’s life and set her on the path that led her to getting it back in order at Odyssey House where she resides her two children Grace*, 2, and Jack*, 1. The three of them live in a unit with a communal living room, kitchen and laundry shared with two other families. The house mirrors the one where Mark’s family lives about 50 metres away.
Sam says she’s taken the hard road to get here, but finally feels like she’s on the right track.

About seven years ago with two kids already in foster care, the young mum began using ice while working as a promotional model at the age of 20.
“I was getting lots of jobs, making good money and my goal was to try and get my children back but I went around it the wrong way,” she says.

“The girls (colleagues) were using it and I tried it. I didn’t jump in the shallow end of the pool either. It was great the first time but after that I needed more. Within two weeks I was injecting.”
Sam’s plan to make some money and prove she could be a good mother was torn apart when ice interrupted. She ended up homeless and endured five or six years of peak addiction.
Her only relationships were with drug dealers and other drug users, and an intensely violent relationship only increased her dependency.

“My mum got bashed and ran over and brutally beaten probably for the first 20 years of my life and I thought it was OK. It was just what I saw and she drilled it into our heads that you don’t say anything so that’s what I thought,” she says.
“I only got bashed a few times but when I did it was really bad. He was just horrible to me. He’d take my money, he’d kill my pets, he wasn’t a nice person … After I left him I stupidly went back and ended up in hospital after four days … Ice just blocks everything out and I didn’t have to think about losing my kids, about having no family, I didn’t have to think about anything.”

I KNEW I HAD TO GET OUT

Sam managed to leave that relationship but kept using ice. She stayed clean during pregnancy with Grace but started using again shortly after her daughter was born and made the decision to seek help.
“I’d always fought against (FACS) and never wanted anything to do with them or my kids, but I never thought maybe they were trying to help me the whole time. It was the first time I was honest with them when I decided I needed help and I told them I just had to go to rehab.”

Sam has now been in the Parents and Children’s Program for 19 months. After referring her to the program the department ensured her daughter was well looked after before she was reinstalled to Sam’s care and the then one-year-old joined mum after three months.
It’s the 28-year-old’s first time in rehab and she’s determined for it to be her last.

“I came here because I wanted to opportunity to do this with my kids. It’s twice the length of the adult’s program but I don’t care. I’m working on two things while I’m here instead of having to go out raw, fresh out of addiction and then figuring out how to be a parent, here I’m doing both,” she says.

In a few months Sam will graduate to the final stage of her rehab program and work on re-entering society with her family. She’ll likely have lost most of her teeth by 30, healthy circulation is unlikely to return to her arms and those cysts on her kidneys won’t be going away any time soon. But she’s keen to find a house, a job and get the kids into school and be “a normal family”, putting ice behind her.

KIDS IN REHAB, ARE YOU SURE?

Even the program’s co-ordinator Melissa Eldridge had her doubts about the idea of families living together in a drug rehabilitation facility before she started there nine years ago.
“Even myself, when I came for the job interview, you half expect to see people shuffling around in their pyjamas and slippers, comatose, but it’s completely the opposite,” she says.

“It’s a therapeutic community so we’re all part of the community. We’re all here to assist one another and to teach and learn.”

While parents and children’s facilities have their critics, Odyssey House’s program boasts a high success rate as well as a long waiting list, having to turn away several families a year.

Seventy per cent of the program’s residents are referrals from FACS. In a statement to news.com.au, the department said it recognised the links between the misuse of drugs and influence on child outcomes.
“For some families, accessing programs that provide holistic treatment that attends to their multiple needs can be most effective and often, produces the best outcomes for children,” a spokesman said.

“There is not a simple or single solution to parental substance abuse. However, families fare best when they are engaged in the process of treatment, feel a part of the treatment and have a commitment to the treatment. Parents who have limited social support and live socially isolated lives are at greater risk for poor parenting practices.”

Cont -

http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/re...ren-to-treatment/story-fnq2o7dd-1227455263587

 

[forgotten_username]

Anyone know which report is being referred to here? I am sceptical of this claim, especially given the fact that this website has misinterpreted and misrepresented statistics in other stories I have read.

Who knows where they get their facts from, but guessing they mean per capita.?
Besides weed and meth most of our other drugs are piss poor, depending on who ya know of course, so meth is as common as weed maybe more so. USA and other countries have the luxury of high quality opiates both pharma n street, coke, mdma and all at a fraction of the cost of what we would pay
You can get meth at really any pub/club. Shit I know ppl who lay down a greenback for 15 zanny bars and even worst costs for pharma opiods without citing prices and even HIGHER prices for meth. Pfft.

IT JUST TAKES OVER YOUR LIFE

Mark’s life turned hectic when he joined a gang at the age of 14. He started selling the drug ice at 16 and after a few months wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
That was back in 1996 when “ice wasn’t big”, he says, and while he says it was a different drug back then it was just as dangerous.

“Not many people really knew about it and everyone was only smoking it, no one was really injecting. It was a lot better, as in, more pure than what’s around now and it was cheaper too. You wouldn’t burn out so quickly,” he says.

Very true, newly formed ICE task force just a little bit late! The shit back in the day was better Marky Mark