Scattered (20 page)

Peeling back the bulk numbers, however, shows something interesting. Users in 2006 were asked how the use of a particular drug affected their performance of a criminal act. The five drugs in the study were alcohol, cannabis, heroin, benzodiazepines and methamphetamine. The questions were:

Did you use the drug purposely to help you commit the crime? When using the drug at the time of offending, did the drug help you to:

Be more confident or have more courage?

Be more effective or more capable?

Get a rush of excitement or adrenalin?

Become erratic or unpredictable?

Have fun while committing the crime?

Feel less worried about your chances of being caught?

Feel less guilty about your offending?

To each of those questions, methamphetamine came out at or near the top. On making the offender more effective or capable, methamphetamine (72 per cent) gave double the positive response of other drugs. On giving the criminal a rush of excitement or adrenalin, methamphetamine (65 per cent) was the only one to register more than 33 per cent positive. On feelings of confidence, 76 per cent of methamphetamine users said yes. So while methamphetamine was not anywhere near as present in violent criminal activity as were alcohol and cannabis, meth seemed to have become accepted as a drug that specifically rewards and abets the kind of moods that surround violent crime. And among the meth users, 67 per cent said the form they had used before their arrest was crystal. Only 17 per cent named the next most prominent, the drug in its powder form—more indication that ice was having effects that were qualitatively different from old-style speed.

After eight years of DUMA, however, no self-respecting scientist would say that the urine sampling has shown a causal relationship between methamphetamine and violence.

Yet there is science and there is science. It must be remembered that science has yet to prove, irrefutably, that smoking causes lung cancer. Similarly, although no ‘proof' has been established of a causal chain leading from ice use to violent acts, the association has been well known for decades.

As far back as 1971, an eminent American psychiatrist named Everett H. Ellinwood studied the pattern of amphetamine use and violence among thirteen convicted murderers. Of course, such a small sample cannot be taken as being in any way definitive. The possibilities for extrapolation are limited. But what Ellinwood, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Duke University, was doing was to ‘distinguish as clearly as possible the specific types of drugs associated with aggression and violence'.

Ellinwood had observed in the late 1960s something very similar to what was observed in Australia after 2000: ‘stories in the news media have linked the use of drugs with a series of bizarre murders'. First Ellinwood accounted for the low coincidence of opiates and sedatives with violent crime. Then he looked at ‘four persons who committed murder after taking large doses of amphetamines'.

His first case was a 27-year-old truck driver who ‘shot his boss in the back of the head because he thought the boss was trying to release poison gas into the back seat of the car in which he was riding'. In the previous twenty hours, the murderer, Mr A, had ingested 180 milligrams of amphetamines while doing a long-haul drive. He became suspicious that someone had planted drugs in his truck, and even called the police, who took him into a local jail cell for his safety. In the cell, Mr A thought he was being watched from across the street, and then that someone was gassing him. His boss came to pick him up, and showed no sympathy for Mr A's ideas that he was being watched. Mr A then decided that his boss was in on it, and shot him on the way home. Even eighteen months later, Mr A still believed in his paranoid ideas.

Ellinwood's second case was a 26-year-old daily amphetamine user who shot his neighbour after not sleeping for three days and becoming convinced that the neighbour was helping the FBI spy on him.

Mrs C, 32, the third case, had been prescribed amphetamines for weight loss. She found herself growing euphoric on the drug, and took more; then the paranoid delusions set in. She bought a gun because she thought someone would come to kidnap her or her children. Her husband was serving in Vietnam, and while he was away she had an affair. She became more and more suspicious of her lover, and anxious about her husband's impending return. Then, on an amphetamine binge lasting four days, she calmly shot her lover in the stomach as he got out of his car. She followed him and said, ‘You wanted to die; I showed you.' After shooting him two more times, she asked a bystander to ‘Turn him over and take a picture of his pretty face'. When she was arrested, she put her feet up on the back seat of the police patrol car and tickled the sheriff on the ear, asking him if it felt good. At her subsequent interrogation at police headquarters, Mrs C stood up and said, ‘Well, I've got to go, I've got a hair appointment.'

And so it went through Ellinwood's thirteen killers. Most had some kind of personality disposition to violence, and some, though not all, were taking other drugs as well. A small few were involved in the drug trade. Five were diagnosed schizophrenic. Most lived isolated lives, where their delusions were able to flourish.

But Ellinwood was less concerned with sifting through the causes for a ‘silver bullet', which he knew was not possible. His attention fell on describing a common pattern of behaviour in the lead-up to the murders. What he found was a three-step evolution:

1) chronic amphetamine abuse;

2) an acute change in the individual's state of emotional arousal;

3) a situation that triggers the specific events leading to the act of violence.

The chronic abuse phase, Ellinwood wrote, ‘sets the stage'. The user gradually becomes more paranoid, and obtains a gun (easier in America but possible, as we have seen, in Australia) for self-protection.

The sudden change in emotional arousal can arise from a change in the user's circumstances and an increase in amphetamine dosage. It usually culminates in a binge of wakefulness and a misinterpretation of ‘signals' coming from the environment. The user develops an alternative reality in which he or she is being threatened.

Any minor incident can be the final trigger. ‘Often,' Ellinwood wrote, ‘the threatening incident is half real and half misinterpreted.' Mrs C, for instance, was clear-sighted about the impending threat of her husband coming home and discovering that she had a lover, but completely addled on the question of what threat the lover posed to her.

With his analysis of a three-phase pattern, Ellinwood provided a framework for differentiating between a chronic meth user who stopped short of violence, and one who took the extra step. It would always, he argued, be largely down to luck and circumstance. But in the chronic amphetamine user, the potential for step one to turn to step two, and thence to step three, was ever-present.

Three and a half decades later, Ellinwood's study was read by Rebecca McKetin at NDARC. She had been commissioned to conduct another attempt to relate separate population figures on ice and violent crime, this time for the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR). Her study compared ‘methamphetamine arrests' with arrests for assaults between 1995 and 2005. This report, when published, attracted a lot of media attention for its refusal to link ice directly with crime. The reason for this caution lay in the study's methodology.

‘Methamphetamine arrests', defined as arrests for possession, supply, trafficking, importation and so on of the drug, had risen threefold between 1997 and 2001, dropped by a quarter in 2002, then stabilised at a rate of a little more than double where they had been at the beginning of the decade. Assaults, meanwhile, had risen incrementally before stabilising around 2003. In other words, as McKetin wrote, ‘there is currently insufficient empirical data to estimate whether, or to what extent, metham-phetamine use has increased assaults in NSW. Existing evidence suggests that methamphetamine use is likely to have a relatively minor impact on the assault rate in NSW in comparison with other factors'.

The study, however, defined ‘methamphetamine arrests' very narrowly. When Dudley Aslett and his accomplices were arrested, these were not ‘methamphetamine arrests'—they were arrests for murder, rape and robbery. Likewise, many of the worst methamphetamine-related crimes in the spate of 2003–04 would not have made any statistical register as being connected with the drug, because the accused often did not reveal that they had been taking ice; or if they did, they waited until a court hearing to reveal this information, in the hope of mitigation. The most common ice-related crimes—common assault, break and enter, domestic violence, armed robbery— were never recorded as ice-related. (Ellinwood, by the way, had noted the same information deficit in 1971: ‘We have no data showing the number of assaults and homicides committed by people under the influence of amphetamines or other drugs.')

As the director of BOCSAR, Don Weatherburn, says, until such information was routinely gathered, attempts such as the BOCSAR study to examine a link between methamphetamine and violence are ‘a blunt instrument', frustrating in their imprecision.

By 2003, with the girls at school and preschool, Vicki Wolf and Mark Thomas were well out of the child-rearing woods. They'd briefly considered having a third child, but had decided against it. Life was too good to go backwards.

Vicki was now an associate partner with her law firm. Mark had left his firm to work as an in-house lawyer with a multinational food concern. They worked long hours, but each was pulling down more than $200 000 a year and they'd been able to move into a spacious home in Waverley in Sydney's eastern suburbs. In 2003, they were renovating it, adding a second storey which would have views to the Pacific Ocean.

Since that party in 2001 when they had taken crystal, they'd smoked the drug on average about once every two or three months. They still enjoyed the sex, which followed crystal-smoking, in Mark's words, ‘as a shit follows a morning coffee'. And they still didn't suffer any noticeable hangover or comedown. If they were sick the day after, they attributed it to the skinful of alcohol they'd drunk while they were ‘getting on it'.

They had nothing to worry about with the drug. They had long experience with various illicit substances, and drew careful boundaries around their ‘crystal nights'. They used it only when the children were staying over at a cousin's house, and only on Friday nights, not Saturdays, so they had a two-day ‘clear-air' period following it. Although there was no detectable hangover yet, they didn't want it to cross over into their work lives, and that meant being strong and sober on Monday mornings. If anyone had warned them about crystal methamphetamine, or ‘ice' as it was beginning to become known (although nobody Vicki and Mark knew called it ‘ice'), they had the answer. Scare campaigns against drugs had been a part of their landscape since adolescence. ‘Remember when one line of cocaine was enough to get you addicted, or one acid trip sent you crazy? Drug campaigns are a joke,' Mark says. ‘Nobody took them seriously, and we knew we weren't the type of people who were going to get into trouble. Nobody we knew who used crystal had anything remotely approaching a problem. They were all people like us.'

Mark and Vicki were parents, successful professionals with close links to their families in Melbourne—too strong a safety net to fall through. But they weren't falling. They were rising. They each had the sense, in 2002 and 2003, of rising fast, not only in the material world, but in their journey through life: ‘We were in prime time,' Mark says.

They found ways to loosen the hold parenthood had on their lifestyle; they had a teenage babysitter who lived with them on weekends and, if the party was at their house, as started to happen, they'd even invite her to get into the swing of things after the children had gone to bed. Vicki and Mark told themselves that after the responsibility of bringing two children through infancy, they had ‘earned the right' to cut loose a little, let off a bit of steam. It was a phase.

The only cloud—and it has to be said that this is a cloud identified in retrospect, not at the time—was something about the sex Mark and Vicki were having on crystal.

‘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.