Scattered (32 page)

One of the oldest uses of amphetamines, as we have seen, was as an appetite suppressant. The drug had long been taken by jockeys to help control their weight, so it was not surprising that there would be some realisation of the potential euphoric properties, and hence its use for recreational purposes. In 2005, after horses tested positive to cocaine, trainer Gai Waterhouse said there was a thriving culture in illicit stimulants at some levels of the racing industry.

Celebrity magazines and tabloid television thrive on a drug scandal; in America, crystal meth addiction has had different celebrity figureheads over time. Comedian Richard Pryor, Britney Spears, singer Stacy ‘Fergie' Ferguson of the Black Eyed Peas, Nicole Ritchie, Lindsay Lohan, Tom Sizemore and musician Rufus Wainwright have been associated with the drug either by being caught or coming out and admitting a habit.

Australia's first attempt to fill its celebrity-ice deficit was in January 2004, when a contestant on the reality television show
The Block
, Dani Bacha, was dumped after it emerged that he had been busted in a drug-manufacturing operation involving ecstasy and methamphetamine.

In the fishpond of celebrity, however, Bacha was algae-grade. A better-known ice victim was Jason Bulgarelli, a rugby league footballer with the Canberra Raiders. Bulgarelli's rise was an unusual story, in that he had come down from Queensland, signed with the Raiders and been rookie of the year in 2003 at the age of 26. In football terms, he was closer to retirement than rookiedom.

While he shot to prominence for his bustling running and hard tackling, Bulgarelli had a dark history. He had been involved in cannabis cultivation in Queensland, and when he'd arrived at the Raiders in late 2002 a routine urine test had found traces of methamphetamine. The club kept this secret, hoping to give him a second chance. He rewarded them with strong seasons in 2003 and 2004, but at the end of 2004 a package arrived at Raiders headquarters addressed to ‘Jason Brow', from ‘N. Brow' in Queensland. Officials opened the package and found pills. Initially the police believed they were ecstasy, but when tested they were found to be methamphetamine. Bulgarelli came to the club asking for the package. He was questioned, then sacked. His claim for unfair dismissal came to nothing.

For news editors, celebrity is itself a kind of performance-enhancing substance, boosting otherwise mundane stories into the pages of a newspaper or website or onto the television bulletin. In 2005, a 33-year-old ice user who lit a gas cylinder and left it in an elevator in his apartment block, would have remained below the media radar except for the fact that he had formerly been a manager of the upscale Sydney restaurant Forty One. The man who said he had taken ice since being traumatised by the death of his father, had intended to blow up the Darlinghurst building in which he lived. He also used a hammer to threaten police when they came to arrest him, and told them he would set alight a second gas cylinder and a molotov cocktail if they came any closer.

As a link between celebrity and ice, however, it was a long bow. Likewise, some interest was generated by Anthony William Dow, the Qantas steward who was caught trafficking ice across the country, because he had acted in the television shows
All Saints
and
Love is a Four-Letter Word
. But as star factor, these characters were low-wattage. So desperate were Australian media to have a home-grown Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan that in 2006 the
Daily Telegraph
created its own celebrity ice user. Her name was Sally Brennan.

The
Telegraph
had been campaigning to bring ice to greater public notice. On 20 October 2006, it repeated a well-worn tactic:

In a terrifying dose of reality, the first dealer approached by
The
Daily Telegraph
on a busy Kings Cross street yesterday offered a hit of the frightening, mind-bending drug for $50.

It was lunchtime in the city, with hundreds of people around, and in just 15 seconds the dealer had secured the drug with a mobile phone call.

He produced 0.1g of ice crystals, which would have delivered an intoxicating array of delusions and, at worst, psychosis, in a seedy alley.

The Daily Telegraph
did not buy the drug but the exercise proved how easy it is to get ice in a city where school children are being admitted to hospital suffering from its effects.

It is also abundantly available in outer suburbs and can be delivered to youngsters' doorsteps.

The dealer yesterday was not shy, announcing after his brief call, ‘I can get six matchstick-sized crystals for $50.'

The drug was presented in a bag with Playboy bunnies on it, which the dealer said was used to differentiate ‘brands of ice'.

But all stories are more effective when personalised, and twenty-year-old Sally Brennan gave the
Telegraph
's campaign its needed human face.

In an ‘exclusive interview' with the
Telegraph
, published on 20 October, Brennan said she had been ‘out of control' since first using ice at the age of seventeen. She had been a heroin user, but switched when ice became more easily available.

‘I was smoking heroin with friends one day and I said “fuck it”. Everyone else around me was using it so I may as well see what it's like,' she said.

‘It makes you not worry—you don't care. You don't worry about your problems, they just get put to one side.'

She supported herself through shoplifting, and was banned from all Westfield shopping centres. Her six-week-old son Jaydan had died from sudden infant death syndrome while in her care and her other son, Jordan, was taken away from her. In October 2006, ‘hallucinating from two days of smoking ice', Brennan dragged a 49-year-old woman from her car in Miranda in an attempt to steal it. Brennan said she thought she'd seen her son Jordan in a passing taxi and wanted to steal the woman's car to chase after him. She failed because she couldn't drive the manual vehicle.

The day the
Telegraph
interviewed her didn't turn out well. During the morning, Brennan told the newspaper she dreamt of being ‘a superstar' in the fashion industry and owning an apartment at Cronulla Beach. Accompanied by her father Brett, she was bailed from Sutherland Local Court over the carjacking charge, and promised to seek treatment. Brett took her to the Gorman House rehab clinic in Darlinghurst that afternoon, but within an hour she had run away, presumably to go and buy more drugs. She met up with her former boyfriend, the father of her children, and woke the next day to read about herself on the
Telegraph
's front page. ‘She woke up, saw it and said, “Shit, I'm on the run”,' said Brennan's friend with whom she'd stayed the night. ‘I think she'd just been in a daze—the ice does that.' Later that day Brennan was found at a Surry Hills pub, the Royal Exhibition Hotel, playing poker machines.

While the
Telegraph
decided Brennan was ‘the face of the ice addiction sweeping Australia', she remained a marginal figure, her celebrity of the paper's own making. Brennan typified many ice users, but as a ‘celebrity' she was unsuitable. She was Aboriginal, from the fringes of society, had been abandoned by her mother as a child, and led a life of addiction and crime which many readers must have assumed was doomed already. To give its planned ‘wake-up call' to middle-class parents, the media would need a middle-class celebrity ice user, a boy or girl next door.

Brendan Francis McMahon nearly achieved that kind of status.

McMahon was another whose relationship with celebrity was at one removed. When he first appeared in court in October 2005, McMahon was described as having run ‘a financial and mortgage broking company, Meares-McMahon Capital, with Jason Meares, the brother of fashion designer Jodhi Meares, who was formerly married to James Packer'. It was another long stretch, but a Packer connection would suffice for newsworthiness until details of his crime emerged.

In mid-2005, police had received information that 40 to 50 dead rabbits had been found in a lane behind McMahon's office in York Street, Sydney. A number of those rabbits had been interfered with sexually. Police traced McMahon through a corporate credit card with which he had bought the rabbits, and found on the card ‘excessive amounts of purchases from pet stores around Sydney'. They obtained a warrant and confronted McMahon, charging him with bestiality and the mutilation deaths of seventeen rabbits and a guinea pig. He had small scratches all over his face.

‘Since the time the investigation involving these offences commenced . . . it has become evident that the injuries to each animal has escalated in violence and ferocity,' the police fact sheet tendered in evidence said.

McMahon, 36, was also charged with possession of cannabis, but when he gave evidence in court he spoke of having become addicted to crystal methamphetamine. Having dabbled in biblical and Eastern mysticism, McMahon believed he was ‘a tool for the universe' who had a special ability to communicate with animals. He said he had been tasked with ‘rescuing animals from pet stores' and creating ‘safe havens' that were ‘free of predators'. McMahon denied having had sex with any of the animals, and prosecutors dropped the bestiality charge when they were unable to prove that he had penetrated a rabbit with his penis.

The forensic psychiatrist Dr Stephen Allnutt examined McMahon, and found that the New Zealand-born financier was not mentally ill. Dr Allnutt's report said that McMahon had used cannabis since his teens and had a ‘lifelong love for nature', but his ‘interest in nature, bird-watching and mysticism became distorted by the amphetamine use' after McMahon began using ice to give him a ‘mental push' at work and confidence in tense business negotiations. McMahon had ‘delusional' beliefs that ‘were further complicated by his interest in mysticism, hence the development of his idea that he could communicate with animals through a third eye', Dr Allnutt said. ‘At the time he really believed that he had been communicating with the rabbits, and that this interaction with the rabbits was of value to nature. He said that when this happened he would feel a “joy” in his heart.'

McMahon had told Dr Allnutt about three ‘significant' experiences during the year or so when he had been smoking ice. Twice, in the outback, birds had followed his truck and communicated with him, and once he'd seen a cloud shaped like a wedgetail eagle.

‘During the period that he had these experiences he had also become contemplative about contributing more to nature,' Dr Allnutt said.

McMahon, Dr Allnutt believed, had become ‘floridly psychotic' during his ice use. He had asked Dr Allnutt: ‘I wonder if I made a mistake, because I never actually asked the rabbits if I could kill them.'

Dr Allnutt told the court:

I believe he was doing it in a deluded mental state in the belief that what he was doing was right.

He felt justified in doing something that he saw as morally right because he was delusional.

That was the degree of distortion of his capacity to reason about rightful and wrongful, significantly compromised by his delusional belief that he was placed on the earth for a special purpose and that purpose was to free the animals.

The Crown argued that McMahon's mental state was self-induced, and the court agreed, sentencing him to sixteen months in jail with a twelve-month non-parole period. Magistrate Ian Barnett said: ‘There is community outrage at this matter and someone should not be allowed to commit such offences of aggravated cruelty upon animals and then say, “Well, I was using ice at the time. I have been taking cannabis for most of my life”.'

McMahon, however, believed he would not have committed his crimes without the influence of ice, and later his conviction was overturned by the District Court on technical grounds.

Outside the District Court, McMahon set himself up as a spokesman warning the public of the perils of ice: ‘If you use ice you'll end up either in a mental institution, or in jail or dead,' he said.

‘Anybody who hands someone an ice pipe and offers them the drug is not a friend of the person.

‘It always surprised me that you could get ice pipes in tobacconists and the state government collects GST on that . . . Ice is a problem that the government can fix.

‘Once you start playing around with the endocrine system there's no turning back. When you're addicted to it, it's like the little entity in your brain saying, you know: “Smoke me, smoke me.”'

McMahon, who by his release in 2006 was drug-free and had no pets other than a family dog, could not remember the details of what he had done.

‘The weird thing is to look back and ask yourself why. There really are no valid reasons . . . I think I was burnt out and self-medicating. ‘When you experience psychosis and then you come out of psychosis you don't really remember very much at all. It's like it never happened or it happened to another person.'

(Following outrage over the McMahon case, New South Wales introduced tougher laws against animal cruelty. The first person convicted under them was also an ice user. Stephen John Clancy, of Blackett in western Sydney, had smoked ice before becoming angry with his pet kitten, Puddy, when she defecated in his house. Clancy, 45, had rubbed Puddy's face in her faeces, thrown her out the back door, and kicked her before throwing her into a bin. He pleaded guilty to animal cruelty, and was banned from owning a pet again.)

Brendan McMahon had achieved what Dudley Aslett, Damien Peters, Mohammed Kerbatieh and the other offenders mentioned in these pages had failed to do: he had brought ice onto the front pages. This was due to a number of factors, not least of which was the strange horror of his crimes. But the undeniable currency, in media terms, of Brendan McMahon was that he was a well-paid financier with connections to the Packer family. He was middle class and prosperous. And ice had brought him undone. But it wasn't until early 2007 that the Australian media, at least, had the celebrity factor it had been craving.