The Ice Age (23 page)

Boshe, as it turns out, has in years gone by been one of the biggest meth producers in China, and probably the world. Guangdong police estimated that around 20 per cent of the town was involved in meth production in Boshe, and corruption went all the way to the top: the people running the meth trade in Boshe were government officials. Fourteen of them all up, and the local Communist Party secretary was in fact the local drug king pin, Cai Dongjia. Local police were in on it, too, colluding with local criminal groups to provide what seemed like a watertight and highly profitable illicit market. Today, there are even signs that read ‘discarding of meth lab garbage here is forbidden'.

Chinese police knew what was happening in Boshe for a long time. In August 2013, police had tried to enter the village, but were met with roadblocks, people hurling abuse, and violent resistance. Peter Barefoot on Chinasmack.com writes that before the Thunder Drug Raid:

As soon as the police entered the village, they'd be surrounded by the two to three hundred motorcycles in the village, with nail boards placed on the roads in the village, and rocks thrown from the top of buildings. Villagers would hold imitation firearms, even AK47s, homemade grenades, crossbows, and other deadly weapons.

The police retreated and re-evaluated the situation, deciding that they needed to go in better armed and better resourced — although few could have imagined just how well armed and resourced they would be when they finally returned a few months later. In China's coldest month, amid the drizzle and grey, 3,000 police surrounded Boshe. When the police got out of their vehicles, they were dressed in camouflage gear, and so the raids began. There were police vans on top of police vans, speedboats, and at least two helicopters accompanying the raid.

Police arrested 182 people, destroyed 77 methamphetamine labs, and a massive three tonnes of meth was seized along with 100 tonnes of meth ingredients. Cai Dongjia was the first to be captured. After completing the raid, the police said Boshe and the surrounding region were the source of a third of China's crystal-meth supply.

They later discovered that the village had become so polluted with chemicals for drug manufacturing that the groundwater could not be used for farming. Locals reported that a huge wealth gap had developed between the farmers in town and those involved in the drug trade. Indeed, entrepreneurialism and economic inequality could have a lot to answer for in explaining why China has become our biggest trading partner in both legal and illegal markets. Australia pays a lot for meth compared to our Asian neighbours. While China has increasingly advanced technology, it still has very low production and labour costs — big profits are to be made by making meth in poorer nations, and then selling them to high-income nations like Australia. Trafficking a highly addictive, highly pleasurable drug into a nation that is surrounded by some of the biggest meth-producing countries in the world must seem like a no-brainer to drug barons all over the world.

And we are not talking about one particular set of groups with names or brands, or any one particular country or region — in the transnational illicit-drug game, allegiances often only exist for a short time, and most of these ‘groupings' are informal, fleeting, and very hard to track down.

With all this taken together, it is very tricky for our authorities to get a handle on the problem.

If there is one common fuel to this engine right around the globe, however, it is the bribing of high-level government officials in often weak, poorly resourced states that help get the drug cartels into gear. While we might know this is happening, stopping it is another thing altogether, especially when crime cartels are paying members of the government far more than they would be getting on their taxpayer-funded salary. In this way, poor and weak nations make the perfect hunting ground for criminal entrepreneurs to make it rich. And indeed, some of them are very rich — the illicit-drug trade makes up 1 per cent of the total global economy. The illicit-drug trade is the largest in value among global illicit commodities, at some US$320 billion, according to the United Nations World Drug Report — an unwelcome, though arguably inevitable, consequence of an increasingly globalised economy.

Robert Mandel, who is the professor of international affairs at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, argues in his book
Dark Logic
:
transnational criminal tactics and global security
that while Ronald Reagan started the ‘global war on drugs' in 1985 with that very catch-cry — as well as with an allocation of hundreds of millions to the defence department to ‘combat' the problem — the endeavour met with limited success:

Any attempt to interdict global drug smuggling faces nearly insurmountable problems including (1) the eagerness of users/victims to imbibe, making them unlikely to press for prosecution of distributors; (2) reduced government monitoring of domestic activities due to economic liberalization and deregulation; (3) the proliferation of weak states which have remote areas conducive to drug growing and; (4) the scarcity of alternative sources of income for impoverished workers involved in the production of drugs.

And what I have told you about southern China is really just the cherry on top: it is unclear how much of the meth sent from Guangdong is being made in China, and how much of it is just distributed from there. If it is the latter, it is also not known precisely who Chinese criminals are linking with internationally. In many cases, it is likely to be groups in the jungles of the Golden Triangle — that infamous patch of jungle comprised of Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand where crystal meth is known to be made en masse. Much like the Mexican cartels, the Golden Triangle is likely going through an ‘upgrade,' as a paper from Brookings Institute put it, and ‘transforming from traditional drugs to new synthetic drugs, following demand of the international drug market'.

So our relationship with the illicit drug trade is ‘complicated', and to make it even more so, today's problem region might be tomorrow's massive headache. The latest intelligence suggests parts of the Middle East and western Africa — regions usually associated with transit points for drugs — are now increasingly producing meth, particularly Iran and Nigeria. In fact, there is at least a 50 per cent chance that the gear my friends were selling was manufactured overseas. AFP Assistant Commissioner Ramzi Jabbour told the Victorian parliamentary committee at a hearing that: ‘These very large seizures were being attempted to be imported into Australia, or in this case particularly Victoria, from overseas, and we allege by sophisticated organised criminal syndicates which have tentacles both in this country and reaching out through numerous countries overseas'. In many cases, crystal-meth users in Australia don't even go through their local dealer — they simply order from one of the many websites from which people can purchase meth and other drugs from overseas. While the notorious Silk Road site has closed down, many others have emerged in the space known as the ‘Dark Web'.

The net result has not just been a stronger drug flooding our drug markets, but a significant global shift in drug use: according to 2013 data from UNODC, ATS were used, in 2011, at rates higher than any other drug class with the exception of cannabis. The number of cannabis users worldwide (on an annual basis) is estimated to be about 180 million, ATS users about 34 million, opiate users 16.5 million, and cocaine users about 17 million.

Today, we live not so much in a meth nation as a meth world: meth use is now an issue in most parts of the world, from the working classes of the United States to the middle classes of New Zealand, and from the shanty towns of South Africa to the increasingly affluent young people in Indonesia, the Philippines, Fiji, Thailand, and India. In Europe, the Czech Republic remains the focal point for the drug in the region, where it is called Pervitin. In Sweden, Finland, Slovakia, and Latvia, UNODC reports that amphetamines and methamphetamine users account for between 20 per cent and 60 per cent of those seeking drug abuse treatment. There are few nations around the world that remain untouched by meth.

After the argument with Beck that day, Smithy and I made up from our little incident a few hours earlier. Our physical altercation in 2011 (and our recovery from it) had actually strengthened our friendship — I think we both knew how difficult we could be. A little while earlier, I had thought he was orchestrating a cruel and vengeful plot; now we were the best of buddies again, with bong smoke consuming the space between us, and most sentences finishing with uncontrolled giggles. He had come back from Beck's, where he'd given her a small fix. She had, reportedly, lost her grimace, cured her cold, and was now vigorously washing rocks in her basin with her rock book next to her.

Smith had given me a tiny hit, too. It hadn't knocked my socks off, but it was enough to make me feel more energised: like a car that had been running on a low tank, but now had a bit in reserve. I felt calm — intensely calm — and knew that Smithy was a blood brother once again.

‘That's it, the last of it,' he said, looking at me meaningfully. ‘Y'know what that means?'

‘We are both going to go clean and never use drugs again?'

‘Hilarious — it means we have to go for a drive.'

‘Where?'

‘St Kilda.'

So we jumped in the car. We drove along what was in reality an uneventful freeway, but which felt, on this day, like the road to some of the greatest pleasures a man could ever know. We threw words around like confetti; Smithy talked about cricket, I talked about the way I got my job at triple j. Smithy said he had been texting Beck's oldest daughter for the past few months because it was ‘important she had a parent right now', and as the wind blew around the car, and we smoked cigarette after cigarette, Smithy said ‘Is it just me, or do you smell like cat shit?'

We got to the dealer's house, and Smithy went to the door. After a while he came back, remarkably calm, and said, ‘There's nobody fucking home, and he's not answering his phone.' It was warm inside the car, but I suspect Smithy, who was resting outside the car against the door, was feeling much warmer; he's an intolerable, catatonic, hot mess when he can't have drugs.

We asked a prostitute on the side of the road if we could pay her to find us some meth. She said her name was Celia, and agreed to help us out, but only if we gave her a cut.

‘One of you need to come with me. Just one of you — if I bring two guys in he will freak out.'

I agreed to go, and so we walked silently together down the street, and the prostitute took me around the corner, then down a little side-alley, until we reached a set of white-brick apartments about three storeys high.

‘It's not a houso block, by the way,' she said, smirking. ‘It's a boarding-house, love. If you love freaks, you'll love these guys.'

From the front yard, we could see a 7-Eleven sign on the horizon, amid a row of oak trees. She knocked on the door.

‘Who is it?' a grubby-sounding voice yelled.

‘It's Celia, darl.'

‘What do you want?'

‘A bottle of chardonnay.'

A man opened the door. He was a tall, broad guy with short dark hair and dark skin, and he was wearing a large purple T-shirt and brown tracksuit pants. He had a mono-brow, and some of the hairs in it looked as long as my little finger.

He ushered us in. There were two other guys there — both men in their forties, old-timers with caps and tattoos — sharing a joint. The place was smaller on the inside that it looked from out. It was also musty, and there were barely any windows. There was a tiny lounge room, a small bedroom that barely fit one bed, and a kitchen — where everyone was standing — which was the biggest room in the unit.

‘Who's this guy?'

‘This is my friend, Luke,' Celia said. ‘He wants two points.'

‘Two points, hey?' he said, staring at me wide-eyed, his pupils swishing like two vibrating eggs.

‘Luke, is it? Fucking let me tell you something, okay,' he said, eyes getting bigger and his movements looking almost comically self-righteous as he puffed out his chest. ‘I am a fucking pharmacist, do you understand me?'

I nodded.

He thumped on his chest ‘Me, I am a fucking chemist, the chemist, okay — I am the fucking chief, do you understand?'

Ignoring him, Celia flashed $200. ‘Got those points, babe?'

‘Here and here,' he said, passing them on to Celia, who immediately passed them to me. I looked at the bags of small clear crystals — innocuous, clean-looking — pretending that I knew what I was looking for.

‘Sit down,' the chief said.

‘No babe, I think he has to — '

‘Sit down! In my culture, if somebody doesn't sit down, if they don't work a trade, if they are not polite to the chief, they get the
shaka
,' he said, raising his fist with his little finger and thumb raised on either side — what my generation would probably understand as the ‘ridgey didge' symbol.

Celia was trying to hold back her laughter.

I pulled up a seat in the dining table. The chief pulled up a chair next to me and said ‘But I am not going to give you the shaka. I am a
chemist
.'

It had been a long couple of days. Proving why white middle-class pencil-pushers should never, ever try to go ghetto, I said, with a tinge of sarcasm: