The Ice Age (24 page)

‘Are you actually a chemist? I mean do you actually have a chemistry degree?'

The Chief ejected himself from his chair with a jolt, panting madly, walked over to the door, and slammed it shut.

‘Nobody is fucking going anywhere, nobody leaves unless I say they can, and under my terms. Do you all fucking understand?'

Chapter Eight

Wheeling and dealing

MUCH TO THE
disappointment of many of those I have met in my life, I
did
manage to survive that afternoon with the Chief, thanks to the quick-thinking Celia, who asked the Chief to get her something from his bedroom before leaning into me and whispering ‘run'. We were out the door before the Chief realised we were gone. Two minutes later, I was safe: back in the car with Smithy, fielding all manner of questions about why it took so long and where we could get some syringes. I was glad we didn't have to regularly endure such trips to score. In fact, travelling nearly an hour to get crystal meth was a rarity for us — and pretty much everyone else — post-2011 in Australia. It isn't hard to find crystal meth once you start looking for it.

The Victorian branch of the Australian Medical Association told the Victorian parliamentary inquiry that ‘the drug is exceptionally cheap and easy to obtain'. Indeed, Smithy's trips into town were very rare. To support both his habit and his own low-level dealing, he had multiple dealers to choose from — dealers who traded in both wholesale and retail. With this in mind, as well as the low cost of crystal meth, it should come as no surprise that even welfare recipients can inject the drug several times a day. Others — such as me — used less: a dose that can last many users up to twenty-four hours costs somewhere between $30 and $50.

From about 2011 onwards, if you were buying crystal meth in South Australia, you may well have bought it from a minion for an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang (OMCG); in Wangaratta, you may have bought it from a makeshift drug syndicate run by a former sports hero gone bad; or in Brisbane, you may have bought it from Patrick ‘Ryan' McCann, a suburban real-estate agent who was earning as much as $100,000 a month in property commissions, but who, behind closed doors, was a daily drug-user, hiding silver bags of methamphetamine in his home.

And if you were in certain parts of Perth, the secret code to getting your gear was ‘Hot Wheels'. To be more specific: you might have been told to go up to a paraplegic in a wheelchair and use a special code, after which he would reach down and pull a point or two out of his socks. Wheelchair-bound Ryan James Salton was arrested in July 2014 during a hospital visit. When he faced court, WA police alleged that they found four bags of methamphetamine hidden in socks in Salton's tracksuit pants, as well as a ‘sweet puff' (crystal meth) pipe. Prior to the hospital incident, police had found the 33-year-old in bed next to a toiletry bag that contained his personal belongings as well as several drugs, at a house where Salton was believed to be living. It was also alleged that electronic scales, a gun, and a CCTV system that monitored access to the building were found at the house, as well as $5,000 cash hidden in a wheelchair. After he was charged, he was placed on bail, where it is alleged he committed further offences: police alleged they found him with hundreds of grams of methamphetamine in tablet and crystal form, almost $45,000 in cash, and a list of customers he had sold drugs to ‘on tick'. Police would also allege that Salton's drug-dealer nickname was none other than ‘Hot Wheels'.

Australia's meth dealers are an extremely diverse bunch. The ACC told the Victorian parliamentary inquiry that:

No one criminal syndicate, type of crime group, or ethnicity-based group are dominant in the methamphetamine market in Victoria. Members of Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (OMCGs), family groups, ethnic groups and entrepreneurial individuals working alone or in partnership are represented. The methylamphetamine market is sufficiently diverse and profitable to support a large number of competing and sometimes collaborating suppliers, at different levels of sophistication.

Later, a joint submission from six federal government agencies, including the Australian Crime Commission and the Australian Institute of Criminology, would tell the federal inquiry into crystal methamphetamine that:

More than 60 per cent of Australia's highest risk criminal targets on the National Criminal Target List are known to be involved in the methylamphetamine market. Approximately 45 per cent of the highest risk criminal targets in the methylamphetamine market are characterised as OMCGs. The rest of the crystal meth dealing and manufacturing market remains then somewhat of a mystery.

This supports research by University of Queensland legal academic Andreas Schloenhardt, whose 2007 study found that within the methamphetamine drug market in Australia ‘a changing mix of criminal elements is present, ranging from highly sophisticated and structured criminal organisations to individuals operating within small, local markets and friendship circles'. Other research from NDARC suggests that most meth users buy their meth off a friend, rather than a ‘formal' drug dealer. Making in-roads into the problem of supply, particularly in the context of a rapidly expanding international market, has proven difficult for authorities; a legal database search shows meth-dealer convictions on any level are extremely rare.

I asked the ACC what the impact of the international trade had been on the local market. Their CEO Chris Dawson told me:

There is no evidence that increases in the frequency and weight of methylamphetamine importations into Australia have led to a reduction in domestic production. What seems to have occurred is that both the level of domestic production and supply of methylamphetamine and the market share of imported (particularly crystal) methylamphetamine have increased.

Simultaneously, local manufacturers ‘picked up their game' and began making higher-purity meth; it's probably only a matter of time before they start making crystal meth en masse. It would be a lucrative business — nationally, Australians are spending more than $7 billion each year on illicit drugs, according to research from the Bureau of Statistics. This is far more than our federal and state governments spend each year on law enforcement, treatment, and harm minimisation combined. That said, it's difficult to argue that spending more on law enforcement would make too much difference — as it stands, Australia's drug-dealer scene is messy, chaotic, disorganised, and very difficult to police. Alison Ritter from NDARC told me that she doesn't think organisations such as the Australian Federal Police have really started to unravel the big operators behind Australia's crystal-meth trade, unless ‘they have people are currently embedded or working undercover, or perhaps they are collecting evidence — and in that case we might see some bigger convictions in years to come'.

What our federal authorities do seem to have worked out is that illicit-drug trafficking is closely linked to money laundering that is filtered through apparently legitimate businesses. In December 2012, the Australian Crime Commission Board approved the Eligo National Task Force, which it described as ‘an Australian Crime Commission-led special investigation into the use of alternative remittance and Informal Value Transfer Systems by serious and organised crime … Eligo National Task Force is made up of the Australian Crime Commission, the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC) and the Australian Federal Police'.

The taskforce has made several significant drug busts, collecting tens of millions of dollars, and, for instance, leading a joint police operation in Tasmania and Queensland with transnational connections that in July 2014 led to the arrest of six men, including four members of the Rebels motorcycle club, on charges relating to the alleged trafficking, possession, and importation of more than 8 kilograms of amphetamine from the United Kingdom. The drugs were believed to have an estimated street value of at least $20 million. In a press release, Tasmania Police Assistant Commissioner Donna Adams said ‘Criminal entities including OMCGs are developing in sophistication. This is why collaborative efforts by law enforcement agencies are an important element in staying ahead of the game'. In November 2014, the Serious and Organised Crime Branch of South Australia Police launched Operation Jackknife and nabbed an Adelaide crime group distributing methamphetamine from Malaysia to South Australia and Singapore. Police alleged the ringleaders of the importation in South Australia were the Rebels and Finks bikie gangs.

However, contrary to what some may be led to believe, bikies have not been involved in most of the nation's high-profile meth-dealing arrests. Australia's second-largest meth bust came in February 2013 after a single phone call to police from an anonymous source sparked a yearlong investigation that netted Australia's then-largest recorded crystal-meth seizure — 585 kilograms worth an estimated $438 million.

In Philip K. Dick's 1977 science-fiction masterpiece
A Scanner Darkly
— set in the not-too-distant future, in a futuristic, totalitarian society — America has lost the war against drugs, and paranoia and big corporations reign. Law enforcement has been completely privatised, and undercover detective Bob Arctor is working with a group of small-time drug users trying to reach the big distributors of a brain-damaging drug called Substance D. Bob starts to take the drug, and begins to lose his mind. His reality shatters into a psychotic matrix, and his identity begins to split in two.

Substance D, the drug in Dick's novel, is described as being quite amphetamine-like. Dick himself was an enthusiastic speed-user at various points in his life: by 1971, he was ingesting a whopping 1,000 speed pills a week, along with plentiful tranquilisers. Dick wrote
A Scanner Darkly
after several years of firsthand experience with what he called the ‘street scene' in the early 1970s.

In the novel, Arctor says that being addicted is like being sentient yet not alive: ‘Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognising but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood.' Dick describes Arctor's thoughts on the drug thus: ‘Someday, he thought, it'll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald's hamburger as well as buy it; we'll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won't even have to go outside.'

Dick's vision is grim, where the collusion of state-corporate power and drug addiction are intimately linked, and where the very ideals of individualism, freedom, and self-possession have not only reached their limits, but become perverse.

Bob Arctor seems to ache so badly from the lack of adventure and meaning in suburban culture that he descends into drug abuse to escape. Dick's novel was written at a time when the beatnik and hippie movements of the 1950s and 1960s had run their course. Drugs were used within these subcultures to attempt to expand consciousness, but by the 1970s they seemed to people like Dick to be ways of confusing reality for users, so that otherwise revolutionary thinkers were too incoherent to dissent in any meaningful way. Rather than find a way to improve or progress an over-sterilised, over-controlled suburban environment, Bob is so self-focused that he chooses simply to alter his perception of it.

On describing the nihilism of suburban drug addicts, Arctor said: ‘They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed — run over, maimed, destroyed — but they continued to play anyhow.'

There is no apparent choice of a more interesting, fulfilling life. The people Bob meets live in a haze of drug use, and he never gets close to the mysterious drug syndicate, while the corporation's quest to defeat it seems like an incredibly superficial response to an environment which lends itself so easily to drug addiction. In other words, catching the syndicate — which we get the sense may not even exist — seems fruitless when the demand to deal and use the drug is a cogent response to a culture that has bred this kind of appetite for drugs in the first place.

If you added youth unemployment to Dick's unstable societal mix, you'd be getting close to a remarkable turn of events that took place in Wangaratta, three hours from Melbourne. In 1999, the town of 17,000 looked like it might have a new sporting hero. Eighteen-year-old Aaron Shane Dalton — tall and strong, with dark brown hair — was restless and rebellious in school, but seemed to have found the right outlet for all his energy: cycling. His father, an abattoir manager and part of a well-respected family in the area, was delighted when his son ditched his pot habit for a sport that required endurance, patience, power, and tactical nous. So delighted was his father, in fact, that he organised for his son to be trained by former Olympic gold medallist Dean Woods. Dalton trained like a demon under Woods; he trained at the Victorian Institute of Sport, and eventually became one of the top ten riders of his age group in Australia. Ultimately, though, like many young men before him, Dalton found that even his best wasn't enough: he wanted to turn professional, and to do that he almost certainly needed to get a scholarship at the Australian Institute of Sport. Dalton didn't make the cut. He gave up on cycling and threw himself into drug taking, soon graduating to amphetamines. He began dealing meth, and, despite getting convicted twice — once in 2006 and again in 2009 — he masterminded one of the most sophisticated drug syndicates regional Australia had ever seen. Dalton discovered an ice manufacturer in Grafton, in country New South Wales, and then started recruiting distributors, drivers, ‘logistics' people, and heavies. Dalton cashed in at the right time — ice was now on the market, and he found plenty of dealers with recurring customers around Shepparton, Wodonga, Yarrawonga, Myrtleford, Corowa, Rutherglen, and Wangaratta. In less than eighteen months, the syndicate — and especially Dalton — was raking in millions. His drivers were known to collect up to $250,000 worth of ice at a time from Grafton. In some cases, they would pick up the gear and then hire expensive hotel rooms in Albury, where they would weigh and package the drug, sometimes burying it in the ground near the hotel to store it for future use. Dalton found a few locals who were desperate to be liked and who desperately wanted friends, including 26-year-old Jai Montgomery, who had a missing limb, and 26-year-old Kruchan Chandler, who had played semi-professional football before a devastating knee injury destroyed his career. Dalton was extremely professional and cautious in his operation. Computer-generated documents were used, but there were protocols for destruction of written materials.
When a distributor or driver joined the network, they were given a four-page instruction letter on how to conduct themselves in public. The document instructed that the syndicate was in the ‘business of making money, not power-tripping or disrespecting customers', and any complaints would be investigated. ‘This is how serious we are about the professionalism of our services which you require.'