The Ice Age (31 page)

‘You really are a dumb fuck,' Jake replied.

There is among all this a far more difficult reality to digest — the presence of kids.

When Cassy McDonald was in her early twenties and dealing drugs — all day, every day — she had one trio of regular customers who would offer to clean her house in exchange for drugs.

‘A grandmother, a mother, and a daughter,' she told me. ‘Gran was about sixty, the mum was thirty-nine, and the daughter was eighteen. I would give them a point of meth between them, and they'd clean my house from top to bottom, cut my lawn, and then go over it with nail clippers to ensure the blades were even, wash and iron all my clothes, even stuff that was brand new.'

Cassy's mother also used meth — as Cassy found out when she started using herself at the age of seventeen. ‘It all added up,' she told me. ‘My mum has always had big mood swings — she always had people over, and she never slept.'

Intergenerational meth use is more common that you might think. Geoff Munro from the Australian Drug Foundation told me that it's relatively widespread, often involves grandparents, and is ‘deeply problematic'. Dianne Barker from St Luke's Anglicare in Bendigo told the Victorian parliamentary inquiry that she had been involved in a case where a mother was facilitating the delivery of ice to her children while they were in residential care in St Luke's.

In other cases, the children of meth users don't live long enough to share in the lifestyle. There are stories from all around the world of people and parents who slip over the edge and fall so deep into the pit they can no longer see the cliff from where they fell. These stories never cease to horrify. There is the 25-year-old Californian woman Jessica Adams, who after a 4-day meth bender returned home from a party ready to crash. And crash she did, with her 2-month-old son asleep next to her. At some stage during the night, she rolled over in her sleep, suffocating the baby to death. Across the border in Nevada, meth addict Bransen Locks was charged with shaking his girlfriend's 1-year-old to death while on a bender. An autopsy would reveal the baby had ‘midline shift' of the brain after the incident. In Wales, former Lostprophets frontman Ian Watkins said he was on crystal meth when he engaged in an online sex session via Skype in which he instructed a woman as she sexually abused her infant for his entertainment. He later sent another woman a message saying he wanted a ‘summer of filthy child porn' and spoke of a desire to ‘cross the line'. In the Slovak Republic, a 4-month-old baby was left brain-dead after his parents gave him crystal meth to stop him crying. In Phoenix, Arizona, the 5-year-old daughter of a meth user tested HIV-positive, after the girl complained about her mother sticking her with needles in late 2014.

Research published in the
Child Abuse & Neglect
journal reported that kids said their parents would become ‘aggravated', ‘angry', and fight a lot, and one third of children who had parents who used meth reported that their parents became violent. Other children complained about not getting meals or not being taken to school. Throw in paranoia, depression, and the three-day-long sleep marathons after a binge and things are bound to go wrong. While I certainly saw evidence of this in the way Beck treated her daughters, what I found more difficult to discern was the kind of parent Beck might have been if she didn't take meth — it seems possible, given her self-centred reasons for having children, that she would have pretty much behaved that way anyway.

Dr Keith Humphreys, professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University, describes crystal meth as a ‘seductive' and ‘powerful' drug that affects the part of the brain that signals our most essential functions including safety, eating, sleeping, and taking care of children. It is his view that the drug ‘takes over' and leads users to believe that meth can replace these essential functions — hence why, in many cases, kids are neglected by their meth-using parents: the drug is competing for ‘resources, attention, and love' that would otherwise be given to them. Dr Humphreys claims he has made contact with child-protective services over the issue, and says that some children are being sexually abused by their meth-using parents — a consequence, he says, of meth destroying both empathy and sexual inhibitions.

Academic Susan McFarlaine, who has researched families living with amphetamine problems, writes that amphetamine-using parents may become ‘withdrawn, self-focused, paranoid delusional' and are likely to be preoccupied with ‘planning, obtaining, and using drugs as well as emotionally and physically affected by ATS use and the subsequent withdrawal and craving'.

From my own experience, the effect of meth use on parenting is far more subtle and far harder to detect than outright abuse. I saw parents slowly lose interest in their children, their instincts apparently lost in the fantastical fog of regular use. One user I interviewed, Mark McNeil, told me he used to live for his daughter, and for his family, but they soon became not so much second-rate as utterly irrelevant in the face of his addiction. In typical meth-addict style though, even after his wife divorced him, and there was a court order preventing him from seeing his children, he didn't believe that he had a problem.

And how were Beck and Smithy's children faring in this culture? Beck's oldest daughter Hayley, who was now fifteen, seemed to bear the brunt of Beck's bad temper. If Beck wasn't screaming and yelling or threatening violence, she was crying. Hayley spent more than half of her week staying at a friend's house. Whenever I came over to stay, Beck and Hayley would have a terrible fight, and I would spend an hour talking it over with Hayley in her room, where she would sob and tell me how much she disliked her mother.

‘She's worse when nobody is home, and it's just us kids,' Hayley said.

I am not sure why I never said anything to Beck — I guess I wanted to be the peacemaker and I was usually glad it wasn't directed at me. I wish now that I had said something: it was Hayley who gave me my first taste of unconditional love as an adult. When Hayley was a toddler, she cried when I left the house. I spent hours with her, talking to my feet after I drew faces on the soles of them, turning them into a cheery old-fashioned married couple called ‘Sally' and ‘Bob'. Sometimes I wondered if the only reason I stayed with Beck was because of Hayley; I always felt that the more people she had involved in her upbringing, the better. Beck's yelling and screaming was always worse on Christmas day — as if to pre-empt and quash any suggestion that she should have gone without pot that week, and spent a bit more on gifts. I always tried to supplement Alice and Hayley's Christmas with gifts; one year, when I bought Hayley an expensive camera for Christmas, Beck asked me why I nor anybody else bought
her
presents.

Hayley was highly intelligent; she won awards at school, won premierships at sport, she was attractive and well-dressed, and was always in the popular gang at school — all of which was quite inexplicable for those who knew the circumstances in which she was raised.

Many of those who played a part in Hayley's upbringing — and there were quite a few of us who did — want to take credit for Hayley. The truth is, though, that she was just born with something special about her.

She was like a mysterious otherworldly plant who sucked up the shit around her and turned it into beautiful flowers that attracted anyone and everyone. She was independent, and preferred her peer group to home life, although that was hardly surprising.

About three months before I moved into Smithy's, I was staying at Beck's on a visit from Sydney. On the walk back from the doctor's one morning, Beck happened to drive past me (she had spent the night at Smithy's). She stopped the car on the side of the street, crying hysterically. When I asked what was wrong, she said she had a cold, and when I rolled my eyes, having heard it so many times before, she told me Smithy had done something to her. I was in no mood for her drama, and just kept walking. I ended up at Smithy's for the afternoon, and when I didn't return at night, Beck called, still crying, demanding to know why I was spending my time with him and not her. So I went back to her house, where she told me again she had sinus pain, and ran to her room to cry for an hour.

That night, Hayley came back and asked to talk to me in her room.

‘Mum is a bully … she screams at me all the time, over nothing, she calls me names — I just can't live here anymore.'

(By this stage, Beck and Smithy had split up. He had a restraining order against her, and Beck — despite her best efforts to contain it — was starting to crumble.)

When I left that time around to go back to Sydney, I sent Beck a long and thoughtful Facebook message telling her that I was worried about her behaviour and that I thought the way she was behaving around her kids may have been damaging. She never replied, and later admitted to me that she'd never read the message.

A few days after Christmas in 2014, Hayley — still fifteen — contacted me to say Beck had kicked her out of the house on Christmas Eve. Apparently, the camera I'd bought for Hayley a few years earlier was missing as well, along with several other things from the house, and Hayley told me that — along with some of her niece's things — Beck had sold them in a pawn shop.

‘I know I'm not sixteen yet, but I really want to move out,' Hayley said.

She explained that there was a family who were happy to have her move in. She gave me the mum's number and I rang and had a chat with her — the family were church going, liberal-minded, and reasonably well off. The mum told me that the kids had set dinner and homework times, and that they loved Hayley to bits. They were happy to have Hayley stay as long as she wanted, and would look after her like she was one of their own.

I agreed to support Hayley in moving out and to help organise her Centrelink, and told her not to tell her Mum that I had helped her. Beck was deeply hurt when her oldest left the nest at such a young age, and I think she would have wiped me from her life if she had known that I'd helped her move out.

So while I'm really not sure what sort of parent Beck would have been if she had not been a drug user, I do know that crystal meth's ability to dull everything else so you keep feeding on it undoubtedly made her less of a parent that she might have been. The way meth works on the brain probably explains the relatively high number of women who continue taking meth while pregnant. In 2013, at the Royal Women's Hospital alone, 15 babies were born to mums who had used ice during their pregnancy.

Their paediatrician, Dr Ellen Bowman, told me that some of these babies are born showing withdrawal symptoms, meaning they could be floppy and refuse to eat, and be undersized or irritable. She said the long-term risk with these babies could be that they grow to be adults with undersized heads. Research by journalist Kate Legge, in an article published in
The Weekend Australian
magazine, also found that pregnant mothers using ice was a growing problem, with numbers increasing at those hospitals that screen mothers for substance abuse (which many do not).

There are also many examples of minors getting involved in meth irrespective of their parents' actions. In their submission to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry, Melbourne City Mission report that workers in their early intervention programs have identified meth use in ‘clients as young as 12 years of age' and that ‘70 per cent of [their clients] between the ages of 14 and 15 years of age have had some experience or use of ice'. The Victorian component of the 2011 Australian School Students Alcohol and Drugs (ASSAD) survey found that approximately five per cent of 17-year-old male and female secondary school students had previously used amphetamine for non-medical purposes at least once in their lifetime. The same survey showed 1 per cent of high school students aged between twelve and fifteen have used amphetamine or methamphetamine in the last month.

Suzi Morris, community services manager for Lives Lived Well, the super-clinic formed after the merger of the Alcohol and Drug Foundation Queensland, the Gold Coast Drug Council, and the Queensland Drug and Alcohol Council, told
The
Courier Mail
that young adults and teenagers using drugs was becoming more common.

‘I would say 15 to 24 is a common age group. There are a lot of street kids and a lot of kids who have been traumatised. They don't have loving and caring homes, they are couch surfing and they are vulnerable.'

More generally, if there are lot of teenagers using crystal meth, there's a lot of very worried parents. Or, at least, I hope they are worried — and worried in a reasonable, proportionate, rather than hysterical way.

I know, for instance, that I gave my parents more than a few headaches when I was staying in Smithy's house. During our conversation on the night my mum talked me out of the idea that she and everyone else were poisoning me, I made the link between my psychosis and what I had been through in high school. A painful exchange between Mum and me followed:

‘I know what this is all about,' I said. ‘Do you remember why I had to leave high school?'

She hesitated as if she were struggling to remember.

‘C'mon, Mum.'

‘Because you were gay?'

‘Yes. Did you know there were people at my school who believed gay people should be killed?'

Silence.

‘Well, Mum, there were, and that's why you shouldn't be surprised that I have delusions of people wanting to kill me.'