The Ice Age (25 page)

Customers were given code words to use on phones when placing orders: ‘catch up for a coffee' translated into 0.1 of a gram of ice, and ‘catch up for a bourbon' meant one gram. The instructions included a warning that there would be harsh consequences for anyone who acted unprofessionally or dared commit the ‘vile act' of going to the police. Dalton ruled with an iron fist: he hired 24-year-old Muay Thai fighter Dean Griggs as the syndicate's tough guy. Over time, a young butcher was shot at his home in a busy residential street, two homes were firebombed as children slept inside, and cars were set alight. Recovering drug debts and maintaining territory was a vicious process, and often involved weapons. If a person left the syndicate, Griggs was known to interrogate them violently in their home.

Wangaratta Police launched Operation Juliet and eventually caught up with Dalton, who — much to the relief of his own family — was arrested in September 2012. The full extent of his syndicate's operations were laid out in court nearly two years later, and, in July 2014, he was sentenced to a maximum of nine years in jail after pleading guilty to trafficking a commercial quantity of methamphetamine — known as ice — and ecstasy, as well as recklessly causing serious injury, reckless conduct endangering a person, false imprisonment, and arson. Eight others were charged, and another four, including Dalton's brother and ex-girlfriend, would later be convicted.

During the trial, Aaron's father Shane Dalton told the court that he was relieved when his son was arrested: ‘We didn't know what was going to happen. At least if he was in jail, we knew he was going to be safe.' He said that he saw his son slip into the problem in mid-2012, after his partner and young daughter left him.

Fleeting, opportunistic, and surprisingly sophisticated: Australia's meth scene was creating instant criminals — often with little or no prior criminal history — who wanted a slice of the action. It's not surprising that many people — often youngish men — would be attracted to the idea of being a drug dealer in contemporary society. Drug dealing is one of the few vocations that crosses over between gangster street cred and celebrity, creating a kind of buoyant masculine glamour that can be either a consolation for failure in the mainstream or a suitable alternative to the blisters, bad backs, and slow-burn money-making of most working-class jobs and trades. For others, it might simply be a way of ensuring the phone is always ringing.

Smithy, I often noticed, charged people for drugs based on how sexually attractive he found them — which in my case meant I didn't get free drugs for standing there looking pretty, like many of the girls who came to the house did. However, when I first moved in, he came up to me one day when I was in the kitchen and whispered ‘I'll offer you the same deal I offered Beck: you can give money for a hit or you can give me a blow job.'

Beck later denied that this was the set-up, suggesting Smithy might have been joking about the offer, although ‘you can never be 100 per cent sure'.

Dodgy deals aside, I reckon we live in a society that not only expects us to fulfil our duty, but also wants us to discover what our duty is. We must find our own reference for meaning. Many of us long to find it in our daily lives, and eventually we ask ourselves: ‘Can I work hard enough to dream?'

For Smithy, his casual drug dealing had started again, believe it or not, after Beck gave birth to their twin boys in 2009. Beck had fallen pregnant twice before in the first two years they were together, and terminated both pregnancies. Smithy had told her he was not interested in having children because he wanted to keep partying for the rest of his life, and didn't want the responsibility or financial burden of having kids.

After the birth, Beck went to work in the factory in Dandenong, and found the work a nice break from crying babies and the sight of her lounge-room walls. However, after hour upon hour of screwing together light globes and putting them inside little boxes, she found herself dreading work so much that she was having painful anxiety attacks. She resigned at the six-week mark, and Smithy took this as a serious, disappointing, but not altogether surprising broken promise. He now believed that not only had Beck deliberately fallen pregnant, but he was also faced with the prospect of working all week to feed his children and pay his rent, without a drug-fuelled ‘Smithy Saturday' to look forward to. This was nothing short of a prison life, surely, though there was one thing he hadn't counted on: Smithy bonded with those beautiful little boys like a fish does with water, and he quite liked his new life. Nonetheless, he pressed Beck to make money, and she used her encyclopaedic knowledge of welfare law to good effect for a little while, but eventually she ran out of tricks. So Smithy started dealing pot. He'd buy it in bulk — on tick — sell it, smoke it, and then repay the wholesaler with his revenue — meaning all ‘profit' went up in smoke. This non-profit, consignment model of small-time retail drug dealing was also readily applied when he started selling meth to his friends.

Like so many other young, small-time drug dealers, Smithy and Beck both had parents who never used drugs and were never involved in crime. They saw their parents work day after day, often for relatively long hours, without much pleasure or glory — at least not that they could see. And they grew up to find that getting meaningful employment was far harder for them, and required far more commitment and training — and for what? To spend all their money on a rental, or on a mortgage that required an average working-class person to work two jobs and eat Vegemite sandwiches for dinner every second night? Beck had an easier time applying her brains to mastering Centrelink than she did packing boxes. Smithy could have gone out to work as a labourer and earned $120 a day, or he could sit at home taking drugs, and selling them among his friends, for roughly the same result. I guess you could call it an underclass rebellion: a group of people who aspired to less of the material and career goals they'd seen their lower-middle-class parents struggle to attain. Meth use was a way of living in the moment and rejecting the stoic, disciplined lives of their parents. Instead, this was a group who thought hedonism and fun were the appropriate ways to live their lives — all part of their defiance against the expectations they work in arduous jobs like labouring or aged care.

I met other small-time drug dealers while I was living at Smithy's: three to be precise. There was ‘Tall' — a 45-year-old former refrigerator repairman who I think meant well, but whose poor social skills meant he was bound for a lonely life. There was ‘Short' — a young Italian-looking dude from the suburbs who tried to hide his tiny frame and highly sensitive personality with Adidas-style gangster wear. And there was ‘Skinny' — a willowy, dark-haired former carpenter who walked in one day to see us watching netball on Foxtel and said ‘Oh, netball. I used to play mixed netball down Knox way. Good on you, mate, good on you'.

All three seemed to come over to Smithy's at about the same rate. Tall would sometimes stay to socialise, and one day he said he'd found something he thought would be of particular interest to me.

‘This will blow your mind, mate, blow your mind. Have you ever heard of Agenda 21?'

He played me a video on his iPad. The video was of a former South Australian Independent MP called Anne Bressington speaking on a podium at some unnamed event at the Adelaide Convention Centre. Bressington explained that ‘the words of Agenda 21 were never meant to be spoken'. She said it had been created by a secret group called the Club of Rome, which invented a number of ‘imaginary dangers' like global warming and water shortages as a way of creating globalisation. Australia, in turn, brought in a new economic order, leaving Australia short of technology, a manufacturing base, and jobs.

Tall stood over my shoulder watching it, nodding his head in agreement, and then shaking his head when he thought through the implications.

Agenda 21 is — in case you are wondering — a real thing: a non-binding, voluntarily implemented action plan of the UN with regard to sustainable development. For conspiracy theorists, it is part of a secret global agenda to depopulate the earth.

‘We are constantly having our rights impinged upon,' Tall said after we'd watched the video. ‘I can never make a profit from work, I can never get ahead, I can't afford a house, and it's all because of Agenda 21 — it's all because of the carbon tax.'

I explained that the carbon tax had been abolished, and oddly that seemed to be just a 24-hour obsession; Tall never mentioned Agenda 21 again. Instead, he began to focus his attention on Short, to whom he had given an amount of crystal meth to sell on consignment. Then — apparently long before the date when Short was supposed to return the profit — Tall started demanding the money back. Smithy told me this was because Tall was in the habit of injecting at our place, and then going around the corner to the oldest building in town — the Pakenham Hotel — and blowing all his money on the pokies. When Short was unable to return the funds on time, conflict ensued. Tall spent hours in our garage, fuelled up on meth, threatening to kill Short: ‘If only I could find where he lives,' he would say, and then he'd put on his reading glasses and spend hours trawling through the White Pages online, Google maps, and various other websites from which he was convinced he'd be able to learn Short's whereabouts because he had his phone number. Eventually, he settled on sending threatening text messages.

Tall, Short, and Skinny all knew I was writing a book, so they were very, and understandably, reluctant to give me any information about who they sourced their drugs from, how they did their business, or how the drug-supply hierarchy worked. However, one did introduce me to one guy — I won't give too much away about him other than to say he worked for a major Melbourne underworld figure a few years back, and he had a number of contacts. One of his ‘cooks' told me that home-made meth — the world's most powerful stimulant drug — can be made in our sinks, in our garages, and in our cars by shaking a Coke bottle containing some ingredients that have been blended in a food processor.

Towards the end of
A
Scanner Darkly
, a character who appears fleetingly throughout the book is endlessly antagonised by imaginary bugs he sees all over himself, the floor, and his dog. Driven mad by his abuse of Substance D, he apparently decides to end his life by drinking and sleeping pills. He goes to bed inexplicably clutching a copy of Ayn Rand's
The
Fountainhead
while a creature with many eyes all over it, wearing ultra-modern, expensive-looking clothing, rose eight feet high with a scroll to read all his sins. We are told this is going to take a hundred thousand years. Dick writes:

Fixing its many compound eyes on him, the creature from between dimensions said, ‘We are no longer in the mundane universe. Lower-plane categories of material existence such as “space” and “time” no longer apply to you. You have been elevated to the transcendent realm. Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end.' Know your dealer, Charles Freck thought, and wished he could take back the last half-hour of his life. A thousand years later he was still lying there on his bed with the Ayn Rand book … listening to them read his sins to him.

It is not precisely clear what Dick was intending to convey by placing Rand's book in this scene. Rand was a supporter of egoism and laissez-faire capitalism, and
The Fountainhead
is about one man's choice to live in obscurity to maintain his independence and integrity. Rand's philosophy was called ‘Objectivism' — she described its essence as ‘the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute'. Rand's ideas would later influence a whole generation of libertarians; free marketeers who emphasised the importance of autonomy and individual choice without state or collectivist interference.

There is something to be said here about the connection between meth production and individualism; a person who makes their own meth — particularly an addict who uses their own products — is economically autonomous. The meth producer who works for his or her own self is atomised, has happiness as their central goal, is isolated, and is highly self-sufficient. They do not concern themselves with social expectations or what other people think. It makes me wonder: are they not a warped result of Ayn Rand's dream?

And as a result of the actions of these autonomous producers, clandestine lab detections — while not rising as quickly as importations of meth — have increased rapidly since 2009, doubling across the last decade. There were 314 detected nationally in 2002; 356 in 2007–08; 449 in 2008–09; 694 in 2009–10; and 744 in 2013–14. Queensland had a particularly monstrous rise: from 121 in 2007–08 to 379 over the 2011–12 period, before dropping back slightly to 340 in 2013–14.

That's an awful lot of toxic waste, cat-piss odours, and empty brake-fluid containers filling up Australian suburbs. And Australian suburbs are exactly where the police are finding this new wave of meth production. During 2011–12 and 2012–13, 68.2 per cent of clandestine laboratories were located in residential areas, followed by those in vehicles (9 per cent), commercial or industrial areas (8.9 per cent), public places (3.8 per cent), rural areas (2.2 per cent), and other places (7.9 per cent). However, unlike the big industrial-scale labs shown in
Breaking Bad
(which
do
exist all over Mexico and parts of South-East Asia) between 2011–12 and 2012–13 in Australia, the majority of detected clandestine laboratories were individual and addict-based (58.8 per cent), whereas others were small-scale labs (23.5 per cent), medium-sized labs (9.7 per cent) and industrial-scale labs (8 per cent), the latter of which had seen an increase from 2.7 per cent in 2011–12. Notable detections included a massive drug factory in Hume and another in South Australia, at a property at Walker Flat, where a drug lab was found in a shack on the banks of the Murray. Two Gold Coast men were jailed for their involvement in one of the most sophisticated ‘factory style' meth labs ever seen in Australia: Dane Marriott, thirty-nine, and Matthew Smith, thirty-one, who were arrested after police raided their ‘resort-style' property nestled in the Currumbin Valley back in June 2011.