GOT YOU ON ICE

About fifteen years ago – when I had a house in Hawaii – I was at a barbecue on Kaua’i and got talking to several senior police officers from Honolulu.

When one heard my accent he warned me about a major problem that was heading Down Under. He said the problem was ‘ice’. I had never heard of it.

The copper said Australia was an easy target and that ice would be worse than heroin, worse than crack cocaine. A mind-altering crystal methamphetamine that produced a short-live energy hit, had sexual connotations and could give a demented user so much additional strength it could take four men to hold him down.

It seems like he was right, according to a new report by the Australian National Council on drugs. There has been a ‘ significant surge’ in ice problems since the late 1990s. Any Sydney or Melbourne copper could have told you that.

But frankly, I don’t believe some figures in the report – which will be released tomorrow at the National Press Club in Canberra.

It claims that almost one in ten Australians has tried methamphetamines at least once. That’s two million Australians. Take out elderly people and 99.9% of children under the age of twelve and that would push the number to four or five million. And I don’t believe that.

I do believe that more than 70,000 Australians are dependent on methamphetamines which is about double the number of heroin addicts.

Ice is addictive. It can be smoked or swallowed or injected. It can lead to uninhibited sexual behaviour than increases the risk of AIDS and also can lead to psychotic violence including murder.

The reports recommendations on how to combat ice could go into the
‘means well’ basket. For example predictably they want ‘school-based prevention programs that are not fear campaigns, but rather concentrate on teaching young people resilience and other social skills they need to refuse drugs’.

Yeah, sure. It hasn’t worked with booze, binge drinking, pot smoking or popping ecstasy tablets. The first thing to do is crack down on the motor cycle gangs which run backyard ice and ecstasy factories. Seize the drugs, try then jail the gang leaders and confiscate the houses and boats and Harleys they have bought with the illegal profits.

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2007