Free The Ice Age by Luke Williams Page A

me he thinks there are three ways in which people go from being a meth user to being a meth addict:
    1.They drift slowly into ice, and unexpectedly become addicted.
    2.They take ice without understanding its full effects, prefer using meth to other drugs because its effects last longer, and eventually become addicted.
    3.They are in a scene where it is acceptable or ‘cool’, and begin using it as a drug of choice.
    â€˜When somebody gets too far into meth addiction, daily life just starts to feel like a grind,’ he said. ‘They prefer being on meth than not. Their health starts to decline, their everyday reality feels less and less tolerable — they start to struggle financially. Then a classic addiction-cycle starts — the worse life gets, the more drugs they take, and the more drugs they take, the worse their life gets.’
    Even in retrospect, I have trouble piecing together exactly when the bit-of-fun use ended for me, and the serious, abusive use began. I can see only the after-effect, not the exact moment when I slipped from user to addict. In his book Crazy Town : money, marriage, meth , former addict Sterling R. Braswell compares the experience of being an addict to being Gollum from Lord of the Rings : ‘We forgot the taste of bread, the sound of trees, the softness of the wind, we even forgot our own name.’ My time in the house became a mess of sped-up time and drawn-out days, of coming down in bed, of blackouts, and of excursions into make-believe. The defining moment may have taken place when I started shop-lifting food; the day I thought everyone was going to kill me; the day of my bloody needle-stick injury; the day I started using two days in a row; the moments I spent fantasising about my next high while walking through the homogenised streets of inner Sydney. It may have come around the time I began having a recurring dream of walking along a field, and suddenly realising I was surrounded by steep drops, and was desperately hanging on, so as not to fall. When I had these dreams at Smithy’s, I eventually decided to let go, and enjoy the exhilaration and thrill of the fall. Falling can be joyful, even if you know that death awaits, and especially when you are so tired of holding on, and so sick of being scared.
    Even still, I have met users who suggest that meth makes them better people, and improves their lives; people who think the drug brings them experience and thrills that are beyond the normal, limited realm of human experience. They think meth makes them perform better, think better, and become better, faster, more evolved human beings.
    â€˜I cannot imagine living without it,’ one user told me. ‘I get so much done, I work so much out when I am on it. Actually, I don’t think I am that different when I use it, and often people around me can’t even tell.’
    Many people simply think that meth isn’t affecting them at all. Apart from the possibility they are delusional, perhaps this also reflects the way new technologies have come to play an apparently inconspicuous role in our lives, while at the same time radically altering the experience and understanding of our own nature. Meth is a wholly synthetic drug, one of over twenty-million chemicals that have been created in the past hundred years, and it is often, and ironically, providing a pathway for many of us to discover the beast of yesteryear.

Chapter Three
    Converging paths
    THE ORIGINS OF meth can be traced to the chemical-research labs of nineteenth-century Japan. The late nineteenth century was a time of considerable scientific advance: medicine was riding high on the discoveries of microbes, vaccines, anaesthetics, painkillers, and the realisation that humans had powerful biochemical signals called ‘hormones’. Scientists around the world had set about trying to find a synthetic compound of the human hormone adrenalin, which was at that time particularly expensive to