Free Scattered by Malcolm Knox

bathroom, away from the three lawyers, who were—unlike Mark and Vicki—strangely quiet and concentrated.
    Mark felt that the top of his head had come off. The first words Vicki said were: ‘I remember this now.’ Mark’s eyes were dewy. She knew what he was remembering.
    They stayed at the party for another three or four hours. They thought they’d given up dancing. They hadn’t. They thought they’d given up having sex on the floor of someone’s garage. They hadn’t. They thought they’d given up having sex twice or more in one night. They hadn’t.
    And the next morning, there was no hangover, no comedown. This shabu was better than the old shabu. Mark and Vicki talked about it all the next day; it seemed there was nothing else of any great importance or excitement to talk about. And talking about it made them excited and horny again. They made love on the aphrodisiac memory of the previous night, and said, over and over, ‘How could we have forgotten how good this is?’ They meant the sex, but they also meant the drug.
    In the following weeks, Vicki became friendlier at work with Peter and the other guy who’d been in the bathroom. Mark, through his law firm, manipulated one case so he could brief the barrister who’d been the source of the shabu at the Coogee party. Only the barrister didn’t call it shabu. He called it crystal.
    Vicki and Mark used it again, about twice in the next six months, with their new friends. When they were on it, they loved to philosophise about it. Alcohol made them tired. Children also made them tired. Life had made them tired. So why would they use alcohol to relax? At this time in their lives, what they needed was a pick-me-up, not a depressant. It seemed they’d grown into this drug. When they were energetic youngsters they’d loved smoking dope or taking acid trips, but now they were so tired all the time, what they wanted from a drug was not a transcendent experience but a burst of energy. The best thing about crystal was that it affected them even after it had worn off; that is, it improved their sense of their own powers. Three years of parenting had depleted their vitality, but now they had it back, almost more than they needed.
    In 2001, an Australian statistical milestone was passed. Noticed only in law enforcement circles at the time, its repercussions were not yet fully understood.
    That year, nationwide drug arrests for amphetamine offences exceeded heroin arrests for the first time.
    To put that into perspective, in three decades heroin supply, possession, trafficking and importation had grown into Australia’s number one drug menace. Heroin imports, mainly from Burma but also from Thailand, Afghanistan and elsewhere in Asia, set off a domino effect of crimes against property and people, family tragedies, overdoses, imprisonment and personal ruin. Australia’s distance from the coca-producing countries of South America had to a degree insulated it from the cocaine epidemic seen in the United States. Among the illicit drugs of addiction, in Australia heroin was king.
    At the turn of the century, this changed quite abruptly. As a rule, nothing happens quickly in the illicit drugs world. Behaviour changes direction like the Queen Mary. But this change was, in relative terms, like the throwing of a switch.
    A prolonged policing assault on Asian opium poppy production, the effects of the anti-opium policies of the Taliban government in Afghanistan and a concerted police/customs chokehold on the importation of heroin across Australian borders produced results on the street. The average price of heroin went up from $350 to $450 a gram in the capital cities. Meanwhile, its average purity dropped from 51 to 39 per cent. So junkies were paying 30 per cent more for 25 per cent less. Deaths from heroin overdoses in New South Wales fell by almost half in 2000, from 491 to 296. Non-fatal overdoses also