Free Scattered by Malcolm Knox Page A

dropped.
    Politicians jockeyed to claim victory. Prime Minister John Howard and his health minister, Michael Wooldridge, extolled the virtues of heavier law enforcement in creating the heroin drought. (They had opposed the safe injecting room project in Sydney’s Kings Cross, which was also responsible for reducing the number of overdose deaths and the spread of blood-borne infections.)
    Meanwhile, on the street, injecting drug users didn’t simply pack up their fixes and give up. As Rebecca McKetin points out, the sentinel groups ‘soak up whatever’s going around’. And what was going around was to have even more devastating consequences than heroin.
    The NDARC Drug Trends studies in 2000 and 2001, which showed such good news on the heroin front, also suggested that this, like so many law-enforcement initiatives, was a zero-sum game. As the king of hard drugs died, another king stood up to claim its throne.
    In New South Wales, the number of injecting drug users wasn’t actually falling. They were just changing their drug. The portion of injecting drug users who had used ice in the previous year rose from 7 per cent in 2000 to 35 per cent in 2001. The purity of police amphetamine seizures, which had bottomed out at around 5 per cent in the mid-1990s, had crept up to 14 per cent by 1999 and was now hitting 36 per cent. The price of methamphetamine, meanwhile, was stable or dropping—to as low as $25 for a shot in Sydney. Methamphetamine was even cheaper in South Australia and Victoria.
    In the United States, the crystal meth epidemic had followed a clear geographic path through the 1990s. The Pacific Northwest and California, being closest to the supply chains of Asia and Hawaii—and, in California’s case, Mexico—felt it first. Texas was hit when the pseudoephedrine traffic started coming in from Mexico. But overall, ice’s journey in the mainland United States could be said to have started on the West Coast, in centres like Portland and San Francisco, and spread steadily eastwards.
    In Australia, reports of ice seemed to flower simultaneously in all states. And it all happened in 2000–2001. As New South Wales usage rates among injecting drug users rose from 7 per cent to 35 per cent in that year, in Victoria it rose from 8 to 18 per cent, in South Australia 13 to 20 per cent, in Queensland from negligible up to 18 per cent and in the ACT from negligible up to 21 per cent. As it had in Sweden, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, ice in Australia went everywhere at once.
    Police and researchers could never answer precisely why this happened, but the strongest theory was quite simple: major illegal drug distribution in Australia is concentrated at the top. When the big importers couldn’t get heroin, they shifted to methamphetamine. The bikie gangs who organised on-the-ground distribution were unfussed: bikie gangs had long controlled the amphetamines manufacture and sale in Australia. And bikies were everywhere, in all states.
    Dr Michael Dawson, a chemist at the University of Technology, Sydney, is a leading expert on the chemistry of methamphetamine. He says it is impossible to determine the origin of pseudoephedrine chemically—making it hard to know where the methamphetamine police capture is coming from.
    â€˜It is not like plant-based drugs [such as cannabis, cocaine and heroin] where you can identify the origin,’ he says. ‘It’s been said that you can tell local pseudoephedrine from imported pseudoephedrine, but that’s bullshit.’
    The big change, Dr Dawson says, was in the early 1990s from the P2P method, producing a 50-50 mix of left- and right-handed isomers, to the method that used pseudoephedrine to produce methamphetamine hydrochloride, entirely made up of the right-handed isomer. This happened simultaneously in Australia and overseas.
    â€˜My back-of-the-envelope estimation is that more methamphetamine in Australia is