Free Scattered by Malcolm Knox Page B

imported than local,’ says Dr Dawson. ‘That’s just from the economics of it. A kilo of pure methamphetamine yields about 20 000 doses. To make it in Asia, where the big production centres are, and secrete one kilo in a shipment to Australia, doesn’t seem too difficult.’
    By the age of 29, five years after moving to Australia, Darren Jason Blackburn had been homeless around western Melbourne for the best part of three years. He still wasn’t seeing doctors for his schizophrenia or taking any medication other than the alcohol he drank and marijuana he smoked.
    Every now and then he landed a job. After one of several stints in a hostel for homeless men in Footscray, he found casual work loading containers for the dairy company Bonlac. With his cash wages topping up his dole cheques, Blackburn was able to buy his nightly two casks of wine and get quietly sozzled.
    Or not quite quietly. On 12 December 2001 he was convicted, after a vicious fight with another man, for intentionally causing serious injury. He was sentenced to six months’ periodic detention, but didn’t turn up one day and was ordered to serve the remaining 69 days all at once. He also went to a detox centre when his drinking overwhelmed him. He did the course, but as soon as he came out he resumed his consumption of alcohol and drugs.
    Blackburn’s downward spiral was accelerated by three significant events in 2001. First, he met Graham ‘Banjo’ Band. Thirty years Blackburn’s senior, Band was a disreputable old drunk who presented himself to Darren Blackburn as a kindred spirit. They lived together in a house in Seddon, in western Melbourne, and spent each night drinking.
    Then Blackburn met Lyn Henry. Notwithstanding his deep-seated alcoholism and mental illness, his drug-taking and his sketchy employment, Blackburn remained a fairly robust, cocky and good-looking man, at least on the outside, and Henry fell in love with him. She moved in with him and Banjo Band, and, just as he had a few years earlier, Blackburn believed he could be saved by love.
    But there were competing love interests. In 2001, he started becoming a frequent user of intravenous drugs such as heroin. He was also introduced to ice. He liked heroin, but it was hard to come by. He liked ice more, and it was cheap and plentiful. As Dr Peter McGeorge, the mental health director at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, would say a few years later, ice became the ultimate democratic drug—it was popular in the party scene, among white-collar professionals who liked a weekend buzz, and also, because it cost $50 a point (a shot of one-tenth of a gram), it found favour with the homeless. For the first time in years, Darren Blackburn felt that his luck was coming good.

    It’s not as if the consequences of the heroin drought hadn’t been foreseen. By 2000, Australia was a client state on the doorstep of the world’s biggest producers. We have seen how by 1997 methamphetamines were a bigger problem than opiates in Thailand. In 1998, the Australian Bureau of Crime Intelligence reported that Indonesia was threatening as a base for ice export to Australia.
    So it proved with actual seizures. The 971 grams of amphetamines seized by Australian Customs in 2000–2001 surged to 305 kilograms the next year. In the following years the seized amounts were 6 kilos, 6 kilos, 157 kilos and 90 kilos. And that was only what was being intercepted at the borders. Police seizures of ice inside Australia rose phenomenally, from one kilo in 1998–99 to 6 kilos in 1999–2000, 80 kilos the next year, 150 kilos the next, and 225 kilos in 2002–03.
    These figures were distorted by big single busts, some of which were spectacular or newsworthy. In March 1999, an unemployed seventeen-year-old youth was arrested in Sydney over the delivery of 238 grams of methamphetamine, packed into children’s toys, from south-east Asia. He was connected to an