Former model, racing driver, sportswoman Kate Amoroso tells how ice addiction ruined her life
“THE DRUG controls you. You’ve never got control of ice and I don’t care if people say they only smoke it once a weekend — it will get you in the end.”
- Families warn ice plague needs crisis centres
- Mum using pain of her son’s drug overdose to help others
“THE DRUG controls you. You’ve never got control of ice and I don’t care if people say they only smoke it once a weekend — it will get you in the end.”
Six months ago, Kate Amoroso was restrained in a hospital bed, certain that nurses were plotting to murder her and or that she’d died and gone to Hell.
The mother-of-three, former model, racing car driver and sportswoman had everything she wanted in life — until ice addiction took a stranglehold on her world two-and-a-half years ago.
Kate, 41, was detained after barricading herself in the room of her Mt Gambier home in early November as police blocked off her street before trying to coax her out.
READ BELOW: I fear ice will put my daughter in a pine box
She had “wigged out” after an eight-day bender of injecting ice, taking other drugs and no sleep.
“I can’t remember much more apart from waking up in my bedroom with a heap of knives on me ... there were police and ambulance there and people were yelling and screaming
“I remember throwing stuff at the roof and the door because I thought people were shooting at me.
“I thought the police were trying to kill me, the paranoia you get with this drug is terrible ... I could hear voices and helicopters, I thought it was like a movie.”
After surrendering to police, Kate was taken to Mt Gambier Hospital, where her bizarre, paranoid and violent behaviour continued.
“Apparently I was yelling and screaming in the hospital and saying that I had massive feet and couldn’t fit my shoes on then I must have gone to sleep for two or three days,” she recalled.
“I thought the nurses were actors and they were trying to kill me, I thought the medicine they were giving me was poison, obviously the police were involved to restrain me a couple of times.”
Following several violent outbursts, Kate was flown to Royal Adelaide Hospital, where she spent several weeks in a high-dependency ward unable to move and with no idea who she was.
“I could just tap my arm on the side rail if I wanted something, I couldn’t eat and could hardly drink,” she said.
“I thought I had died somehow and gone to Hell.
“Can you imagine waking up like that and you can’t walk, talk and have lost all your faculties? I’m assuming that’s what Hell is going to be like.”
Kate eventually returned to Mt Gambier in January after a stint in the rural and remote section of Glenside Hospital, where she encountered many other patients who had suffered ice psychosis.
“They were amazing, the staff there. I woke up and didn’t know who I was, I tried to rub my tattoos off and forgot that I had children,” she said.
The former part-time model said she was prescribed painkillers and antidepressants after a 2008 work accident, which she believes led her on the path to ice addiction.
“I dropped it first, then in a couple of weeks I turned to smoking ice and once you do that it’s all downhill and when you start injecting it you get a massive rush and feel like Superwoman,” she said.
Using about $2,000 worth of ice a week, Kate said she was like other addicts — using up the trust of family to obtain money for the next hit.
“I would pester family members and say I can’t afford to pay the rent or I need my credit card paid and meanwhile was spending all my money on ice,” she said.
“Your drugs become your everything. You beg, borrow — I never stole but they do — I’m very lucky I have a good family and they would buy me food and stuff like that.”
Kate, who has two adult daughters aged in their early 20s, said her addiction had badly affected her relationship with her 12-year old son.
“You just can’t care for children on the drug — it’s impossible — you’re up all night and go to sleep at 9am when your kids are ready to get up for school,” she said.
“You can’t go and kick the footy and you can’t sit down and play a game of Monopoly because you can’t sit still, you’re tired, you’re cranky.”
Surviving on a diet of crystal meth, ice cream, cheesecake and red cordial, Kate lost 40kg and her grasp on reality.
“You can see things on the wall, people’s faces change and go funny so that’s a mild psychosis, and where it all starts. Then you hear voices and get paranoid,” she said.
Kate said it took weeks for her to return to reality and compared her brain with that of a dementia patient when she was first released.
She is now helping other ice users fight their addiction and is campaigning for a specialised ice crisis intervention centre to be established in Mt Gambier.
“I’ve got a petition with about 200 forms going for a crisis centre in Mt Gambier because it’s important they are around family, even though they hate them at that time,” she said.
Kate vowed never to return to ice and to rebuild her life.
“I don’t feel tempted. Because I have the pictures, I have the scribbles I wrote in hospital and I have the images in my head of what it was like,” she said.
“Just waking up in the morning and saying ‘wow that sun or rain is beautiful’ I honestly have never felt better or felt more positive about life.
“I’ll never go back to it, never. I’ve seen the devastation in families and the hurt in their eyes and I will never put my family through that again.”
FOR HELP WITH DRUG ADDICTION, CALL THE ALCOHOL DRUG INFORMATION SERVICE ON 1300131340 OR FAMILY DRUG SUPPORT AUSTRALIA ON 1300368186.
ADDICT MUM’S FEAR
I worry ice will put my daughter in a pine box
By Andrew Dowdell
THE DISTRAUGHT mother of an ice addict fears her daughter will be “in a pine box” within years unless she kicks the deadly habit — but believes there is little hope of that.
Sharon has watched helplessly as her daughter Samantha spiralled from young, professional mother into a wretched cycle of drug abuse that has cost her friends, family and son.
“She had so much potential and to see what she looks like now compared to what she was is heartbreaking,” Sharon said.
“She looks older, her hair is drab and did go through a stage where she did have the sores on her face but they’ve gone again.”
Samantha, in her mid-20s, turned from a devoted mother into someone who stole from her parents to feed her ice addiction.
“Her friends from school, they’re gone. And the only friends she has are also drug addicts so that’s the only life she knows and has,” Sharon said.
Sharon said she spent years trying to help her daughter, before her young son finally left to live with her two years ago.
“I would always buy them food and stuff and wouldn’t give them any money because she’d just go and buy drugs with it,” she said.
“That’s the most disheartening thing because I went to help and I got abused and ignored, we cleaned up the house and bought stuff for them but it didn’t help.”
Sharon said she held grave fears for her daughter’s future.
“I don’t know. If she hasn’t been able to give up for her son now, she’s been given every opportunity, but she just went back again to it and that’s the life she wants to live,” she said.
“I hope she’s clean, but I think she’ll probably be in a pine box in five years. You wait every day for that call, or that someone is going to knock on your door.”
The ordeal has forced Sharon to focus on her other family, including her grandson who has “seen too much”.
“He’s got nothing now, he doesn’t have a Dad and he virtually doesn’t have a Mum because she chose ice over her son. And that must be heartbreaking for him,” she said.