Mitchell, 27, has known about drugs since he was 10, when he’d come home from school in Guildford, western Sydney, and find his dad had prepared him a backpack and a list of names.

Mitchell was an after-school drug delivery boy on a bike. He didn’t touch the stuff, not then. At the age of 14, he fled his home, worked in construction, earning $900 a week. At 16, he had his first hit of ice.

“That first taste was unbelievable,” he says.

After that, he mostly stayed away from it, using dope and alcohol. He was a good worker and the chance came, in his early 20s, to shift to Perth, to be part of the resources boom.

Mitchell’s family originally came from the Cook Islands, and he was determined to be the first among them to build his own home. On high wages, he began to make it happen, but ice was back in his life.

He scored a job as a fly-in, fly-outer with John Holland at the Devil Creek gas plant, near Karratha, in the Pilbara, 29 days on, nine days off. His missus was pregnant and didn’t know he had developed a serious habit.

She’d want to come and pick him up from the airport when he came home. He made excuses. “The real reason was my dealer was waiting there at the airport,” says Mitchell. They’d go for a drive so he could hit up.

Dropped home to his wife, he came across happy and loving. “But inside I was an absolute piece of shit,” he says. The aggression would quickly set in.

“I didn’t want a broken family like my mum and dad,” says Mitchell. “And I had achieved my goals of building a house, but my temper was short. Not physical, but I was abusive enough to scare her.

“After six years, she’d had enough. I didn’t think she’d be silly enough to leave me — with a house, and my wages. But she did. I was injecting half a ball a day.” That’s half an eightball — which is 3.5gms of 80 per cent, high-purity ice. That’s a lot of ice.

Any person injecting such quality product is invariably close to the importation or local manufacturing source. Most streets addicts inject or smoke a product of around 20 per cent purity, once mid-level dealers have cut it to maximise profits.

For more than five years, Mitchell beat drug testing in the Pilbara using legally available synthetic urine, sold in “smoke” shops such as Cloud 9, which has outlets across Perth. That meant he could load up on ice all through his days off and return to the site, apparently clean.

He did morning weights, worked 12 hours, pushed more weights, had dinner, pulled a cone of Kronic — synthetic cannabis, also undetectable on urine analysis — and crashed to sleep.

Mitchell doesn’t blame his wife for leaving. He knew he’d estranged her in favour of ice. But then he hit it even harder and realised it was time for a self-reckoning.

He heard about the Fresh Start program, which involves inserting crave-blocking Naltrexone implants in the stomach lining, along with counselling and a place in a rehab hostel in Northam, north west of Perth.

The last time he felt those aches on descent into Perth and hooked up with his dealer outside the airport was just five weeks ago. He knows he’s got at least a year of rehab ahead of him.

IN HOSPITALS ACROSS AUSTRALIA WE SAW ICE PSYCHOSIS IN ALL ITS EXTREMES

JOHNNY Mitchell has money and presents well. In that sense, he is an atypical user. Ice is tearing at society from the bottom up, hurting and criminalising the poorest before making its way up the income ladder.

Ambulance and emergency department staffers recall almost fondly the days when heroin was the main problem. Users were nonviolent. They were either body-bagged or could be brought back to life with a rousing shot of Narcan.

In three visits to emergency departments as part of a four-week nationwide investigation into the extent of the ice problem, we saw ice psychosis in all its extremes.

There’s the 23-year-old guy brought into Royal Melbourne Hospital, which has the state’s busiest emergency department, kicking at the insides of a police van, screaming: “I’ll cut my cock off!” This is a Code Grey — or dangerous — situation. It takes 15 staff to restrain him.

His threat is self-pitying, but not idle. An ice user in Mt Gambier did as much earlier this year. When he came to after his psychosis passed, he asked for it to be sewn back on. No such luck.

Royal Melbourne consultant doctor Martin Dutch points to a board showing that emergency staff were threatened 188 times in the month of June, mostly by ice patients.

“We need to contain them,” says the perfunctory Dr Dutch. “We use a combination of physical and chemical restraint, tying all four limbs to a bed, forcibly gaining intravenous access to deliver sedation.”

There is Brody, 24, the young guy in St Vincent’s, also in Melbourne, sitting under a blanket, suffering “confusion” after taking ice. Brody leans forward and confides that ice grants him access to a hidden world where fantastic knowledge is transmitted by number codes and colours.

“Ice, used properly, unlocks the secrets of the mind, and the body,” he says, oblivious to the reason he’s in hospital. “With ice, we can become a great race.”

He’s holding my business card, staring at it, constantly turning it in his hands, studying the blue ink, muttering and fixated as though it holds a universal clue. I gently prise it from his hand and he looks shocked, as though I have interrupted a profoundly insightful trance.

At the Royal Perth Hospital, three police auxiliaries arrive with “Bill”, late 20s, locked in the back of a paddy wagon. He’s got his pants down and is screaming for a smoke. A team of doctors, nurses, security guards and police auxiliaries — 12 staff — are standing by when the van door is finally unlocked.

Everyone is wearing face masks: Bill is HIV-positive and a known spitter. Out he comes, roaring, and the biggest security guard gets slagged right in his mask.

Handcuffed to the trolley by both hands and chained at the feet, Bill is still trying to spit. The guard slams his elbow down and pins Bill’s head sideways on the hospital trolley, as Bill screams his neck is being broken. This is not unnecessary force — it is absolutely necessary.

A vein is found and the sedatives and antipsychotics — Midazolam and Droperidol — kick in almost instantly. Bill moans to sleep, momentarily sits bolt upright, then drifts off again, now harmless.

Bill joins the five people already in various states of sedation in the hospital’s “psychosis alley”, a row of beds taking up much-needed room in the emergency department. It is not yet 4pm on a Tuesday.

Ice psychotics are often described as having superhuman strength. As Owen Kortlang, a security guard at Royal Melbourne, says: “You’ve got a 500kg person coming through the door.”

Dr Dutch says methylamphetamine bestows no pharmacological gift of strength: it is instead the total abrogation of normal human inhibition, or a kill-switch, that sees users aroused into states of outsized power.

“What you’re seeing,” says the head emergency nurse at Royal Melbourne, Laura Zeeman, “is fear. They are frightened of what is happening to them.”

The risks are great but big-city emergency departments have become reluctant experts at handling ice-psychosis patients who present as wild, caged animals.

Yet the small-town hospital, or the single mother, stand little chance against a raging ice psychotic ripping apart a home.

THE ICE ‘HIGHWAYS’ ARE A MYTH: IT’S ALREADY EVERYWHERE

AUSTRALIA is now routinely cited as the highest ice-using country in the English-speaking world, something that the head of the Australian Crime Commission, Chris Dawson, 16 months in the job, is still coming to terms with.

“We don’t quite understand ourselves,” Dawson says. “Whether it’s that we are a rich country, a high cash economy, that may be one of the factors, but we are certainly seeing a disproportionate level of use.”

“Anyone I talk to knows someone, if not directly, but indirectly affected by this drug. It’s tearing families apart.”

As a high-income island nation, Australia — in theory — ought be removed from the worst excesses of a cheap synthetic drug such as methylamphetamine, or ice, yet foreign and homegrown crime syndicates ignored the unfavourable business modelling and found rich pickings.

Ice has now become the main focus of Crime Commission reports and investigations. Dawson says he doesn’t get hung up on whether what we are seeing is described as an epidemic, a pandemic or a scourge.

“Whichever way you want to describe it,” he says. “Either way, I’m seeing it as a very serious harm that’s visiting Australians and it’s not confined to the cities but small and disadvantaged regional communities as well.”

As crime syndicates move their product through suburbs and towns in addict-recruitment drives, certain places develop reputations as “ice capitals”.

The usual suspects are Roma or St George, in Queensland; Walgett, Wellington or Wagga Wagga in NSW; Mildura or Shepparton in Victoria; Devonport in Tasmania; Mt Gambier in South Australia; Bunbury or Roebourne in WA; Queanbeyan on the cusp of Canberra; the suburbs of Palmerston out of Darwin.

Some civic and police leaders reject such labels as unfair; others embrace it, because they hope the attention will bring help.

But there is no ice capital. The drug has now infiltrated all of the country, with one final frontier to conquer — the most isolated indigenous communities of the Northern Territory. But they’re bracing and it’s just a matter of time.

It would be easy if it was just bikies behind the trade, but as one NT copper says: “Nobodies are bringing it up. It’s people we don’t know about. It travels small and it travels fast.”

The so-called “Ice Highways” of Australia — key truck transport routes — are a myth. When you can cram $100,000 worth of high-purity ice into the size of a pack of Horizon 50s, ice goes by car or bike, wherever there’s bitumen or a dirt track.

Country towns are no worse afflicted than major cities, but it is easier to see the stark damage wrought by ice in a small town with a captive drug audience.

The ice pyramid scheme always looks the same: importers or manufacturers recruit distributors who recruit locals to become dealer-users, who in turn create other addicts, who then become sellers to support their habits. So it goes until a broad market is built on human ruin.

Ice addiction has brought new levels of criminality never seen among cannabis users. And the further that customers are from importation and manufacturing centres, the more it costs them: Northern Territory users pay up to $1500 a gram compared to around $800 elsewhere.

High prices have done nothing to stop demand, as this startling statement from NT Corrections to the Ice Select Committee shows: “Since 2014, nearly every young person received at youth detention centres (between 90 to 100 per cent) and assessed upon admission self-reported that they had used ice, and/or exhibited behaviours associated with ice addiction.”

Eastern States’ rural towns with high Aboriginal populations are often described as being deepest in the grip of ice. Walgett hospital dispenses 1200 syringe packs a month. Each black box contains five syringes, or 6000 hits a month in a town of 3000.

However, the white woman who opens the front door of her small Queensland town knows this is no black problem.

SHE FOUND HER SON HANGED AT HOME

WHEN told we are here to inquire about her son, whom she recently found hanged in her home, the woman breaks down. She cries that it is still too soon to speak.

Her son’s death was by opiate overdose, but she has no doubt it was ice that killed him. The comedown from an ice binge is so severe, users invariably become poly-users, mixing the volatile upper with heavy downers to escape tormenting psychosis.

Psychosis is characterised by iron-held beliefs — of secret societies following them, bugs crawling under their skin, instructions from unseen commanders, or sometimes inarticulate bewilderment.

Anyone who cannot understand them is a suspected collaborator. Even your cowering mum.

One current black-market answer to an ice comedown is Fenantyl, a fast-working synthetic opiate patch for pain, far stronger than morphine or heroin. Ice users dilute the patches in solution for injection, usually with no idea how potent it is.

Despite Fenantyl killing her son, the mother believes it was ice that led to his knife-wielding rages; it was the after-effects of ice that he was trying to escape with Fenantyl.

In St George, in southwest Queensland, another mother, Robyn Fuhrmeister, says her town is overrun with ice. Her son, aged 34, is currently in rehab after falling hard for the drug.

St George, on the Balonne River, seems forever caught between drought and flood. Ice is now constant.

Fuhrmeister, 64, is president of Care Balonne, an organisation set up to help the town. She wasn’t expecting her family would need help. The problem became starkly clear when she found her son with a rope around his neck.

 “My son is a user,” she says. “I’m not proud of it. He’s lost his wife and his children. Ice is all over Australia, but in small towns you see it.”

Senior Sergeant Paul Tabrett is deeply conscious of two disturbing trends, neither of them unique to St George: the arrival of extremely high-potency ice, and the social “normalisation” of ice.

“It is long accepted out here that people, when they’re 15 to 21, will smoke some cones. This drug is different,” he says, showing us a recent seizure of 52 grams of 70 per cent ice, found in an incoming vehicle, street valued at $60,000.

“Rural communities are getting caught out. The transition from smoking cannabis to an ice pipe is not dissimilar. Socially, it’s not that alarming to people to see someone make that transition.

“When we faced heroin, most of that was done though intravenous, so there was this view that, ‘Hey, you’re a hard drug user.’” Now, he says, people are passing the ice pipe at parties, and not questioning it.

“We had the sledgehammer to deal with heroin. It was AIDS. We don’t have that with ice.” Still, Tabrett knows ice smokers will quickly move through to intravenous use, and hep C in particular has been reawakened.

In Perth’s Fresh Start clinic, 40 per cent of the 1000 people they see each year are hep C positive. Hep C can be cured, but harder to cure is the addiction for a drug that users rate, on first try, as better than sex.

The problem is they don’t enjoy the rapid degeneration that follows. And the dealers are targeting kids so young they are not in a position to compare ice to a sexual experience.

‘BLACK, WHITE, ASIAN ... ICE IS GOING TO KILL US ALL’

GORDON Byers is the stereotypical worst-nightmare small-town citizen, with a self-admitted chip on his shoulder, a long prison history for domestic and public violence, and a hatred for people, but especially for himself.

Eighteen months ago, Byers added ice to these pre-existing conditions that had till then been fuelled by alcohol and common speed. He got a lot worse.

“I’ve always hustled,” says Byers, 34, an Aborigine who grew up in what he calls the “slums” of Dubbo, in central NSW. “I was selling ice but I wasn’t tempted. Then I started smoking it. I was always an angry person but I could walk away. Now I was getting angry so quick. Blood rages.

“Ice is demon shit. You turn into a monster, you have no control. It takes over. And your kids can see it. You can have an epiphany with drink — you know not to drink. Not ice. That first toke, you’re gone. And then you’re looking for it.”

Byers is chipping away with an adze at a wooden bowl he’s hand carving at the remote Orana Haven rehab facility, several hundred kilometres northwest of Dubbo.

He’s back for his second stint, which he knows is his last chance. His wife, the mother of four of his kids, is clear on this. “I got an ultimatum from her — it’s drugs or my kids.”

Byers has been here only a few weeks but says that this time he’s really trying to think things through, how he turned out so bad.

“Ice, it’s gonna kill us all. Black, white, Asian, it’s gonna genocide us all.”

As a kid he was bullied, so he became a bully. He was mostly raised by his grandmother but has lately been talking to his dad about why he was exposed to so much hatred as a kid. He hasn’t yet got to the bottom of his own story. “There was so much violence. Just drunks. Dirty, creeping people.”

Byers’ reputation was such that each time he came home from Wellington and Bathurst prisons, no one would employ him.

“People know me as a dickhead and wouldn’t hire me,” he says. “I started selling when I got out of jail because I needed money. I thought I was doing it for the kids. And I was there for them as a dad, but I lost it.”

He talks in a quiet voice, for a reason. “My kids flinch when I raise my voice,” he says. “They asked me to stop hurting people, to stop hurting mum.”

He never shot up ice, because he had a cousin who OD’d on hillbilly heroin (the painkiller oxycodone, marketed as OxyContin). But in ice, he felt he’d found his drug.

“I was more hyped up than my kids. It shouldn’t be that way. My plan was to make money for me and my family, but I was smoking more than I was selling. I was losing money. I was pawning stuff belonging to the kids.

“I want some peace. I got greedy and spiteful. I need to learn to think — think about other people. Learn to listen, and learn to learn. I want to learn to be calm. I’ve had enough of jail.

It what seems a counterintuitive business strategy, the ice cartels have consciously and successfully ensnared the most vulnerable and isolated welfare-reliant sections of society with their product.

It worked for the Rebels MC in Mildura, Victoria, whom the ACC accuses of deliberately targeting youth by swamping the town with ice from 2010, till the Comancheros ran them out of town and then, in turn, got shut down.

No one in any town we visited can recall any bikie turning up to a community ice forum. However, they are thought to provide useful information to CrimeStoppers about the activities of other gangs.

HERE IN THE COUNTRY, ICE IS A TRAIN CRASH

BIG BUSTS at the ports — such as the 850kg of ice detected in Sydney in a furniture shipment from Germany late last year — make for impressive photo opportunities.

The cash value and potential damage from such a haul is difficult to compute, yet the elderly couple, watching their neighbours dealing ice, see it as simple problem with an easy solution: they think the cops should raid within 30 minutes of their tip-off.

More often than not, the police don’t come. What usually follows is complaints that they don’t care — or are in bed with the dealers.

 Wagga Wagga Superintendent Bob Noble found himself fronting forums, earlier this year, facing such accusations. He was unable to tell them that a major ice operation was about to hit the town.

It came on June 16, when 110 police gathered and swarmed numerous local homes, culminating — at last count — in 53 people being charged with drug supply charges, plus numerous associated charges.

Strike force Calyx became the biggest grassroots ice operation seen in the country, and served as an explanation to Wagga as to why the “Dob in a Dealer” ice campaigns now cranking up across the country won’t always bring the instant results the public expects.

Removing one dealer serves little benefit; a mass swoop can cripple the market — though Noble knows it’s a temporary fix. “I do think we’ve made a dent, but it won’t be a permanent one,” he says. “The drug trade is resilient because of the strong demand.”

What disturbed Noble about the fallout from June 16 was the number of homes where children were present, acting as lookouts for their parents.

Some parents are now turning up in court arguing they need bail, to look after their kids. “I would contend they weren’t doing a good job in the first place,” says Noble.

Up the road, in Dubbo, an Aboriginal elder known to all as Riverbank Frank spends several days working at a community centre in the Apollo Estate, a rundown part of town where ice has taken hold.

“It’s epidemic proportions,” says Riverbank. “That ice comes and fills a void that has been created among generations of Aboriginal people who have been denied opportunity.

“I have a great belief in people and their ability to endure. We need to get together with non-Aboriginal people who are affected by this, because it affects us all. The kids of Australia are just roos in the spotlight. The only certainty is impact.”

Riverbank has seen generations of alcohol despair but views this as different, because disintegration comes so quick.

“The people who are bringing it in, I hope they can rest easy at night because here in the country, ice is a train crash,” he says. “But I think ice can be a clarion call for Australia — it’s the one thing that I believe can bring us all together.”

Detective-Inspector Denise Godden, who oversees Orana, the biggest policing region in NSW, says random drug testing of drivers shows one in five returning positives for cannabis or ice.

“The statistics are that we’re getting more detections for drugs than what we currently are for alcohol,” she says. “I reckon it’s definitely a trend.”

Godden’s region includes some of the most ice-affected towns in the country, including Dubbo and Wellington (where people are nicknamed penguins - “Black, white, live on ice”).

 Ice began taking over from run-of-the-mill amphetamines — speed — about 15 years ago. Instead of a dry white powder, an oily brown substance appeared. It was not possible to snort it through a dollar bill; it was swallowed or injected.

Marketing refinements came: it was polished, or salted, into shards or crystals. Again, this stuff was not easy to sniff. For those averse to injecting, ice pipes made it smokable, though dedicated users prefer the rush of a needle.

Somehow, ice has caught everyone off-guard. It was always there, but suddenly it’s everywhere. And police and the public have been caught out.

“That’s why we’re asking the community to give us the information, where it’s coming from, who’s making it,” Godden says.

“We can’t do it on our own. We need to know what’s going on.” Not every ice dealer’s door will be immediately kicked in, but Godden says: “They have to have the faith that it may not happen overnight, but it will happen.”

WHERE HAVE OUR CHILDREN GONE?

AT MOUNT GAMBIER, the public forum organised by the National Ice Taskforce in May was standing room only. More than 600 people turned up.

In this town of 30,000, we met Ev Gordon, who had to give up a $65,000 job as a chef in Kambalda, WA, a job she loved, to be closer to her heavily addicted daughter, whom she can’t abandon. “If I give up, I’ll be burying her,” she says.

There’s Maryanne Humphries, whose two sons have stopped using only this year, and who raided a super fund so one son could pay off a drug dealer; and Karen Judd, whose son, Jay, was an ice user who died of a morphine overdose in 2010.

Judd is now dedicated to fighting ice. She remembers how Jay, who once worked in an abattoir, took a blade and decapitated the barnyard cat while on an ice binge. He couldn’t remember doing it only moments afterwards. She had to plead with him to dispose of the remains before the younger kids saw.

Mt Gambier had no rehab facility for her son. The story, across Australia, is that whenever a user makes a decision to quit, they’ll hit the phones trying to get a place in a rehab facility only to find there are long queues.

Invariably, they’ll be using again — and no longer interested in rehab — by the time a place comes up.

“Ice has changed the face of addiction,” says Judd. “Early intervention is needed into this addiction and it should be involuntary. You ask them — they don’t have a problem.”

She believes acute ice-care centres are needed in the bigger smaller towns — to relieve the hospitals and to help the parents who cannot cope.

Alcohol may still be the nation’s biggest drug problem. But those who tell you that ice is a beat-up haven’t had a good look around their streets, or even their own homes.

Snr Sgt Tabrett from St George held an ice information session with parents, who were most worried about other families in the town. When he told them about the cut-off bits of plastic straw, used to dig specks of ice out from plastic bags, he saw faces cloud over with recognition.

Epidemic, scourge, emergency: the terminology doesn’t matter.

The federal government’s Ice Taskforce is due to deliver its national action strategy in October. Its interim report, delivered in July, talked in general terms about more focused police responses and better intervention and treatment.

Their report will be delivered among great public expectation: filling the pockets of advertising companies to deliver information campaigns will not be enough.

Half of Australia’s ice is made here, in clan labs, using basic widely available ingredients; the other half mostly comes from China, Mexico, Iran and South-East Asia, the US and Canada.

The 17-year-old girl sitting in a Mt Gambier cafe doesn’t know where her ice is made. She says she started using at 16.

Her father, Serge Derivas, a longtime heroin user who in recent months has been trying to stay off ice, later corrects this, saying she used from the age of 14, after she had a baby, and he found her in a drug den.

“The ice dealers in this town have no scruples,” he says. “They will sell drugs to a 10-year-old. Once, you had to know someone to get drugs. But I could go for a walk now and in five or 10 minutes, we could have ice here.”

The girl describes her first ice experience as “heaps good”.

“I smoked that crack pipe one night and didn’t go back to my daughter for three months. I was smoking it, drinking it, whacking it then back to smoking.”

Her child was removed and she went to rehab in Canberra last year. It didn’t work for her. She’s supposed to be attending counselling to get her kid back but has been missing meetings.

“I struggle with it every day,” the girl says. “I’m not even joking. In Mt Gambier, it’s easier to get ice than pot.”

Among the users of this town, the girl says there are no secret codes when they arrange deals on the phone. “Nah, no codes. Just talk openly”.

“I’d really like to see ice taken away from this town. There’s not a nice way to say this, but I know of a 14-year-old girl who sucked dick for a point (worth $50). Sorry, that’s the truth.”

Thinking back on it, you have to hope that she wasn’t talking about herself.

*PART 2: Why ice prices will soon plunge - and our problems rocket.