Poor employment and lack of options across regional NSW traps teens in addiction
AN ENTIRE generation of country NSW kids is at risk of wasting away in drug squalor — angry at the lack of opportunities in the bush and sucked in by the temptation of cheap and nasty narcotics to escape boredom.
NSW
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A GENERATION of country NSW kids is being lost to a drug haze — as boredom and lack of opportunity sends them turning to hardcore abuse and even trafficking.
At the epicentre of the crisis is the Riverina, the rich farming region renowned as Australia’s food bowl but where an investigation by The Daily Telegraph reveals there is a dark underbelly of drug dens and hopelessness.
“I feel like I’m just sitting here waiting to die,” 19-year-old Jordan Futcher, a Wagga Wagga local who first tried ice when he was just 12, said.
“I do have a plan but I’ve got to get a job first.”
His home — with broken furniture and needles and other drug paraphernalia littered everywhere among empty bags of fast food takeaway — has become a meeting place for drug users in the riverfront town of 54,000.
The meth epidemic has been compounded by the crippling youth unemployment in the Riverina, which has more than doubled from 6.8 per cent in mid-2016 to 15.3 per cent a year later.
It has prompted calls for the state government to decentralise and push jobs to the bush.
Police are doing their best to bust dealers and local “cooks” manufacturing ice, as well as battling the break-ins, theft and violent crimes that accompany illicit drug use.
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But authorities admit they are fighting an uphill battle.
“We can try and arrest ourselves out of it and get some short-term relief but unless you’re addressing the problem right at the start those rates will still go back up,” Wagga Wagga chief inspector Andrew Spliet told The Daily Telegraph.
“It wrecks people’s lives. Young kids have potential, they might have sporting potential or academic potential, and they get caught — their future is gone.”
Rates of trafficking and possession of meth in the Riverina are among the highest in NSW. Wagga Wagga has the state’s fifth-highest rate of break and enter. And there are signs addicted children are behind it.
A three-month crackdown on youth crime by Wagga Wagga police last year led to a 43 per cent drop in property offences and a 58 per cent fall in stolen vehicles.
Wagga Wagga councillor Kerry Pascoe said fewer young people were taking up apprenticeships with many struggling to keep themselves occupied.
“There’s not enough things to do around town,” he said. “It’s trying to find something for young people.
“The PCYC is trying to get funding for a $20 million facility here in the city and I think that would be the best thing.”
Mr Pascoe said the “number of people going into a trade is dropping”.
“It’s a real problem,” he said. “It’s a whole lot different to when I was a kid.”
Forensic psychologist Tim Watson-Munro, who is writing a book on Australia’s rural ice epidemic, said socio-economic decline was fuelling the ice problem.
“We’ve all seen the distress sales of farms. It used to be an intergenerational career. (Children) would take over the (family) farm,” Mr Watson-Munro said, also noting that rates of depression and suicide have skyrocketed.
“Now kids finish school and there’s no future for them in a lot of these communities. There’s a lot of anger associated with that.”
The addictive scourge of ice is now reaching into a second generation in Wagga Wagga.
“The youngest I’ve heard of is nine, the youngest I know of is 11,” a mother-of-three, who insists she has stopped, said.
“It’s in hands reach for them at their parents’ house. They’ve got it lying around.”
Wagga Wagga mayor Greg Conkey acknowledges the problem.
“I have heard of children taking ice. I heard of a case just last week where parents were giving their children ice here in the city,” Mr Conkey said.
He said while central Wagga was thriving, outlying towns suffered massive intergenerational unemployment.
“We’ve got a situation in rural and regional Australia where we’ve got two or three generations of unemployment. It’s a major problem,” he said.
Mr Conkey called on state and federal governments to lure industry back to the bush.
“That will address a number of issues including youth unemployment,” he said.
ICE ADDICTION SMASHES DREAMS
HE could have been somebody. Used his athletic agility to make a life in top-flight rugby league. But now he’s just 19 and Jordan Futcher’s body is already giving up, ruined by ice addiction.
“I’ve been using my left arm for so long (to inject), I don’t know if the vein’s clogged up to the point it’s stopping blood getting through my body,” he said. “If I’ve clogged my veins up, there’s a good chance I’m going to have a stroke or a heart attack ... no one’s going to find me until they find my body.”
Reduced to living in a putrid fibro shack in the Wagga Wagga suburb of Mount Austen, surrounded by the grime of his addiction, Mr Futcher still yearns for the very thing that is destroying him.
“I was a good kid, man, I played footy, I could have played (NRL). Drugs fully f ... ed my life,” he said.
Mr Futcher first smoked an ice pipe at 12 years old. By 14, the same year he was kicked out of home, he began injecting the drug, launching into what he now describes as a three-year “bender”.
“I’ve tried killing myself a couple of times, this place nearly f ... en destroyed me,” he said.
Mr Futcher is polite but admits he is dangerous when high, fighting mates, punching holes in the walls of his house, even setting fire to a friend’s bed as he slept.
“I grabbed the lighter and lit the blanket up,” he said.
“It changes you, I didn’t understand it could change you that much.”
Mr Futcher said young women were routinely abused while high on ice.
“Sitting there out of their brains not moving, not talking, getting molested. I’ve watched a lot of shit happen in this town.”