When it comes to ice, tear up the rule book

DRUGS are, unfortunately, a constant in modern life but the threat posed by ice is something different and our approach to it must be different too.

17/06/2013 NEWS: Sunday Mail Editor David Penberthy

MOST Australians have memories from their teenage years of parental lectures warning against the dangers of illicit drugs. In some cases the lectures were probably given by parents who could still roll a passable joint on account of living through the 1960s.

Two time-honoured components of the parental anti-drug lecture are that all drugs are addictive and that even the “softest” of drugs can act as an entry point to harder drugs.

Neither of those assertions are necessarily true. They are in some cases. But there are many thousands of people who took different drugs infrequently at a certain point in their lives, usually adolescence, and never took them again. There are millions of people who puffed innocently on a joint and never ended up dying from a heroin overdose. The argument that if you do x, y will happen is a baseless generalisation, even if, as a parent, one we will still make to our children, in keeping with tradition and in the absence of anything better.

Where the argument seems to be completely right, however, is in relation to the drug ice. In terms of its staggering levels of addiction, the speed with which it destroys a person’s mind and appearance and the spectacularly aberrant and violent behaviour it engenders in those who abuse it, I cannot think of a more terrifying illicit drug.

The ease with which this drug has taken hold in so many of our communities is beyond alarming.

The drug has a human face in Australia and that face is Ben Cousins. Enabled by a culture of both indifference and, in the case of some individuals, complicity, the former West Coast premiership star and Brownlow medallist is now completely off the rails.

Cousins has been described as hitting “rock bottom” more times than most, but he has plumbed even lower depths in the past three weeks in what is clearly an all-out, ice-fuelled behavioural collapse.

There were several new revelations about the ice trade this week. The gangs which produce ice are now using new chemicals to make it even more addictive. Ice is also being sold in lots of five rather than individual doses to get people to back up and become hooked from the get-go.

Most incomprehensibly, the one place which has historically provided sanctuary and community for young men, the local footy club, is in many cases becoming the venue where ice is not only available but forced on kids to “improve” their game.

As the Herald Sun reported last Wednesday, senior Victorian police have confirmed there is evidence that suburban and bush footballers are using ice as a performance-­enhancing substance, with some even getting the drug from their coaches.

Footballers are putting their lives in danger by using the drug just minutes before they run on to the field feeling like Superman.

Abusers are as young as 14 and in some teams, there are as many as nine players on ice, football administrators and police told the Herald Sun.

The buzz word in anti-drug policy over the past 20 years has been “harm minimisation”.

Translated into plain English, it means that if people are going to take illicit drugs, they should be informed about what they are doing to themselves and take those drugs in as safe a way as possible. Ice blows harm minimisation out of the water. It is off the charts. There is no safe way of taking it.

If you take it a few times and get through OK, you’re playing a numbers game, as it is only a matter of time before it will catch you and screw you up completely.

I can’t help but suspect that as the anti-drug forces focused all their attention against the scourge of alcohol, the new drug ice came along and blindsided them. That is not to downplay or dismiss the reality of alcohol abuse. It’s a scourge, for sure. But when drug bodies are now saying that in some regional Australian towns there is more ice-related violence than alcohol-related violence, you know that we as a society have been caught napping.

A couple of years ago I went out for beers and tacos with a few mates in Sydney’s gritty but excellent Surry Hills.

Walking down Foveaux St, a guy with a shaved head and no shirt stopped at the neighbouring table and screamed profanity-laden abuse at two girls having dinner. One of my friends called out, “Hey mate, leave them alone”.

He came over and stood over my friend. “I will stab you in the f---ing head,” he said. “You do not know who I am. You do not know what I have done or what I can do. I will f---ing kill you dead.”

After several seconds which felt like an hour the ice man lumbered towards Tumbalong Park shouting abuse and deliberately banging into equally terrified passers-by.

You cannot minimise the harm from this toxic garbage. It’s about time we tore up the touchy-feely rule book and tried a different approach.

Our parents were right after all.

Instead of these nanny state coppers going around hassling bar staff about the number of tequila shots they’ve served, we should double the number of police in our drug squads and quadruple the sentences for anyone who makes or deals this stuff.