Australia’s cocaine use is soaring. Why?

This story is part of the Good Weekend: Best of Features 2024 editon.See all 12 stories.

Before he became hopelessly addicted to cocaine, spent two stretches in prison for possession, and almost died from an overdose so severe that his muscle tissue leaked into his kidneys, Vassily*, the only son of an immigrant family, led a more or less normal life in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

His parents, who were Jewish, had come here from Eastern Europe in the early 1970s with just $750, when Vassily was one. They rented an apartment in Bondi, in a three-storey, red-brick block a kilometre from the beach. On the floor below them were Vassily’s grandparents; his great-grandparents lived nearby.

“Everyone in the building came from the same background,” says Vassily, who I met recently in a rehab clinic in Sydney’s western suburbs. “Everyone knew each other. All the kids used to play together in the street.”

Shortly after arriving, Vassily’s father completed a mechanics apprenticeship. With help from his own father, he bought a mechanics shop in Bondi. “Dad was really hard-working,” says Vassily. “He’d come home covered in grease and test cars on the weekends.” Within a few years, he’d expanded the business, eventually owning almost every mechanic shop in the area. “We moved to a big house, and bought a boat and a farm.” He taught Vassily about hard work and dedication; when the boy showed promise as a junior tennis player, his father pushed him to improve, getting him to train five hours a day, six days a week. (When he was 17, Vassily represented Australia at the Maccabiah Games, in Israel, placing second in the men’s singles.)

Vassily might have progressed had he not been interrupted by what he now describes as “a few family problems”. In 1992, shortly after Vassily had left school, his father was arrested for attempting to import 40 kilograms of cocaine and 20 kilograms of heroin. “I’m pretty cluey,” Vassily says. “But I didn’t know what he was doing, and I don’t think Mum did either.” The family came under intense scrutiny; Vassily was followed by police cars while in the street, and the family’s phones were tapped. Then, in January 1994, four days before his trial was to begin, Vassily’s father, claiming to have a sore tooth, was taken under guard to visit a dentist in Bondi. While he was in the chair, a gunman broke in and began firing shots into the ceiling. He then locked the guards and the dentist in the bathroom, and left with Vassily’s father. “I haven’t seen my dad since,” says Vassily. “They say he’s gone back to eastern Europe.”

The incident was traumatic, but Vassily was young and resilient, and got on with his life. He worked in a chicken shop at night, and went drinking with his mates. If anything, the experience made him more wary of drugs.

He didn’t try cocaine until his 21st birthday party, when a friend gave him a small bag in a birthday card. “I went to the disabled toilet with two girls,” he tells me. “I had three lines, but I didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t, like, ‘Wow!’ ” He had expected to be up all night partying, but instead he felt more or less normal. Indeed, by 1am, he was tucked up in bed, fast asleep.

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Around sunset on December 22 last year, a member of the public discovered a large, barnacle-encrusted package while walking along Magenta Beach, on the NSW Central Coast. When police opened the package, they found 39 one-kilo bricks of cocaine. More cocaine was discovered over the coming days, washed up on beaches all along the NSW east coast, including at tourist magnets such as Manly and Palm Beach, where a fisherman came across a blue barrel containing another 39 kilos. The illicit flotsam, which had by April totalled 265 kilos, elicited an uptick in early-morning beach walkers and launched a minor armada of covert search boats, not to mention jokes about how delightful it was to see it snowing in summer. But it’s perhaps best understood as an almost too-perfect metaphor for a country that is literally awash in cocaine.

One of the barnacle-encrusted packets of cocaine that washed up on NSW beaches last year.Credit: NSW Police

Australia is truly in the midst of an unprecedented cocaine boom. In 2023, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission conservatively estimated that we consume more than four tonnes per annum. More than a million Australians tried it last year, making it our second-most popular drug, after cannabis. We pay up to $400 a gram for it, one of the highest prices in the world, behind only the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and yet more people are using it than ever before. “There is a greater availability of cocaine and more social acceptability around it,” says Professor Dan Lubman, director of Turning Point, Australia’s leading national addiction treatment, research and education centre, and director of the Monash Addiction Research Centre. “People are getting offered it more and more at parties and events. There are more people trying it and being exposed to it.”

Scandals involving cocaine have long been common for wayward game-show hosts and sports stars; if you’re an aspiring rugby league bad boy and haven’t been caught on camera doing lines, then you’re not trying hard enough. Since at least the 1980s, coke has been the A-lister’s go-to vice, a drug whose premier cru status spoke not only to their bank balance but their Olympian elevation above ordinary folk. Smoking bongs is for gamers, ice is for
“housos”, and heroin is grubby. But cocaine says Hollywood and Naomi Campbell and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street. It says famous chefs and celebrity surgeons.

Al Pacino as the cocaine-fuelled Tony Montana in Scarface.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

It should also say gangland shootings and perforated septums, but cocaine has, more than any other drug, been positioned as somehow dangerous and stylish. When, in the 1983 movie Scarface, coke baron Tony Montana, played by Al Pacino, buries his face in a mound of powder before going on a murderous rampage with a grenade launcher, he’s wearing a chalk-stripe, three-piece suit with a white, silk pocket square.

No matter where you are in Australia’s urban centres, coke is never far away. It can be delivered to your door, like Uber Eats. It’s at office drinks, weddings, barbecues with neighbours. Finance types love it, as do real estate agents. “It gives them a little bit of confidence,” estate agent coach Tom Panos told The Australian recently, adding that he encouraged his clients to stay away from such “adverse behaviour”.

“It’s popular with media people, too,” Michael Farrell, director of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC), tells me. “Although print journos have gone down the social ladder and they can’t really afford it.” Coke is a particular favourite with the gay/lesbian and bisexual community, who are 2.7 times as likely as heterosexual people to take it. (Indeed, according to the 2022-23 National Drug Strategy Household Survey, gay/lesbian and bisexual people use all drugs more than straight people.)

Ruth Limkin, founder of The Banyans, says people pay $120,000 for a four-week program.Credit: Oscar Colman

It has, in certain circles, gone from a once-in-a-blue-moon blowout to a cheeky midweek treat, somewhere between a massage and an $80 mani-pedi. “Our C-suite clients will sometimes use coke because it gives them a certain focus,” says Ruth Limkin, founder of The Banyans, a private rehab clinic near Brisbane. “But we’ve also had female clients who drop the kids at school and go for morning tea, which for them means cocaine and champagne.”

Limkin started The Banyans eight years ago. Perched on a mountain top overlooking Moreton Bay, it is, in essence, a Shangri-La for rich drug addicts, a place they can come to detox, discreetly, with the assistance of a gym, cinema, Santorini-style infinity pool, and an always-on-call suite of nutritionists, therapists, psychiatrists and psychologists. It costs $120,000 for a four-week program which, Limkin concedes, “may seem expensive. But you’re talking about people who are spending $20,000 a week on cocaine. If they can save that $20,000, then it’s a good deal. Plus they’re not dying.”

The private rehab clinic, The Banyans.

Cocaine addiction is a mainstay at The Banyans. “It’s the second-most-common drug we see, after alcohol,” Limkin says. “Our third-ever client came in for cocaine. He was running a large company, and he was married, and it was affecting his relationship.” He and his wife had young kids, and there were traces of powder on tables here and there. It was also affecting his work. “In the end, this guy’s CFO actually brought him in.”

Coke has always been especially popular with guys: in 2023, 5.3 per cent of Australian men had used it, compared to 3.7 per cent of women, according to the National Drug Strategy Household Survey. It seems to appeal to the young urban male’s inner gangster – it significantly boosts testosterone for up to an hour after taking it – imbuing even the schlubbiest specimens with something approximating an actual personality.

In Bruce Lehrmann’s disastrous defamation case against Network Ten, documents exposed the former political staffer as an inveterate powder hound, pestering friends late at night for “bags” and “gear”, and suggesting they “get lit”. When it came to coaxing Lehrmann into an exclusive interview about his night with fellow staffer Brittany Higgins, a former Seven Network staffer alleged in court the company had paid for his cocaine use, along with prostitutes and a golf trip to Tasmania. (Seven denies this.)

Lehrmann ticked almost every box for the typical coke user: he is educated, male, professional and young. But there are plenty of non-typical coke users. An article in The Daily Telegraph in 2021 mentioned, somewhat sniffily, that even “tradies and teachers” are using it.

The comedown from cocaine is famously horrendous. Vacuumed of serotonin, the brain seizes up like a salted slug.

This could be a matter of fashion: “Whatever drug is in vogue, then you see more use in wider groups,” Lubman says. It also speaks to Australia as one huge aspirational organism: we want better cars, bigger houses and classier drugs, and not even a historic cost-of-living crisis is going to stop us.

But cocaine’s appeal goes beyond mere fashion. In its purest forms, it prompts a massive spike in the neurotransmitter serotonin, the brain’s natural “feel-good” chemical, producing a powerful sense of euphoria, alertness and energy. Users can become talkative to the point of logorrhoea, and evince an urgent, near-maniacal confidence. A conversation with a coke head is like talking into the wind. The comedown is famously horrendous. Vacuumed of serotonin, the brain seizes up like a salted slug; there is exhaustion and depression, and sometimes paranoia, and more often than not, a really sore nose. Not surprisingly, for some people the only remedy is another line.

Most people’s coke consumption is strictly recreational. But it doesn’t always stay that way. With Vassily, things got out of hand in his late 20s, when he began working at nightclubs. He started in security before moving into management. Most of his weekends were spent in the red-light areas of Kings Cross and Oxford Street, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, staying up late, mixing with wealthy, high-profile people. “There was a lot of cocaine around,” he says. “Once you become part of that crew, you start using.” His consumption was only on weekends, but it was enough for him to become concerned.

In 2005, when he was 31 and newly married, he moved to Queensland with his wife to get away from the scene. But the scene followed him. “Everyone came up there on holidays – my friends, bikies, normal people, football players – and they’d say, ‘Can you take us out?’ I became their go-to person on the Gold Coast.”

Money wasn’t an issue: he and his wife were doing well, buying houses, doing them up, and flipping them. When he turned 33, they tried to conceive. It took five years, during which time Vassily didn’t take drugs. A year after their son was born, however, his wife left him for another man. “I didn’t see my son for a year,” he says. “I wasn’t happy in my life.”

He moved back down to Sydney, where he began using heavily, and during the week. “All my friends are the mega-rich families,” he says, mentioning some highly recognisable surnames. “The money was always there, and the cocaine was always there.” For such people, cocaine is a staple, he says. “Kids from families who are on $100 million-plus, they use it all the time. They even base their holidays around it. They won’t go to Bali because it’s hard to use drugs there. They want to go to Colombia or the US or Mexico. They come back and they don’t say, ‘Oh, we saw the Eiffel Tower,’ they say, ‘The coke is so good there.’ ”

Vassily promptly went down the rabbit hole. Before long, he was going through an ounce of cocaine a week. (A gram of cocaine is usually enough for about 10 lines. An ounce is 28 grams.) “I was spending about $7000 a week,” he says. “A lot of the time I didn’t even pay for it. It was just there.”

Three months after returning to Sydney from the Gold Coast, the cops pulled Vassily over while driving and found two ounces on him. “It was the first time my family found out I’d been using,” he says. “I was so ashamed. They were like, ‘We’ve already been through this with your dad.’ ” He was on bail for three years, during which time he had to report to police, provide urine samples, and abide by a curfew. He was eventually sentenced to a year in prison, which he completed at Parklea Correctional Centre in western Sydney, and further north-west at the John Morony Correctional Complex in Berkshire Park. “I knew people at both places, so it wasn’t a problem.”

He got out in 2017. A year later, he became part-owner of a company that sells European food to Woolworths and Harris Farm Markets. But coke came back into his life. “I would wake up, have breakfast, then a line of coke and go to work. For the rest of the day you’re chasing that feeling, so the whole day you’re having little bumps. Then at lunch, I’d have a drink to take the edge off.”

He’d go to work on coke. He’d go to the gym on coke. He’d play tennis on coke. He’d do five-day benders on coke. “I’d have a line, then a Valium [to keep calm]. Five lines then a Valium. I could go through 30 Valiums in a day or two.”

In 2020, his system imploded. “Protein was leaking from my muscles into my kidneys,” he says. “My kidneys were shutting down. I walked into my house and collapsed.” His housemate drove him to hospital. Doctors later told him if he hadn’t got there immediately, he would have died. “They gave me two choices. Go on dialysis or drink 76 litres of water over a 10-day period.” He chose the water. “It washed out my kidneys.” He winces at the memory. “Coke is very dangerous. Having a heart attack is the best way to die from coke.” He was clean for a year before relapsing, in 2022. He was back on the cocaine roller coaster, heading for disaster.

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The fact that coke can kill you barely registers with most users, in part because it’s seen as more “natural”. “It’s perceived as being cleaner because it’s been made from a plant, as opposed to meth, which is cooked in dirty labs,” Lubman says.

The coca leaves for making cocaine have been used for thousands of years by South America’s indigenous peoples for chewing or to make tea.Credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Cocaine comes from the leaves of the coca bush, an unremarkable-looking shrub native to South America. For thousands of years, indigenous peoples have chewed and made tea from the leaves, which acts as a mild stimulant, helps with digestion and suppresses appetite. It’s common in some parts of South America to see labourers, especially in rural areas, going about their day with a cud of saliva-soaked leaves in their cheeks.

Coca is mostly grown on the lower slopes of the Andes and in the Amazon. (Coca cultivation is becoming a key driver of deforestation.) The leaves are harvested and taken to clandestine labs, or fabricas, hidden in the jungle, where they can be processed in a few different ways. Often the leaves are dumped in a plastic-lined pit, mixed with water and kerosene and stomped on, like wine grapes, for up to three days. The kerosene is poured into metal drums and mixed with a series of chemicals, including sodium carbonate and ammonia, which is then drained through a cloth, dried and pressed into blocks of white paste, known as pasta base. It can take between 400 and 600 kilograms of coca leaves to produce a kilogram of paste. In order to become powder cocaine, the paste must undergo two more chemical processes, using more sophisticated labs that are usually located in or near cities.

In Colombia, the coca fields and labs are often controlled by local crime syndicates and armed revolutionary groups, which sell the cocaine to Mexican cartels. The Mexicans, meanwhile, have themselves become avid horticulturists: in addition to growing their own coca in Mexico, they have bred several high-yielding strains, seeds from which they distribute to Colombian growers. (A number of agronomists employed by Mexican cartels were arrested in Colombia in 2018.) The cartels’ chemical engineers have also pioneered improvements in the process of converting pasta base into powder cocaine, further increasing supply.

Blocks of “pasta base”, which are then chemically processed to become powder cocaine.Credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Not surprisingly, global cocaine production is at record levels. According to German research company Statistica, more than 2300 tonnes were produced in 2021, two-and-a-half times the amount in 2014. Getting that cocaine to market requires extraordinary ingenuity and logistical expertise. Most of the cocaine arriving in Australia leaves from Mexico, but in an effort to avoid detection, it might travel through the UK and from there to China, via a combination of air, sea and land. According to the United Nations’ 2023 Global Report on Cocaine, South Africa has also been an important transit point for Australia-bound coke, along with the Pacific Islands, including Fiji, French Polynesia, the Cook Islands and Papua New Guinea.

On different legs of the journey, the cocaine might be handled by any number of independent operators, each specialising in a particular mode of transport. A few years ago, most of the coke was brought to Australia by Middle Eastern gangs or the Italian mafia. Today it’s more multicultural. “These days, groups tend to cooperate across ethnic lines,” says David Bright, a professor of criminology at Deakin University. “Basically, collaboration across groups will happen where there are profits to be made.”

According to Vassily, the Chinese have become increasingly active. “There’s an exchange,” he says. “In China, pseudoephedrine is $1500 a kilo. The Chinese sell the pseudo-ephedrine to the Mexicans, so they can make ice, and the Mexicans give the Chinese cocaine as payment.” The Chinese, meanwhile, have multiple avenues to get it into Australia. “They’re so much a part of society here,” Vassily explains. “They import food, furniture, whatever. Everything is made in China.”

Cocaine arrives in Australia hidden in air freight or in light aeroplanes, flying low over Torres Strait and landing on remote airstrips in the far north of Queensland. It can be sourced on the dark web and sent by mail. It comes by sea, on board yachts, trawlers and cargo ships, or via so-called “parasites”, packages attached to the hull of ships, below the waterline. (The Port of Melbourne saw a spate of such imports in 2023.) There is also the “mother-daughter” method, where packages of cocaine are transferred, far off the coast, from a larger ship to a smaller boat, which then brings it to the mainland. Police believe the cocaine bricks that washed up along the NSW east coast in late 2023 came from a “mother-daughter” operation that went awry due to bad weather. Shane Neilson, principal drugs adviser at the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, says he is also seeing more cocaine being impregnated in textiles and clothing, and dissolved in liquids. “Border controls are tough,” he says. “So smugglers try everything.”

“Parasite” packages, attached to the hulls of ships, are one way cocaine is being imported into Australia.Credit: AFP

It’s commonly assumed the quality of cocaine in Australia is poor, but this is no longer the case. “The purity here is generally pretty good,” says Neilson. “There is sufficient cocaine that there is no need to cut it to a significant extent.” Vassily agrees. “The cartels are producing so much coke, they just want to get it out there.”

The oversupply has caused prices to drop significantly. In 2022, overseas importers were selling cocaine to local crime groups for up to $250,000 a kilo. By 2023, it was $150,000 a kilo. “But the high prices that users are prepared to pay here mean that importers are still making $50,000 to $100,000 profit per kilo, which is why they can afford to lose some product,” says Neilson.

Drug money, whether it be the cash earned in Australia by local coke lords or that generated overseas, is often laundered through casinos, hoarded in cash or converted into cryptocurrency. In May, the FBI charged Maximilien de Hoop Cartier, an heir to the famed jewellery dynasty, along with five Colombians, with attempting to launder millions of dollars in cocaine proceeds through a cryptocurrency known as Tether. In Australia, cocaine money is now distorting the property market. Criminal groups are spending hundreds of millions of dollars, in cash, buying commercial properties, high-rise apartments and houses. “There’s probably occasions where people are bidding on houses, where they’re bidding against people that aren’t worried about inflation, they’re not worried about interest rate rises because they’re not borrowing that money because it’s come from criminal purposes,” the Australian Federal Police’s Detective Superintendent Craig Bellis told The Daily Telegraph last year.

For some dealers, the lure of conspicuous consumption can be impossible to resist. When it came to spending his millions, Sydney man Alen “Fathead” Moradian, who operated the Golden Gun cocaine syndicate in the early 2000s, curated a life of baronial excess, full of boats, jet skis, antiques and high-calibre firearms, including submachine guns, a gold-plated pistol, and, in a very Tony Montana touch, a grenade launcher. Moradian was a drug dealer, but it might be said that his real crime was against interior design. He spent $1 million converting his home in Pennant Hills, in Sydney’s north, into a Versace-themed palazzo, replete with gold-and-black trimmed furnishings and a $40,000 ceiling mural modelled on that of the Sistine Chapel.

Drug kingpin Alen “Fathead” Moradian, who was murdered last year, and the inside of his Versace-themed home.

At Moradian’s trial, in 2011, Versace salesman Michael Chard, who guided Moradian in his fitout, was asked if he knew that his client was a drug dealer.

“At Versace, we had many clients who paid cash,” Chard replied. “We were trained not to ask.”

Moradian was sentenced to 16 years and nine months. He was released in December 2017, but remained a major player in organised crime, with high-level links to the Comanchero outlaw motorcycle gang. In June 2023, at the age of 48, he was shot dead while sitting in a black Audi in the car park beneath his Bondi Junction apartment. Eight men have so far been charged in relation to the murder.

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Humans have always wanted to get high, whether it be by eating fermented fruit, chewing roots or sniffing glue sticks. “Drug use goes along with the history of humanity,” Turning Point’s Dan Lubman says. “It’s part of the human condition to alter our mental states to feel happier, more confident and deal with difficult emotions.”

Until relatively recently, many drugs were legal, even powerful stimulants. In the 1940s and 1950s, methamphetamine was sold in Australian pharmacies, often to women, as a slimming agent and antidepressant. “Pleasant to use – lasting in effect,” read a 1950 advertisement for Benzedrine in Sydney’s The Sun newspaper. Cocaine, which was first imported into Australia in the late 1800s, was used not only as a local anaesthetic but as a treatment for opium addiction and alcoholism, and was available from doctors, pharmacists and grocers. During World War I, the Australian Army attempted to minimise drunkenness by imposing restrictions on the sale of alcohol; in its place, army doctors dispensed cocaine, heroin and morphine. (The British Army distributed cocaine-laced pills under the name Forced March.) The soldiers brought their taste for the drugs back home. In 1920, concerned about cocaine’s addictive qualities, the government made its sale illegal without a prescription. By the 1930s, the supply of cocaine was controlled by the criminal underworld, where it has remained ever since.

Over the decades, cocaine has been subject to increasingly harsh criminal sanctions, law enforcement and a never-ending procession of police task forces. Authorities are seizing more cocaine than ever – 4.769 tonnes in 2022-23 – yet Australia’s appetite for the drug continues apace, along with cocaine-related incarcerations, hospitalisations and deaths. According to the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, there were 884 cocaine-related deaths in Australia between 2000 and 2021, almost half of which occurred in the last five years of that study.

Turning Point director Dan Lubman believes in the decriminalisation of all drugs, including cocaine.

“The evidence is overwhelming that the war on drugs hasn’t worked,” says Lubman. “Prohibition just creates huge black markets, which only benefit drug traffickers and manufacturers.”

Lubman supports decriminalisation of all drugs, including cocaine, meaning that people caught with small amounts would not be charged with a criminal offence but diverted into counselling and other treatment services. (Decriminalisation isn’t the same as legalisation, which would allow drugs to be bought and sold under government regulation.) He isn’t alone. Plenty of people, including church groups, medical associations, progressive politicians and former police, believe decriminalisation is not only sensible but essential. Three Australian states and territories have already decriminalised cannabis: South Australia, the ACT and the Northern Territory. In October 2023, the ACT decriminalised the possession of all drugs. People now caught with small amounts – in the case of cocaine, anything up to 1.5 grams – will be fined $100 or referred to counselling, rather than charged. The ACT government says the aim is to keep low-level drug users out of the criminal justice system.

But the police remain unimpressed. “I am concerned about people trying drugs who haven’t historically done it,” the then ACT chief police officer Neil Gaughan said at the time. “I think it would be really naive to think people aren’t going to come to Canberra and try something different.”

It’s unclear if Gaughan’s fears will be realised. “At this stage, it is too early to tell the impact [of decriminalisation] on drug use in the ACT,” a spokesperson for ACT Police tells me in an email. “However to date, no significant issues have been identified.”

The quality of his cocaine was always important to Vassily. If you’re taking an industrial amount of the stuff, it pays to make sure it’s good. Whenever he got a new batch, he would assess its purity by cooking it down. “You put a gram of coke in a glass jar, like an empty MasterFoods spice jar, and add 0.3 of a gram of bicarb,” he tells me. “You add a little bit of water, just enough to cover the coke and the bicarb. Then you get a lighter underneath the jar and heat it.” The coke soon turns into oil. “That oil is pure cocaine. You swirl it around until the oil goes into a little ball. Then you throw an ice cube in there, which hardens the ball into a rock. You then tip it out onto a paper towel and dry it for 10 minutes.” This is rock cocaine. “You put the rock on a scale. If it says 0.8 or 0.9 of a gram, that means that the coke you got was 80 or 90 per cent pure.”

Virtually all the coke he got was above 80 per cent pure. Some was 93 per cent. And yet the more he took, the less joy it gave him. “It started to feel like an addiction,” he says. Things got worse in 2022, when, during Mardi Gras, he got caught with an ounce, and was sentenced to six months in jail. After his release, he picked up where he left off. “I was out of control,” he says. His girlfriend urged him to go to rehab, and he agreed. Through 2023, he tried a few different clinics, but nothing really stuck, until early 2024, when he ended up at the place I met him.

When Vassily entered the clinic, the first thing he did was sleep for five days straight. “That was just to detox,” he says. Once that was done, he began taking part in a counselling program, attending regular group therapy with a psychologist, and doing classes in year 10-level mathematics, English and computer literacy. “It doesn’t matter if you already know it all, it’s about getting discipline and structure.” The accommodation is a small bunk room with one other guy. He goes to bed at 9.30pm, and wakes at 5.30am. One of his jobs is in the kitchen, making breakfast. He’s been in rehab now for three months, and leaves in three weeks. “I’m confident I’ll be able to handle it,” he says. “I’ve got NA [Narcotics Anonymous] planned two times a week for when I get out, in Bondi. And my girlfriend and I will go to counselling every two weeks. When I was an addict, I wasn’t thinking about her and caring for her, and I need to build trust back.”

One of the best things about Vassily is his honesty. He never makes excuses for his addiction. Notwithstanding his dad’s disappearance, he says he didn’t suffer any particular trauma, and that this wasn’t why he did cocaine. He did it because it was fun, at least in the beginning. “Then I was delusional because I thought I could control it.” But the past three months have changed his life. “It was a good idea coming here,” he says, very gently. “Now that I’m sitting here sober, I don’t miss anything about cocaine.”

* Name has been changed.

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