Breaking the Ice: How We Will Get Through Australia's Methamphetamine Crisis

By Matt Noffs

'The so-called war on drugs has been a colossal failure, and this book offers further proof that we must treat drug use as a public health issue, not as a crime' Sir Richard Branson

This landmark book, from Matt Noffs and his team at the Noffs Foundation, is a much-needed voice of reason in the national conversation around the drug ice. What is ice? What does it do to the brain? What can we learn from previous drug policies about managing the current crisis? And what are the practical steps we can take as parents and carers to help our kids?
 
Matt Noffs has interviewed leading experts in the public health sector and the justice system, along with drug policymakers and shapers, as well as ice users and their families. He believes we can keep the crisis contained and managed, but we need to do so calmly and strategically - as parents, as a community and as a nation. For anyone seeking to understand what the drug is and how to help our children and our communities get through this crisis, this book is full of facts and sensible advice - and most importantly, it is full of hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jul 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781460707029

Matt Noffs

Matt Noffs is the co-founder of the Street Universities and CEO of Noffs Foundation, Australia's largest drug and alcohol treatment service provider for young people under 25.The Noffs Foundation is a leader in providing drug and alcohol services for young people in Australia. Working in the social sector has been part of Matt's life for as long as he can remember. The Noffs Foundation was founded in 1970 by his grandfather, Reverend Ted Noffs and Margaret Noffs. The couple established Sydney's The Wayside Chapel, set up the first drug referral centre in Sydney and co-founded Lifeline in 1963. Work in the drug rehabilitation field was continued by Matt's parents. As CEO of the Noffs Foundation for a new generation, Matt, with his partner Naomi, established and now runs an early intervention service known as The Street University, in Sydney's west and southwest, which aims to reconnect kids with their communities and help them discover their innate capacity.

Book preview

PART I

The bizarre true history of the global ice crisis

1

A heretical heritage: the Noffs legacy

I am usually zonked on the weekends. The kids usually want to play Lego. And Lego is perfect. I can remain horizontal while my children instruct me which brick to place where. You can imagine that it’s not an opportune time to think about work. And so, one particular weekend, I had enjoyed a sleep-in. The kids landed on me at 9 am to demand pancakes. The pursuit of a hot cup of tea spurred me towards the kettle. Tea. My drug of choice.

Like the walking dead, I shuffled past the kettle and hit the switch. The kids were screaming, ‘We want to help, we want to help.’ I steeled myself for the next three minutes. Soon a great sense of hope would wash over me — for me that is the power of English Breakfast tea.

I’m not exaggerating. Amino acids like L-theanine that are present in tea have been found to increase a sense of wellbeing. And of course there’s caffeine. But coffee turns me into one of those toy monkeys that clangs its cymbals. This is why I don’t enjoy illicit drugs. But I don’t have issues with those who do — a majority of young Australians have used illicit drugs. A majority of them don’t have issues with them. That doesn’t make it any more appealing to me, but I’m probably in the minority.

But back to my drug — tea. With this sense of hope arriving any minute, perhaps a flurry of flour with a few cracked eggs on the floor wouldn’t lead to a nervous breakdown. I was also enjoying the fact that I didn’t have to shave that morning. It was around this time when the phone rang.

A reporter from a TV channel wanted to talk to me about the drug ice. It was Saturday. But that didn’t matter, not in media land. At the time they wanted to do the interview, I’d be at a kids’ birthday in a park. The reporter said the TV crew would meet me there.

I remembered as we were heading out the door to the birthday party that I hadn’t shaved. My wife and I bundled the kids up in the car and I grabbed a disposable razor from the bathroom.

I turned up to the kids’ party, readying myself mentally for the interview. I realised I was wearing a T-shirt. My wife said that wouldn’t do. I asked one of the dads if I could borrow his sweater. I grabbed the razor and hurried to the park’s public toilet to find a mirror. No mirror. I bent down by the side of the car. My head now level with the side mirror, I took the razor to my stubble.

The parents in the playground nearby were standing there wondering what I was doing. My wife was trying to explain. I was past explaining. Ice had taken over my life. Ice this and ice that. Ice rooms and ice pipes. Kids on ice. Clubbers on ice. Cities on ice. The country on ice. It sounds like a pantomime. Perhaps not one we’d take our children to.

This was around the time in May 2015 when the Abbott Government was unleashing their awareness campaign about ice. You would have seen it. It’s the ad on TV where a young guy is brought into a hospital emergency department, barely restrained by police. He head-butts a doctor in the face and breaks free of the cops. With superhuman strength, he throws a chair at a nurse behind the administration desk and shatters the protective glass. At the start of the ad he looks like a zombie from the TV series The Walking Dead; by the end he’s apoplectic. The voiceover solemnly announces: ‘Ice destroys lives.’

Four separate ads, each equally graphic and designed to inspire fear in viewers, were being delivered through a range of media, including television, cinema and digital, at a cost of $11 million.

I remember seeing them for the first time and cringing. Whether the government knew it or not, they were portraying ice addicts as monsters. That makes for great headlines and great politics. It’s also entertaining if we can bring ourselves to admit it.

The six months that followed would be difficult to work through. Requests for interviews would penetrate my weekends. Like this weekend. Because of my work at the Noffs Foundation, and because of my family heritage, I had become a spokesperson for issues concerning young people and drugs — and right now the drug on everyone’s lips was ice.

In a way, I was born into this. In 1964, my grandparents started a little project that became the largest youth centre in the Southern Hemisphere — they named it the Wayside Chapel. My grandfather also co-founded Lifeline as well as the Aboriginal Affairs Association, which would ultimately become the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. He did it in a time when Indigenous people were considered to be fauna, not human beings. Big steps in a short space of time.

But my grandparents didn’t stop there. They started the first drug referral centre in Kings Cross and mobilised the medical community to get a grip on the burgeoning heroin problem in the 1960s. The Wayside Chapel is still around today and in a way it has become a large homeless shelter and community hub. It was and remains vital for Kings Cross and it has become something different to what it had been in its early pioneering days.

My grandad Ted was charged with heresy three times by the Church for questioning church doctrines, including the divinity of Jesus. He believed that Jesus did not need to be a God to be understood. He also believed that Jesus’s miracles didn’t matter, that his words and deeds were enough to live by. That any of us — man, woman or child — could become the next Jesus or Buddha.

I don’t profess to be any particular religion. Instead, I was raised by my grandfather’s heretical creed — he called it ‘The Family of Humanity’:

I am a Protestant but I am also a Catholic. I am a Jew but I am also a Muslim. I am a Hindu but I am also a Buddhist. I am an agnostic but I am also an atheist. Because first and foremost I am a human being and no one in the world is a stranger to me.

To me that creed remains one of the most powerful creeds on earth. It drives everything I do. It’s what gets me out of bed and ready for battle.

I am a human being and no one in the world is a stranger to me.

My grandfather was also a writer. In his book By What Authority?, he called for people of all walks of life to expel the notion that the ‘expert’ is the only one who should have and give all the answers. He called for the everyman to stand up and be counted. ‘You are your own priest now!’ he wrote. Ted believed that at some point during the establishment of colonial Australia and after breaking away from English rule, Australians learned that we were our own authority and this was an awakening that all humans must have. And a part of this awakening is learning to question and, if necessary, challenge authority.

In the 1990s, fed up with the status quo, my parents, Wesley and Amanda, started Australia’s first treatment and rehabilitation service for adolescents suffering from drug-related issues. The service was based on a monograph published by my father and two eminent researchers from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre — Dr Catherine Spooner and Professor Richard Mattick. The new organisation was called Ted Noffs Foundation in honour of my grandfather’s work.

It was under this sort of influence that I grew up, questioning everything around me. Despite my grandfather having a master’s degree in sociology, my mother a degree in law and my father a master’s in public health — and being amidst a master’s of criminal justice myself — I have learned that this sort of academic background is all well and good but it doesn’t necessarily produce results. We ‘experts’ don’t have all the answers; they are commonly found in the community.

In my early twenties, fresh out of university after my first degree and with some community work under my belt, I began critiquing how, as a society, we approach the relationship between drugs and young people.

I had never seen a youth centre that truly attracted young people. They were all based on referral pathways. Everything out there relied on the young people first getting into trouble with the law and then being coerced into treatment or, worse, forced into juvenile detention. There was no early intervention and that bothered me.

At this moment, somewhere deep down in my DNA, my heretical heritage called out to me. I began furiously sketching out the idea of a Wayside of the future. I wanted to convert a warehouse in southwest Sydney, where the heroin crisis was still in full flight, into a ‘Street University’ that would help create positive outcomes for young people in the area.

The most gracious man I’ve ever met, Greg Pickering, helped me flesh out my ideas. Greg is the CEO of Mounties, a community club in Mount Pritchard, a few kilometres from the Liverpool City Centre. Through the government’s Community Development and Support Expenditure funding, Mounties purchased the warehouse that would become the home of the first Street University.

The Street University is a private space run for public use. It may be in a converted warehouse but it is a metaphorical blank space — filled with resources, mentors and guides but stripped of preconceived judgements and politicised agendas. The staff are friendly, wise, open and interested in every young person who walks through the door. The facility contains a basketball court, volunteer-run cafe, classrooms, dance rooms, computer labs with music, design and film software, a recording studio, a library and other rooms for young people to use.

Back when it was still just a crazy notion, I spoke about the Street University to Eamonn Duff, a journalist who ended up being a dear friend and inspiration. Duff’s interview with me, which was published in the Sun-Herald, was pinned up on an office wall at the University of NSW by lecturer Anne Bunde-Birouste. It wasn’t long after that that a young woman marched into Bunde-Birouste’s office, pointed at Duff’s article and accused me of being an ‘Eastern Suburbs cowboy’. The young woman’s name was Naomi Kemmerer. She worked for the Migrant Resource Centre in Liverpool, she was very well respected in the community and she was angry with me. Bunde-Birouste told me I should try to pacify her. I sucked it up and, almost holding my breath, I ventured into the centre to find her.

Naomi asked me a plethora of questions about my intentions for the Street University: ‘Have you thought about opening hours?’ ‘Are kids of all nationalities welcome? This is southwest Sydney, you know!’ ‘What is the strategy?’

I quickly realised that I only had a very vague concept about what this thing was going to be; within a week Naomi had filled a book with ideas and strategies. And so I asked her to work with me. We got on like a university on fire. We were both in our mid-twenties, shared the same values, loved the same food and worked the same hours. Within months we opened the door to the first Street University and it was flooded with kids from the get-go.

Many years later in the Wayside Chapel files, I found a manila folder with the name ‘Wayside University’ on it. It was filled with rejection letters from the government of the day. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Naomi and I had fulfilled a dream my grandparents had had in the 1980s.

Within a few years Naomi and I were married and in 2010 our first daughter was born. I’ve always thought that this inappropriate office romance has really helped our work because we tend to live and breathe it. Our kids think we talk about work too much. But they’re getting pretty good at shutting us up.

Today we run the Noffs Foundation with an incredible bunch of people, many of whom wrote this book with me. Noffs focuses not only on the Street University, of which there are now seven, but we’ve also expanded into homelessness services and social enterprises, and increased the number of treatment centres we run for young people coping with drug-related issues. Our 110 staff now serve tens of thousands of kids around Australia. Like my kids, I have grown up in this world. A world dominated by community. When I was a boy, my grandfather would take me out around Kings Cross and introduce me to all sorts of people: the prostitutes, the politicians, the poor, the rich, the royals (Prince Charles was enamoured with Ted), the seedy, the criminal and the media. So the concept of a ‘normal person’ has never sat quite right with me.

To see a TV crew following my grandfather around the inner city was commonplace for me, as it was for my parents, and so getting a call on a Saturday to talk about ice felt both like something taking a bite out of my precious family time, but also familiar.

So there I was at the party, bending over the car’s side mirror preparing for the interview. I took the razor to my neck first. I had no shaving cream. The sound mimicked the feeling. Scrape, scrape, scrape. I drew blood. Just tiny dots. But tiny dots everywhere. All over my neck and face. Luckily, the sweater I’d borrowed was a turtleneck. I pulled up the sweater neck to cover the small streams of blood running down my neck. I rushed to the toilet to splash my face with water.

I came out to find the camera crew setting up. I explained to the reporter and cameraman that I had just shaved and was bleeding. ‘No problem,’ the cameraman said. Then a minute later, ‘Um, we’ll just have to take that again; you’re really bleeding.’

‘Oh yeah, you are,’ said the reporter. ‘Lick there and there.’ She pointed to two parts of my face that were impossible to reach by tongue. I licked my hand like a dog and rubbed my smooth face.

‘And rolling,’ said the cameraman.

The reporter asked, ‘So why do you think ice pipes should be regulated and not banned?’

There was no way I was going to be able to explain this in a sound bite, no matter how hard I tried.

What could I do? Legislation is being passed all the time and when it comes to drugs it feels to me like very little of it makes sense.

The interview ended and I came back to the playground with a still-bloody face. The dads in the group did their thing — hitting my back and making jokes about me bleeding on TV. And I stared at the AstroTurf. Was I wasting my time? Not just my time but my family’s time as well? Was anyone listening? Would it change anything? Would it save the life of a young person trying to overcome an ice dependency?

One dad took me aside and said, ‘But seriously, I’m worried about our kids and ice.’ The smile that always occupied his face was gone. He was deadly serious. It shocked me. Our children were so young — they wouldn’t be teenagers for another decade — so why the premature concern?

It was at this point that it hit me just how anxious our society had become about ice. People were scared.

I reassured my friend, and then my family and I left the party. Naomi drove home and the city passed by in a blur. I didn’t want weekends to be stolen by work; I knew that much. My grandfather Ted was stolen by work in his early sixties. A stroke. He’d just got off the plane from the UK where he’d launched another gigantic program. He was my hero but I don’t want to die that way. For my kids, if not for me.

As we headed home, I thought about my friend’s fear about ice. I thought about the interview. The pain, not just of shaving without shaving cream but of trying to present complex ideas in short grabs. The pain of trying to placate the worry that the government had been promoting.

And then there’s the pain of those young people I work with who are struggling with the drug.

There is no doubt ice is an insidious problem across Australia for many users and their families. But it’s a problem that can and should be contained. I wanted Australians to be able to distinguish fact from fiction. I wanted to send a message of hope — not of fear. I wanted other people’s voices to be heard too. But how?

Fear campaigns such as the Commonwealth Government’s ice ads are useless. They belong on the scrap heap. Governments who want propriety, and therefore to stay in power longer, must see that by raising anxiety and undue stress via these sorts of anti-drug campaigns, they are playing a losing game. They are pushing themselves out of office.

Some governments amplify fear; but the best ones, the just ones, the smart ones, realise that a community that has the opportunity to be at ease and to reflect are more creative and more entrepreneurial. They are ready for challenges and opportunities much more than an anxious community.

When I got home from the party, I went straight to one of the plethora of notepads and pens I have lying around the house. ‘Time to write a book,’ I scrawled.

To keep the ice crisis contained and managed, we need to deal with it strategically — as parents, as a community and as a nation. It’s time that we put this ‘crisis’ into perspective and understand exactly what we can do, as parents and family members, to reduce the harm that ice does to our children.

And before we equip ourselves with the best tools out there to prevent our children becoming dependent on drugs like ice, we need to better understand the problem that we are currently facing.

This book is first and foremost for parents or other carers in a parenting role; but it’s also for those who are interested in knowing the truth about ice. It’s for the journalists, reporters and producers; I hope it provides answers that can’t fit in sound bites. And it’s for the unsung advisors and policy makers working every day to enact humane policies. I also wrote this book for the ones who won’t read it at all — the kids in our programs who battle with addiction to ice and other drugs. To me they are the champions. Their efforts are the most unsung of all the praises we could sing.

Above all — this is a story of hope.

2

Iatrogenesis: a brief history of ice

I’m addicted to one thing — a good cuppa. And so it’s fitting that the history of ice begins with one of the most ubiquitous and harmless of all the drugs — tea. The birth of ice coincides with the birth of modern Japan and the death of the old ways. The year was 1885 and it was a period of transition for a country steeped in traditions.

This new nation was breaking through the husk of a cracked feudal system. The shogunate were an elite class of citizens and had been warriors for centuries, but they were now a dying breed and a symbol of a system that was holding Japan back. The Japanese emperor Meiji was dragging the country kicking and screaming towards the twentieth century. The revived state needed to keep up with the industrialising world. The cogs were churning and grinding; new ideas were desperately needed.

Under these conditions, Nagai Nagayoshi, a Japanese chemist at Tokyo Hygienic Laboratory, unwittingly unleashed something into the world that could never be recaptured. He didn’t know it at the time, but he would one day be considered the godfather of Japan’s pharmaceutical industry. He would be bestowed with the glory of synthesising one of the world’s most profitable and pioneering medicinal discoveries — and also one of the most devastating drugs on earth.

Ice is a classic example of ‘iatrogenesis’ — from the Greek for ‘brought forth by the healer’ — whereby the results of a healthcare development have unexpected negative outcomes that in turn create their own health problems. Like Einstein’s theories being used to build atomic bombs, the creators of ice would have perhaps thought twice if they could peer into the future to see what kind of ‘innovation’ they had chanced upon.

CRYSTALS IN THE ROUGH

Yamanashi sauntered through the halls of the Tokyo Hygienic Laboratory. He held a dark green stringy substance in his hand. But there was something else there too, something glistening amidst the molasses. Or at least he thought there was something there.

Yamanashi had grown up in Japan’s Edo period when there was a strict social order, but things had changed under Emperor Meiji. The Japanese were determined to hold on to their traditions, but they were equally inspired to reach out towards an uncertain future.

While the Edo period had been plagued by internal threats, the new emperor had to build a nation that could defend itself from other countries as well as compete on an international stage. The previous period was motivated by the slogan: ‘Revere the Emperor; expel the barbarians.’ Under Meiji, the new motivation was: ‘Enrich the state; strengthen the military.’

What linked the two periods was that Japan’s economy was continually driven by war and agriculture. The government wanted farmers to experiment and grow whatever pleased them. It had also invested in scientists to work overseas and bring home the wisdom of Europe, especially Germany. The government now wanted a return on that investment. Yamanashi’s colleague Nagai Nagayoshi was fortunate enough to be one of the few who was sent overseas to develop his calling.

Nagayoshi had been fascinated by the power of medicinal teas and herbs since he was a child. His father studied traditional Chinese medicine and a young Nagayoshi followed suit. He came home from his studies in Berlin with new-found skills to help in his work of synthesising chemicals for medicinal purposes.*

Nagayoshi understood traditional medicine, but he also understood chemistry and was a proponent of Japan’s pharmaceutical revolution. He was the epitome of the new Japan. Tea had been a major export for Japan and so there was now renewed enthusiasm to research strains of seeds, irrigation, new fertilisation techniques and pest control. Tea played a central role right across Asia — not just economically but also medicinally.

And that’s what Nagayoshi’s colleague Yamanashi was holding tightly in his hands in the lab — the crushed stems and leaves of a plant used as a traditional herbal tea.

‘There’s something in this,’ Yamanashi said as he passed the specimen to Nagayoshi. Nagayoshi stopped what he was doing and held the substance up to observe it.

‘What is it?’ he asked. The pair and their colleagues had been searching for a breakthrough for years.

‘Ma huang,’ replied Yamanashi.

Ma huang was a common elixir in Asia. And it was ancient. Named ma huang by the Chinese and soma by the Indians, the plant was commonly brewed as a tea. It had been used for over 5000 years across Asia to alleviate cold and flu symptoms.* To Westerners the plant is known as ephedra (family Ephedraceae).

‘Look closer,’ stressed Yamanashi. ‘I think something is there, amongst the crushed plant.’ Nagayoshi noticed something peculiar rolling around in his fingers between the chopped paste. Something that resembled tiny crystals.

‘Yes,’ said Yamanashi. ‘Now you see it.’

EPOCH MAKING

In 1887, after years of experimenting with ma huang, Nagayoshi made his first major discovery. He isolated ‘ephedrine’ from the plant. Ephedrine was introduced to the market as an epoch-making agent† — a bronchodilator/antitussive drug. In other words, it widened the throat and made it easier to breath for those suffering from asthma as well as colds and flu. It proved to be a commercial success for the company and continues to be a major drug used around the world today.

Ah, the irony of the ‘epoch making’. If only Nagayoshi knew what kind of epoch this discovery would truly create.

Then in 1893 Nagayoshi synthesised another new substance from ephedrine. He named it ‘methamphetamine’.

Nothing immediately came from Nagayoshi’s latest substance. After initial tests on mice, he