Walking on thin ice

Everywhere you look you are slapped in the face with beauty. Your senses are electrified in one synchronised motion. Colours look brighter; touch is heightened. It’s warm and comforting. You remember the intensity of this by the way it feels, not by the way it happens. One smoking glass pipe holds the key to it all – methamphetamine, better known as “ice”, so called because in shards it is crystal clear.

By Erin Bell

“It hits you instantly where your heart beats straight away,” says 19-year-old Bruce.* “You are really alert and talkative and you just want more and more. At times it can completely take you over and you can end up in a place where you have this very skewered sense of reality. You know what you’re doing but you don’t consider the consequences because you’re so off your face.”

Bruce experimented with ice before it cornered the mainstream market and he has been a recreational user ever since. “I discovered ice under really random circumstances. One day I skipped school with a friend and went to her brother’s house. He was an ice addict. He offered it to us and we tried it. Ice was something I had wanted to try for a long time, and I was really excited about it,” he admits. “I started using ice when it wasn’t a widely publicised drug. Had I known more about it, I never would have tried it.”

At $50 a hit, the effects last him all night. And, given its 80 percent potency compared to speed’s 20 percent, it is known to inflict users with an intense charge that lasts up to 16 hours. The substance can be swallowed, snorted, injected intravenously, anally inserted or smoked through a pipe. Bruce prefers to do the latter before he goes out clubbing, taking it with a cocktail of coke and ecstasy because he doesn’t like taking ice on its own.

But ‘Ice Addict’ is an ugly term that Bruce doesn’t want to be labelled by. After all, he has come from a normal middle class background. He grew up in the southwest Sydney suburb of Casula, lived a typical daily existence, attended government schools and avoided the popularity game. He now works full-time in sales.

Read the full story in Corker Issue 2: Winter 2008. It also features interviews with two nurses who work in hospitals in Sydney’s west.

*Names have been changed to protect their identities.

Image by Marie Sinclair