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Methamphetamine: Ice
Crystal Methamphetamine is a significant problem in Australia ~ we've become the Ice Capital of the world! Apart from cannabis, this crystalline form of methamphetamine is the most commonly used illicit drug in Australia. Approximately 1.8 million Australians (9%) report having tried methamphetamine, and approximately half a million Australians aged 14 and over reported being current users in 2004. As a long-acting stimulant, "Ice" causes significant strain on the cardiac, respiratory and nervous systems. Effects include loss of appetite, sleep disturbance, mood swings, tremors and convulsions. "Ice" can also cause erratic, violent behaviour, and provoke an acute psychosis. Long-term effects include strokes, coma and occasionally, death; it also leads to chronic psychotic disorders. This is not the acute drug-induced psychosis which is fairly well understood. The drug induced psychosis remits within hours of ceasing the drug, or at worst, within 10 days. The long-term illness may be a life-long consequence. This creates a myriad of problems for the individual, family, and community. Obviously, if these effects were commonly experienced by users, there would be no ice problem. True, everyone who uses ice long enough, or in large enough doses will experience a psychotic episode; not everyone does, but with half a million regular users it is going to happen to a lot of people. Each weekend in Sydney, every major hospital emergency department is confronted by 4 or 5 people suffering from a drug induced psychosis. A major problem for the health service and its staff, but a small proportion of the hundreds of thousands of ice users. Stroke, coma and other consequences are real enough, but like the consequences of tobacco use, they are too distant, too theoretical, too tomorrow, to stop people using today. The problem is compounded by the high numbers taking methamphetamine without realising it. Virtually all speed in Australia is meth. Much of what people take as MDMA (ecstasy) is actually methamphetamine. Of the drugs sold as XTC and seized at dance parties, in clubs and other venues in 2007, up to 85% contained no or negligible amounts of MDMA. The main component was methamphetamine, with many other “additives”, including ketamine and GHB. That’s in Australia, but it is also true in other western countries world-wide. With bumper crops of opium poppies just harvested, processed and on their way to Australia and other markets, the balance between stimulant and heroin abuse may shift in the next year or so, but is seems unlikely that the drug problem is going to go away any time soon. |
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This intel was contributed by David Rich
David Rich
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May, 2012
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