The Ice Age

By Luke Williams

Scribe, £12.99

Review by Sean Bell

IN many cases, memoirs of addiction hinge upon revealing the point at which our humanity runs out, though not always in the way one might expect. While their contents describe the chemically-charged breakdown of the addict’s mind, body, livelihood and the legal and moral compacts between society and the individual, the lurid way such books are sold often tells us more about ourselves, though we may be disinclined to learn such lessons. Denial is by no means restricted to junkies.

The harsh truth is that accounts of addiction can become rather dull; depending on the tenuous empathy of a jaded readership, they can lose our interest before they break our hearts. All but the most exotic of addictions have, through their prevalence and our voyeurism, become mundane. The narrative becomes bleakly familiar, as both addiction specialists and the publishing industry are aware. Consequently, perhaps at the gentle prodding of their editors, writers may attempt to capture not only honesty, but novelty. Sometimes – as in the case of the infamous (and entirely fictitious) Go Ask Alice, a piece of anti-drug propaganda disguised as a teenager’s diary – the former is sacrificed to serve the latter.

Australian journalist Luke Williams came by such novelty honestly, though only the monstrously unsympathetic could ascribe this to good fortune. He also has a journalist’s regard for truth. With hard-fought self-awareness, The Ice Age details how Williams became addicted to crystal meth while researching the drug and the culture which surrounds it. It’s a pitch that would get any young writer through a publisher’s door, and Williams could have written an otherwise conventional account of addiction and recovery. It would have been easy and predictable, no matter how painfully true.

Yet Williams has bravely chosen to do something more: the book does act as a memoir, but also as a history of crystal meth itself, a polemic on the law surrounding the drug in Australia and beyond, and a meditation of the nature of addiction. For the first few chapters, one might wonder if the book can embody all these roles fully and equally. By the end, the question becomes whether it could really have been anything else.

Readers in the UK, where the presence of crystal meth is negligible, may find particular fascination in the drug’s strange, tangled past. Similar but distinct from amphetamine and meth, crystal meth was first synthesised by a 19th-century Japanese pharmacologist, and remained largely unknown over the following decades, even as its two better-known cousins were packaged as wonder drugs for the modern age.

Due to its proximity to South-East Asia’s poppy fields, heroin had been Australia’s most significant drug problem since the 1960s. By the early 1990s however, crystal meth was being produced in China on a mass scale, and when a smokable form was perfected, Hawaii, Korea and Taiwan followed. In 1999, as the drug trade began shipping its new product in earnest, "Ice" was first detected in Australia.

It is against this background that the addicts who Williams came to know, and eventually join, first encountered the drug. Williams tells their stories without rubber-necking, romanticising, moralising or apparent embellishment – given the flights of delusion and paranoia crystal meth inspires, there is no need. Sometimes they surprise; invariably – particularly when recounting the story of Beck, a young woman whose intention to become a junkie was revealed to Williams during adolescence – they sadden.

Williams is equally rigorous and eloquent in examining his own life. A moderately rebellious youth informed the fact that he was “blossoming into an adult that some considered to be threatening to the population; an adult that needed to be cut down, turned into sawdust, and buried in a hole to ensure it didn’t spread weakness, perversion and infection. I am, in fact, talking about the life of a gay teenager in post-Aids 1990s country Australia”. While anecdotes of bloody needles and narcotic psychosis are reliably grim, it is these memories that are arguably the book’s most affecting.

Returning to journalism after an unsatisfying stint of more conventional employment, Williams hit upon an idea most writers would not be fearless or foolhardy enough to embark upon: he would live in the same house as an ice dealer, and study the comings and goings of the junkies and criminals who populated the crystal meth underworld. “I got a story,” he writes. “A very good story. Only it wasn’t the one I was expecting. I didn’t bank on becoming a psychotic meth addict myself.”

The Ice Age finds a steady rhythm between the vivid, surreal, violent and sorrowful memories of what Williams experienced while addicted, and thoroughly researched sections on history, law, policing and psychology that qualify the book as an excellent reference work. Given how much Williams achieves in a single volume, however, what is notable is where he draws the line. His experiences, he explains early on, are not universal; there are generalisations he refuses to make. Looking beyond himself, he takes a critical but hopeful view: though the Abbot government defunded the Australian Drug and Alcohol Commission upon its election, Australian drug policy seems to be slowly moving towards a focus on treatment.

At his worst, Williams could lie to himself and everyone else with a flair that may have been natural or drug-inspired, or a mixture of both. In this book, he reaches towards the truth. As both an ex-addict and a journalist, he appears to have found it.