Ice use rampant in country towns

Tuesday 1 October 2013 11:06AM (view full episode)

What do you think is the easiest place to buy illegal drugs - the streets of Kings Cross or a country town?

In many small towns the popular drug 'ice' is just a phone call or a short drive away.

Richard is a farm worker near Swan Hill in northern Victoria and a former ice addict.

He says he moved to the town from Adelaide to make a fresh start and has been clean for a year and a half.

But he says there is a network of ice users and dealers in Swan Hill and other rural towns.

"I could quite easily access it in Swan Hill, or in other nearby towns like Bendigo or Mildura. It's a problem for all country towns as it is for the city."

He says his road to recovery began with the chaplain at his teenage son's school.

"I'm linked in quite heavily with one of the local churches. So it's played a massive role for that support network which is very crucial to staying clean."

Prior to using ice Richard had been a heroin habit 10 years, and he says it's much harder to kick an ice habit.

"It's extremely hard because it's such a high and then it's such a low, so you obviously get quite desperate and you do things you wouldn't normally do to source it."

A parliamentary inquiry in Victoria is shedding light on the prevalence of the ice, or methamphetamine, in rural communities.

John Ryan, is CEO of drug agency ANEX and says it's too hard to say definitively if ice use is at epidemic proportions, because of a lack of official data.

"Everyone's talking about it...right from western, to northern to the eastern part of Victoria.

"Everyone's noticing that there's been a significant increase in ice. By everyone I mean people who are interfacing with the problem, so that's emergency departments, drug and alcohol workers, doctors, and police.

"Certainly the recipes for ice manufacture are on the internet. Drug dealers are now organised by text message or mobile phone so it's much less obvious to passers by to know that there's actually drug dealing going on."

He says while the heroin problem of the 1990s was very much a metropolitan issue, ice use is geographically widespread.

"The town of Mildura is an example of a town where people have been coming together for the last few months to try to nut through some local solutions to the challenge.

"Really what we're looking at is a much more linked up community solution to this problem. We can't count on the police to solve it. I think we've got to build the capacity of the community.

"There's a lot of good work being done by services trying to deal with this issue and that includes domestic violence services as much as drug treatment services.

"My challenge to the community is to not think of this as a stereotypical drug user problem.

"This is a problem that actually goes right across from blue collar to white collar workers and right across the ethnicity range.

"There's all sorts of people from all sorts of communities and backgrounds in trouble with this drug.

"The good news is, there is actually a way out and people do recover."

John Ryan, CEO of drug agency ANEX

Richard, farm worker from Swan Hill and a former ice addict

Producer: Bel Tromp

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