ICE: euphoria, depression, psychosis

Guest speakers at the forum included Dr Gilbert Whitton, Drug and Alcohol specialist with Justice Health, Beaver Hudson a Clinical Nurse at St Vincent’s Hospital, Darlinghurst and Tony Trimmingham, founder of the Family Drug Support group.

The main cause for concern, all three experts explained, was that ICE causes users to become extremely violent, making them much harder to control and treat. As Tony Timmingham said, “Unlike heroin, on ICE people are out of control, you can’t reason with them, families are in fear.”

23-year-old Desire Peters can relate. Hooked on ICE for the past five years, and now recovering, Desire explained that when on ICE she became a different person. “It really destroys your brain... I heard the devil clopping around my room... the psychotic state I was in, it was really scary.”

One reason for the popularity of ICE is its immediate effect of euphoria and an increase in sex drive. The catch-22 is the faster the effects, the corresponding increase in dependence levels. As one former addict said, “It is the best of drugs and the worst of drugs.”

When the euphoric effects subside, users suffer severe depression, paranoia, convulsions, hallucinations and “amphetamine psychosis,” symptoms which resemble paranoid schizophrenia.

Although ICE statistics do not indicate a high death rate from the drug, Tony Timmingham says there is an increasing number of ICE-related fatalities. “We know of several suicides, two significant homicides and also plenty of accidents all related to the drug.”

One common misconception is that ICE is a junkies’ drug. As Tony Timmingham reiterated, “When you look at the people using ICE, and their families, there is such a wide range of people. We know it is a social drug for many, many people. It’s a party drug. People using ecstasy do not start using heroin, they are moving on to ICE.”

However, despite the panellists agreeing on the dangers ICE, they were unanimous in their belief that government and media campaigns about ICE were drawing community attention away from the more serious problem of drug abuse in Australia – alcohol. “If we are going to have a substance that is going to damage a generation, it’s not going to be crystal meth, it’s going to be alcohol,” said Timmingham.

Source South Sydney Herald September 2007 - www.southsydneyherald.com.au