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Four Corners: Oct 20

Four Corners reports on the ice scourge that’s ravaging regional Australia.

2014-10-16_2159On Monday’s Four Corners, Caro Meldrum-Hanna reports on the ice scourge that’s ravaging regional Australia.

His name is ‘Jake’. At 15 years old, he was an ice dealer, a user and a crystal meth cook.

‘Jake’ is the new face of crystal meth, or ice, in Australia. It’s the drug that’s ravaged our major cities. But now it’s destroying country towns one by one.

This week on Four Corners, reporter Caro Meldrum-Hanna travels through the regions of two states, riding with police and users, to tell the shocking story of towns and people in the grip of ice.

She pieces together a disturbing picture: major international drug cartels are working with locally based outlaw motorcycle gangs to push ice out of the cities. It’s a massive illicit corporate enterprise; sophisticated and highly organised.

Their targets? Captive markets of bored teenagers in country towns, where there’s a desperate lack of treatment facilities and under resourced or non-existent police.

Four Corners goes to one community of less than 4,000 people where up to one in ten people are using ice. Meldrum-Hanna meets teenagers who began using in their early teens, sits with them as they smoke ice and with others as they inject, and discovers how bikie gangs use other children to “cook” methamphetamine, destroying their health and leaving them with ruinous addiction.

In short, the program tells the story of a generation that is being condemned to a life of drug abuse, crime and ultimately early death. The most alarming element of this story is the age of the people involved, as one clinical nurse at the coalface in regional Australia explains:

“The demographic for ice is changing all the time. We’re noticing the age actually dropping, there’s been reports of 10 year olds presenting at the Emergency Department here.”

Seventeen-year-old ‘Ethan’ is a prime example of the power and spread of ice, the reality of what’s happening beyond city borders. He was injected by a local drug dealer when he was just a boy. He says it took just one night for him to get hooked. This sent his life into a downward spiral that saw ‘Ethan’ leave school, join a crystal meth pack of fellow young addicts hopping from town to town chasing ice, stealing from people night and day to feed their addiction.

Not even his family was safe.

“Mum locked the door on me and I remember thinking… if I get in there I will hurt her for money. I will get money out of her some, one way or another.”

As each person’s story unfolds it becomes disturbingly clear: there is almost nowhere for young addicts in regional Australia to go to get help. That leaves health workers in despair:

“We’re going to talk about the utter devastation of small rural communities where we’re going to have a lot of mental health issues, criminal activity. It’s going to be a nightmare.”

Monday 20th October at 8.30pm on ABC.

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