We Spent a Night with Paramedics to Find Out if Australia Is Really Facing a Meth Epidemic

Paramedics get front-row seats to the way a city gets wasted. When someone passes out, gets knocked unconscious, falls, freaks out, or gets found, mobile medics are usually the first on the scene. This is why, when we wanted to know what Australia's much-written-about ice (slang for crystalline methamphetamine) epidemic looked like, we contacted Ambulance Victoria.

Australia is now eight months into an official war on ice. In April former Prime Minister Tony Abbott ordered a task-force to find ways of tackling the use of the drug. On Monday, Prime Minister Turnbull announced a $300 million [$217 million USD] to enact the plan, making assurances that health service providers would see the bulk of this cash.

In the months leading up to this announcement we'd spent four Saturday nights trawling Melbourne with two separate ambulance crews. With the funding boost coming in, it's likely crews like these will be seeing their slice of it. And while they surely need it, maybe it's not for the reasons you'd assume.

The first incident we were called out to involved a young guy who'd fallen off a balcony. He'd been drinking gin and we found him splayed over a bottom floor, unable to sit up. He was smiling and bubbly, but his words made no sense and his head looked worryingly asymmetrical. This was almost standard, explained Greg Gibson, the group manager with Ambulance Victoria. Every weekend they clean up after a culture that drinks to get drunk. According to him, the fallout from other drugs pales in comparison.

The most cited stats on the cost of drugs and alcohol are from 2004-05. That year it was estimated illicit drug use costed Australia $8.2 billion [$6 billion USD], while alcohol was nearly double at $15.3 billion [$11 billion USD]. A revised estimate by the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education has since priced drinking higher again at $36 billion [$26 billion USD].

These are only estimates, but they seemed pretty well-reflected during my ambulance tour of Melbourne. We saw booze-powered fights, accidents, domestics, and a whole lot of vomit. Only once did we get called to an ice incident: An older guy in a halfway house claimed he was having an overdose, but when we got there he was just kind of confused. It was an ugly scene, but compared to a young guy who'd been drunkenly sucker-punched and face-planted on a fire hydrant, it was pretty innocuous.

We're not the first to raise these concerns. Experts have been comparing the damage waged by drinking to the effects made by ice for years. The first issue is that ice use doesn't even seem as prevalent as the word epidemic might suggest.

Australia's main way of measuring drug use is the National Drug Strategy Household Survey. It tells us that rates of ice use have plateaued since 2010. At that point 7 percent of people admitted they'd tried ice at least once. In 2013 that number was unchanged.

While usage might be stable, the public don't seem to know this. The University of NSW recently surveyed 11,000 people to find just under half thought between 30 and 100 percent of Australians had tried ice. As mentioned before, that true figure is 7 percent—a notable difference.

So what's fanning the notion we're in the grips of an ice epidemic? According to experts it may be a feedback cycle, perpetrated by media coverage and endorsed by increased arrests. Associate Professor John Fitzgerald, sociologist and drug expert at the University of Melbourne, told the ABC that drugs arrests have risen dramatically, which would seem to suggest there's more drugs around.

"In the space of two years [2011-2013] we doubled the amount of amphetamine users we were arresting. That's insane because we didn't see a proportional change in how many dealers we were arresting. There was a targeting of drug users," he explained.

Of course this is a simplification. There are numerous reasons why the Australian public is so fixated on ice. But again the paramedics we told us for all the excitement around illicit drugs, ice just wasn't their man concern.

Spending four nights in an ambulance was never a way to quantifiably prove the existence of an ice epidemic. In any case, it didn't. But it did illustrate the extent to which society suffers via alcohol. The issue is that we're throwing $300 million at ice, while comparatively ignoring the other.

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