P is for addiction

Pete is a Christchurch man who has a regular family, a regular job and had a regular P habit. VICKI ANDERSON reports. 

If you really want to know what P's like, you have to try it, Pete says, staring into my eyes for an uncomfortable 60 seconds.

He rolls a cigarette between practised fingers bearing vague yellowish tinges, pushing and pulling the tobacco into a neat oblong shape, licking the paper closed with deft tongue movements. He kicks his feet and a jandal flies off and lands upside down on the garage floor next to his son's BMX bike. Pete doesn't seem to notice. The silence that follows is uncomfortable.

"This is a funny little town, yeah? There's this fake English, white, middle-class 'look at our pretty gardens' thing happening on the surface, but if you dig below that, just a little bit, the crazy dirty cats come out to play. And they play hard, fast and mean."

Two months ago, Pete finished a six-month-long "love affair" with the most frightening letter of the alphabet, P - methamphetamine.

It's not his first foray into drugs. On the bookshelf next to me in Pete's man cave are numerous titles by Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley.

It's part of the human condition, he says, to want to alter consciousness and journey into different realms. Children do it unknowingly every time they demand to go higher on a swing.

"I've always had a relationship with drugs. I've been hardcore with pot for a long time. Mum and Dad were big smokers around the house when I was growing up. I did a lot of acid in my 20s. I saw in the millennium in Christchurch with a few big lines of cocaine I got off a cruise ship in Lyttelton. I did datura a couple of times too. That stuff has a 50-50 chance of f...ing you up for life. You know that witches used to rub that on their broomsticks. It's where the theory of them flying comes from," Pete says with a low chuckle.

Pete lives in a quiet Christchurch suburb. He has two teenage sons, a devoted wife who, while Pete and I chat about his P use, is in the kitchen making us cheese scones.

The children are living with their grandparents until Pete is sure he can "make a proper go" of being straight 24/7. Pete also has a regular job, "paper-pushing" in a Government department.

A "quiet addiction" to Codral cold and flu tablets started him off on the road to P. "I was buying a packet a day for a while, not for the pseudoephedrine, but for the codeine. I liked the effect."

He was at a party thrown by friends of friends when he began his flirtation with smoking P.

"It was around and I got up on it. It was at a time in my life when I felt flat. I'm middle aged, the bills were piling up higher and higher and every day just seemed the same, stressing out over how to survive the bull... I craved a bit of danger, a bit of excitement. I just wanted to take my head out of the mundane for a while."

Although his six-month P binge is mostly "a blur", Pete managed to hold down his job, and was even awarded the Employee of the Month title twice while he was off his head.

"Yeah, funny, eh? One thing about P is that it makes you feel euphoric. You have this feeling like you are a giant and you can do anything. It makes you feel very sociable and confident. It's so addictive. It makes you go and go. My bosses said they liked my get- up-and-go," Pete laughs.

He would go out at night, meet up with friends also taking P, indulge in five to six hours of "excessive drugs, drinking, sex and fighting" and then clock in to work at 9am in his suit and tie.

"I have no idea where all the money came from. I must have spent thousands, a lot of it on P, some of it on hookers. I still don't know where I got it from.

"I remember one night at midnight I had $3000 in my pocket. I woke up with just a few coins. Sometimes I have flashes of memories and I think, 'Did I do that?' but I can't be sure if I did or not."

He doesn't elaborate on what "that" is.

Pete feels lucky that he came to his senses. The jolt he needed came when his usually placid, easygoing nature turned violent and aggressive.

"I broke one of the kitchen cupboards because I wanted a coffee and I couldn't find the cup I wanted. On P, I became very aggressive and confrontational. Everything needed to happen right now. The flame starts small and increases until it is a big fire. I'm an easygoing guy. I don't fight, but on P I fought like a demon."

When he got home, in the early hours of the morning, with a black eye and a limp - "I can't remember how I got the limp" - the cupboard door was still swinging on its hinge and his wife had packed her bags and left with their two sons.

This snapped him out of it. He went cold turkey "full on".

"The emotional impact was dire. P is such a dirty drug. It eats your soul. It's a terrible drug. I just feel lucky I came to my senses. It's a highly addictive drug. My family has always been my world. When you're in that phase, you are just up, so you want to keep pushing yourself until you snap or your life snaps. I think it's a delusional drug. It makes you feel - like any drug - it makes you think you feel better than you actually are."

Out of cigarette papers, Pete eases his foot into the missing jandal and wanders down to the dairy to get some more.

Two minutes afterwards, there's a knock at the door. I look up from my notes to peer out through the garage window to see three men; like Russian nesting dolls, each is larger than the next. They open the garage door and ask me where Pete is. I assure them he won't be long.

They make themselves comfortable, grabbing bottles of Pete's home brew from the fridge and parking themselves on the other ramshackle furniture, causing flurries of dust to spiral upwards.

I explain that I'm chatting to Pete about his drug use. They ask if I'm a cop. No, I reply.

"Smalls" starts telling me tales of his own drug abuse, pulling his shirt sleeve up and kicking off steel-cap boots to reveal an intricate tapestry of needle marks and tattoos that he says tells the story of his life.

"My life sucks. I'm on the dole, probably going to be on the dole until I die. Drugs will get you through the day to day s... better than anything else.

"Some people have religion as their faith. Drugs are my religion. My parents died when I was four.

"I was in foster care with two religious assholes until I ran away at 13. Here are the cigarette burns they gave me when I was seven."

On P, the highs are so good, the trio says, that most people aren't like Pete and find it impossible to give up. Coming down is "bad ass". Users are exhausted, their levels of serotonin drop and they become depressed, craving the superhuman feeling another hit provides. The cycle weaves on.

Smalls says he has stolen from friends, committed burglaries and done "whatever it takes" to get what he needs. "I'm a speed freak."

I ask what they think of the media's portrayal of P use.

"The media does a good job of shrouding it in the bad, because it is bad. The thing is, there are a lot more people taking it than you know - regular people, who use it to get the job done. They don't go out and rob and beat people. I've done P with judges in Auckland and nurses in Wellington. I've been up on it for two weeks at a time, and no-one can touch me."

Pete returns, sheepishly mutters introductions, and suggests I go and check how the cheese scones are doing.

Pete's wife, a petite brunette with sad, brown, cow's eyes, is removing the scones from the oven. It's a scene straight from an Edmonds cookbook. I ask why she is with him.

"He's a good man," she says, patting my arm, I suspect, to reassure herself as much as me.

"We've been together since we were 17. He just doesn't know how to find ways to be happy in this world. He's always searching for something on the other side of the fence. I've learnt that what I need to know is inside me already. He has to learn that for himself."

In the driveway, voices become heated. I feel vaguely fearful.

"Don't worry, Pete just owes them money. I don't know how much and neither does he. They're quite good about it, though."

Smalls yells "See ya, Vic" through the kitchen window, raising the almost empty bottle of home brew in a farewell gesture. Scone crumbs trickling down his beard, Pete apologises.

"In every sense, the comedown from P is repulsive. I'll probably be paying them back for years. I have no idea how much money I went through. P impacts on all your emotions, intensifies everything.

"P is so addictive, because it gives you an explosive feeling. It brings you out of yourself. I just have to find a way to get back in to myself now."

Pure methamphetamine is a very powerful drug, and the consequences of taking it can be tragic, not just for the user, but for those beaten, robbed and murdered by those in its sway.

"I've taken most drugs," Pete says, "and P should never, ever be a drug of choice. There is no choice with P."

WHAT IS IT?

P, short for pure methamphetamine, is developed from its parent drug, amphetamine, with the base compound of pseudoephedrine. Available in pill, powdered or crystallised forms, it has become the gin, opium, heroin and crack cocaine of the 21st century. P stimulates the release of dopamine, noradrenalin and serotonin within the central nervous system, tricking the body into believing it has an unending supply of energy. Side effects include: hyperactivity, irritability, visual hallucinations (including the feeling that insects are crawling on or in your skin, so users often appear to be scratching), auditory hallucinations, suicidal tendencies, severe depression, aggression, severe paranoia and paranoid delusions, shortness of breath, increased blood pressure, cardiac arrhythmia, stroke, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, welts, spasms, weight loss and induced psychosis.

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