“I was born in Brisbane and at the age of 12 we moved to a country town called Kingaroy in QLD. That’s where some of my difficulties actually began. My sister was mentally ill, we were both in our teenage years and things became a bit troubled. My sister was 3 years older so she was 16 and she was one of the main reasons why we moved to Kingaroy. With the disruptions in life things weren’t going so well for me so I moved out of home fairly early, left school to support myself and then my daughter Kirra came along. I was 17 when she was born. When I was 20 I had Aurora. I started massage therapy but I drifted for a bit and ended up in a disfunctional relationship. It probably didn’t help that he had Aspergers Syndrome and I supposedly had an undiagnosed personality disorder which has since been diagnosed as anxiety. He cheated on me and I really do believe small country towns do hold a lot of difficulties. There wasn’t much in the way of opportunities and I didn’t have much direction in my life. The next thing a friend I hadn’t seen for a while turned up at my house and said, ‘do you want some of this?’ I was 23, very vulnerable and I stupidly said ok.
It grabs you very quickly. I had dabbled in drugs a bit before that but not much. I had big chunks of time when I was pregnant and breastfeeding where I didn’t even do coffee. When I had dabbled in the past it was the speed version and I would swallow a bit at the start of the night to go off and party and that wasn’t often. When it came to Meth I was no longer going out and partying. I was very depressed and there were people in my house. My children weren’t there at the time. It would be during the day when they were at school. Really stupid!.The smokeable format meant that it was very moorish and where normally you’d say, I’m just going to have this and that’s it, you would keep going back for more. I started to notice it spreading through my town and a lot more people around me were consuming. Ice became a lot more of a norm. Instead of going over to a friends house and being a offered a coffee, suddenly it became.. do you want a pipe? People don’t sit around shooting up together, it’s not the social norm but with Meth it feels more relaxed with the smoking method of delivery so that’s a big thing I want to bring up. It has changed the paradigm enormously. You know, seeing people that were good people, maintaining jobs and all of a sudden addicted to this pipe and their lives crumbling around them.”