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stimulants. Cocaine was the expensive, shorter-lasting, ‘cleaner’ high; coke users could later go to sleep. Speed users, on the other hand, spent less money but paid the price in drawn-out, depressing post-high crashes.
    In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, however, it was alterations in cocaine use that eventually led to the reinvention of amphetamine in a new, dangerously glamorous context.
    In the 1980s, heavily addicted cocaine users began to prepare the drug in a different way. Instead of snorting it in powder form, users bought the drug in purer, crystalline form and smoked it in water pipes, or ‘freebased’. This form of cocaine, known as crack, fast became the most destructive drug in modern American history, mostly because crack was cheaper, more concentrated and more accessible to the poor.
    The allure of crack lay partly in the method of delivery. Smoking had a quicker and more exciting effect than snorting, yet it didn’t carry the stigma or threat of blood-borne diseases that came with injection. Snorted speed takes effect within three to five minutes. Smoked, it hits within seconds. Snorted speed comes on without an extreme rush. Smoked, it fires the user up like a rocket.
    The crystal, smokable form of methamphetamine, the crack to speed’s coke, also had a new name, owing to its appearance. It was called ice.
    Around the Pacific, in Japan and south-east Asia, methamphetamine had been sold as crystals and smoked since the 1960s. As early as 1968, the smoking of crystalline methamphetamine was reported in Hawaii. But it was in South Korea and Taiwan that the production and distribution of crystalline methamphetamine was taken on by large organised-crime concerns and turned into a profitable international trade.
    One reason for the production shift to Asia was the long history of the ephedra plant in China. Known also as mahuang, ephedra had been used as a herbal stimulant for more than five thousand years. When reduced in a laboratory with hydriodic acid, ephedra derivatives make methamphetamine. Most of the drug factories converting ephedra into precursor chemicals such as ephedrine and pseudoephedrine were, by the 1990s, in India and China—convenient for the east Asian drug cartels who were fighting a worldwide war against law enforcement officials over the heroin trade. In manufacturing methamphetamine, they saw an opportunity to reap higher profits at lower risk. America was already being serviced by speed cartels based in Mexico. For the south-east Asian traders, the natural orbit of their market was their neighbouring countries: the prosperous, fast-growing, pacy urbanised centres in Thailand, South Korea, China, Taiwan and Indonesia. The United Nations 1997 World Drug Report said methamphetamine, with 260 000 addicts, had overtaken opiates in Thailand. A gram of meth sold for as little as ten dollars. The International Narcotics Board said Thai police had seized 500 000 ice hits in six months, and a raid in the Philippines uncovered 600 kilograms of meth and 1.6 tonnes of ephedrine.
    Further south, there was another market—small, to be sure, but with many of the same characteristics as America, which by 1995 had taken to crystal meth with a vengeance. Within two years, ice was starting to trickle from south-east Asia into Australia.
    In 1998, Damien Peters turned 29. Not for the first time in his adult life, Peters was nurturing a new hope for the future. He felt he had turned a corner. He felt that he might have fallen in love.
    Peters’s teenage and adult history was a sorry one. The youngest of four children, he had always struggled to live up to the high expectations of his suburban pharmacist father. Suffering from attention deficit disorder and consequently a poor academic performer, Peters left school after year ten hoping to gain an apprenticeship as a chef. Buffeted by what he perceived as his father’s bullying and teasing, he soon lost that job. His