VOICE OF EXPERIENCE’S CHILLING WARNING
Foundation 61 program director Rob Lytzki has been at the forefront of affordable and accessible drug and alcohol rehabilitation in Geelong since well before crystal methamphetamine came to town. Now, one of the city’s most recognisable – and respected – recovered drug users shares his insights into how ice has changed Geelong. HARRISON TIPPET reports.
HAD crystal methamphetamine been around when Rob Lytzki was into illicit substances, he doesn’t think he would have survived.
“In my day it was speed. Speed in one arm, heroin in the other and I’d go to the pub,” the 63-year-old rehab boss rumbles, in his characteristically gruff and laconic tenor.
“Methamphetamine was coming in as I was going out, which is fortunate for me. I honestly don’t believe I would have survived it; I nearly didn’t survive what I was going through anyway.
“If I didn’t die, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have ended up in jail over some nasty crime. As soon as it started coming in I watched all my mates who were still in the arena, they ended up in some pretty bad places.”
Rob is the utterly endearing program director at Foundation 61, a 15bed residential rehabilitation clinic located a few minutes’ drive down a dirt road just off the Surf Coast Highway in Mount Duneed. Blueeyed, bald and with a wispy white and grey beard, Rob spends about 55-hours each week working at Foundation 61 – much of which is voluntary.
And when it comes to how ice has impacted Geelong, Rob probably has the best insight in town, having seen first-hand the transformation in drug users since opening Foundation 61 in 2005.
“We started with two beds, then very quickly we ended up with somebody living behind the couch, and within nine months we found a bigger house and that had six bedrooms. Then we moved into Mount Duneed, which had nine bedrooms,
and through the good graces of Give Where You Live, they gave us some money and we extended, so now we have 15 bedrooms.”
“When we started it was mostly alcoholics, followed by marijuana and heroin.
“We got here [Mount Duneed] about 13½ years ago, which seemed to be about the same time I started hearing the rumours and all the stories about ice. It just got more and more, our inquiries were getting bigger.
“If Geelong was honest, they could have three rehabs like this.”
Rob’s blunt with his assessment of how the seemingly unceasing growth of crystal methamphetamine in Geelong is affecting the city.
“It is getting worse, and it’s going to stay that way,” he says.
“Ice is starting to destroy the whole social fabric of the place, it’s right across the whole socio-economic
spectrum. There are just as many ‘icies’ up in Highton and places like that as there are in more disadvantaged suburbs, it’s just that they can hide it better.
“Everything is five- or ten-fold, the violence and the crime. You look at it now with the gangs and stuff like that, a lot of that’s ice driven.
“They’re just coming in stormtrooping into your house and there’s six or eight of them, and it doesn’t matter if you’re home or not anymore.”
Foundation 61’s waiting list is hovering about 60 people, with bed turnover averaging between six months and a year. Ice is also now behind more than 90 per cent of inquiries, with recovery times taking longer and rehabilitation success rates lower than those of many other addictions.
“We like to think our success rate is high, it’s about 50 per cent,” Rob
says. “Government institutions are around 1 per cent.
“Before the ice, going back about 12 years — with alcoholics and good old heroin addicts and cannabis smokers — we would have been at about 60 to 70 per cent.
“Ice is very hard because they actually need a lot longer time. I’ve got icies in here that need to stay for at least a year, most of them … and I’ve had icies stay for two years.”
Rob is proud of Foundation 61’s standing as the region’s most accessible residential rehab, with the notfor-profit baulking at the opportunity to make big bucks out of private care – with some providers charging up to $30,000 a month.
“We’re here to cater for the people who can’t really afford to get better, so to speak. The people that fall through the cracks,” Rob says
Rob’s not just having a dig at the “competition” either.
Victorian Health Complaints (HCC) Commissioner Karen Cusack last month found that a lack of regulation had led to some private rehabilitation providers preying on people “at their most vulnerable” and identified “some disturbing patterns” within the privately-funded alcohol and other drugs (AOD) treatment sector”.
“By way of summary, it appears that the intersection between under supply, vulnerability and the forprofit model is the space where poor consumer outcomes seem most likely to occur,” her report found.
Ms Cusack found AOD residential rehabilitation providers were “largely unregulated”, which “appears to have had a detrimental effect on the health and wellbeing, and financial situation, of clients and their families”.