Cheap score all too simple

ICE addicts get their drugs from a bottleshop, through messaging app Snapchat or by paying a $100 entry fee for a “smorgasbord” at all-night parties.

By contacting a dealer’s website, residents can organise for a “home-delivery service”.

Tourists, after checking-in, buy utensils from hardware stores to cook up the drug in their hotel kitchens.

The massive options on offer to get a hit from the killer drug, along with shocking new statistics, show why the Coast is fast becoming Queensland’s “ice land”.

Police, lawyers, welfare workers and educators deal with victims ranging from teenage students to 64-yearold businessmen and “high-society ladies smoking on a pipe” before heading off to functions.

Gold Coast criminal lawyer Ashkan Tai said 90 per cent of the cases that come across his desk involve clients who have had contact with ice.

It costs $18-25 for a hit if you’re just starting out while regular users, who need more of the drug to achieve the same effect, will spend $80 at a time.

Mr Tai said ice turned its victims into zombies, unable to sleep and not knowing what they are doing, to the point where they lost touch with reality.

Sexual offences were often committed by people high on ice but many also offended purely to support their habit.

Australian Anti Ice Campaign director Andrea Simmons, who has built a successful business after recovering from a $500-a-day habit, said the big difference from two years ago was ice was now easier to access and produce.

“Ice on the street is cheaper than alcohol,” she said.

“You can order online – delivered to your door on the Gold Coast. I know 16-yearolds who can make it.

“The only way you are going to stop it is to make people understand that the base product is Drano. It’s acetone – they’re poisonous.”

ANDREA SIMMONS