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    What he really liked doing was getting stoned and drunk. From twelve years old, Blackburn was smoking marijuana—a joint each day at first, gradually moving up to half an ounce a week, a prodigious amount when started in adolescence and sustained over years. He also popped anti-psychotic pills which another boy had given him: they made him feel calm. And at the end of the day he would also put away up to five or six bottles of wine before passing out. Pot, wine and pills—a standard day for Darren Blackburn by the time he was fifteen.
    On leaving school, he held a variety of jobs that would have done Jack London proud. He worked as a window tinter, Venetian blind maker, and cobblestone paver. He worked in a textiles factory assembling jackets. None of the jobs lasted. His real passion, for drink and drugs, formed a symbiotic relationship with the paranoid schizophrenia he was diagnosed with after leaving school. Whether the schizophrenia resulted from the drug use, or the drug use was a self-medication against the schizophrenia, is impossible to untangle. Both the substance abuse and the mental illness started from too early an age to separate into cause and effect. He saw psychiatrists and other doctors, taking medication from time to time until he left New Zealand in 1996, at the age of 24, and moved to Australia with his girlfriend, Louise. Darren Blackburn wanted very much to be saved by the love of a good woman. He and Louise had a baby together, and were expecting their second when they arrived in Melbourne.
    Once in Australia, Blackburn stopped seeking medical attention. He didn’t see the need; booze and pot made him feel better.
    His first job in his new home was a case of a fox being put in charge of the henhouse: working for a bottle shop, an Aussie Liquor Mart in Melbourne’s western suburbs, as a labourer carting boxes of beer and wine. He tried not to drink so much, but now, instead of drinking steadily each night, he would sober up for days or weeks and then go on massive benders, sometimes lasting for weeks. He’d consume two to four casks of wine each day and a slab of beer. Drunk, his taste for dope rose again.
    For eighteen months he kept going at the bottle shop—the longest he’d ever held down a single job. He could drink right through the day and, being an experienced alcoholic, he was capable of putting away enormous amounts without getting falling-down drunk. He was reprimanded for stealing alcohol, and for being intoxicated at work, but when he left it was his own choice rather than his employer’s. On a binge, he simply didn’t turn up one day.
    Louise, having had enough of his drinking, kicked him out of home. He moved to Werribee and lived in a tent on the riverbank. One day he came back to find his tent destroyed; he moved on, sleeping behind a church until his niche was boarded up to stop him staying there. He wandered around western Melbourne, sometimes sleeping in parks, sometimes in a hostel for homeless men in Footscray. He received unemployment benefits and spent them on alcohol and, on happy days when he could score, marijuana.
    So this was Darren Jason Blackburn at the age of 26, in the late 1990s: homeless, unemployed, separated from his girlfriend and two young children. Hopeless, suffering from untreated paranoid schizophrenia, his days revolved entirely around getting drunk and stoned. Nothing else mattered. He was existing, just, in western Melbourne and outlying towns like Werribee, simply waiting for the fates to pick him up and drag him by the scruff of his neck into the future.
    Back in July 1989, a former US serviceman and his wife had been busted in Honolulu for receiving 10 kilograms of ice from an Asian syndicate. A police crackdown on marijuana plantations in Hawaii was having a predictable effect: the drug trade shifted from the high-risk but less dangerous pot plantation to the lower-risk and more