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profitable methamphetamine lab. By the mid-1990s, Hawaii had a crystal meth problem as bad as the mainland US West Coast. Though originally synthesised in Japan, East Asian ice was now being made cheaply and less riskily in Taiwan and South Korea, then smuggled down the east Asian archipelago and across the Pacific. Ice was also being manufactured in the Philippines and trafficked directly to the nearest American states: Hawaii, California and Oregon.
    Australia, however, had remained largely insulated. In November 1991, Frank Kelly, the Comptroller-General of Australian Customs, warned of ice’s popularity in south-east Asia. The 1991 Asian and Pacific Heads of National Drug Law Enforcement Agencies conference, at which Kelly spoke, issued a statement saying that criminal motorcycle gangs continued to control the manufacture and distribution of amphetamines in Australia. It said the Japanese crime syndicate, the Yakuza, was behind the increased use of ice in Japan, and that South American cocaine cartels were building networks with the Yakuza. Now Australia was believed to be in their sights. Law enforcement officials tasked themselves with monitoring and stopping any link between the Yakuza, other east Asian syndicates, and Australian bikie groups.
    Yet Kelly, noting that this link was so far speculative rather than based on hard evidence, also voiced confidence that Australia could stop ice from coming in, relying on the same effective combination of education and law enforcement that had kept the country for the most part free of the crack cocaine epidemic. Law enforcement officials had stopped Latin American cartels from trafficking huge quantities of cocaine across the Pacific, and the same could be done to stop Asian organised crime syndicates from exporting ice or its precursors.
    Australia had been largely untouched by cocaine and crack; but as a stimulant-drug problem, says Nicolas Rasmussen, it was a zero-sum game. ‘Amphetamine use in the US dropped by about half in the 1970s, and 1980s,’ he says, ‘largely due to the abundance of cocaine. But in Australia, where there wasn’t much cocaine, the use of illicit amphetamines didn’t drop by anywhere near as much. It probably explains why now we’re second in the world (after Thailand) for amphetamine use.’
    Police busts of ice importation into Australia were still small-time and sporadic. A 29-year-old Filipino immigrant, Luisito Javillonar, was arrested by Australian Federal Police officers in July 1992 when some jars of face cream containing 12 grams of crystal meth were imported from Manila to his flat above a pet shop in Marrickville, in Sydney’s inner west. Javillonar, who had been under surveillance, appeared only to want the drug for his personal use and was released on $2000 bail. He obtained a false passport and fled the country, to return some years later.
    Busts were mainly of this trivial magnitude. But their numbers increased stealthily through the nineties. In 1998–99, Australian Customs captured a total of 971 grams of methamphetamine in 22 separate interceptions at the borders.
    Yet word was beginning to filter out that ice was on the streets, even if much of it was still conjectural. More and more drug researchers were getting reports of shabu among injecting drug users, and local police in Sydney were making their first arrests of suspects in an unusually heightened, proto-psychotic state.
    The evidence about a coming wave of ice was far from uncontested. NSW Premier Bob Carr became the first politician to raise the spectre of ice in February 1998, when he wrote to the Prime Minister, John Howard, saying that police had told him ice was on the streets of Sydney and was a potential national menace. But Paul Dillon, the information officer for NDARC, aware that only a handful of informants had mentioned ice in NDARC’s studies, said it was ‘incredibly irresponsible’ of Carr to overreact to a