Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Ice is a problem that is not only in Australia but all across the world. But now Perth has become the ice capital of Australia, and today I want to talk about the effects it is having on our community, and maybe something we can do about it. Our police forces, our health forces and our judiciary are working as hard as they can to sort this problem out, but it needs more than they can do—and they are all doing a fantastic job. I'd like to talk a little bit about a gentleman who lost his son to a drug tablet, and also about an education program that's being run in the US which has had magnificent success. It is something I'm looking at trying to implement in my electorate of Swan, and, hopefully, it can steamroll from there.

I'd like to mention Rod Bridge, who has taken action to educate schoolchildren and educate the whole community about the issues around his son. At age 16 his son, Preston Bridge, passed away when he jumped from a balcony at Scarborough after taking a single $2 synthetic LSD tab. Preston made one bad choice while celebrating after his end-of-school-year ball. The tab he took was supplied to him by a school friend. It had been purchased from the website Silk Road and was posted direct to a mail address in Australia.

The legacy of Preston and his family now is to educate others about the dangers of synthetic drugs and the so-called research chemicals. Synthetic drugs are those that are made to mimic illicit, unlawful drugs at a fraction of the price. The producers say they are manufactured for the purpose of medical research, but there is no evidence of them being used for medical research anywhere in the world. There are psychoactive or hallucinogenic party drugs worth millions of dollars coming into Australia on a daily basis. Unlike with pharmaceutical drugs, no measurements are used during manufacture, making the finished product different in compound every time they are made. Online ordering and rapid delivery by door-to-door couriers currently make purchasing too accessible. With limited detection methods, the amount coming into Australia is on the increase. The scourge is already having unprecedented effects on individuals in our community and, as I said, Perth has become the ice capital of Australia. An education program on the negative effects that substance abuse, particularly of synthetic psychoactive substances, has on people and society needs to be made available to these people to make them aware of what's going on.

I mentioned a program being run in the US, and I'll briefly touch on that. I will read from the paper 'Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation and the Meth Project', from the Stanford Graduate School of Business:

On a beautiful sunny day in November, with a hint of snow on the ground, Tom Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, was bird hunting in Montana where he has resided part-time for over 40 years. While out in the fields, Siebel and his friend John Stevens, a sheriff in Cascade County, discussed how methamphetamine ("meth"), a highly potent and addictive synthetic stimulant, had become a significant problem for law enforcement in the state. Siebel’s friend told him that the county's 17 sheriffs spent nearly all of their time busting meth labs. In 2005, Montana was ranked number five in the country for meth abuse and half of the children in the state placed in foster care were removed from their homes for reasons related to meth. Montana was not alone, however; at the national level, the meth problem was also severe. Meth had become the leading drug threat to the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Justice's National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC).

At lunch with his friend later that day, Siebel recalled: "For some reason, I just asked him, 'John, how do you make this meth?' He told me that you go to the hardware store, buy a gallon of Coleman lantern fuel, then you go to Walmart and buy a bunch of Sudafed tablets, then you put the Coleman lantern fuel in a pot, grind up the Sudafed tablets, and you put that in the pot. You then take some red road flares out of the back of your pickup truck, take the insides of that and put it in the pot. Then you go to the garage and get some acetone and put about a quarter-cup of that in. Then you go under the sink and put some Drano in the pot, take lithium out of the rechargeable batteries from your Sony camera, put that in the pot, and then you mix that and boil it and what's left is a white powder and that is methamphetamine." Siebel said Stevens' description of how meth was manufactured affected him at a visceral level, and the challenge facing law enforcement in dealing with meth got his attention. Thus in 2005, he and the Siebel Foundation team—including Executive Director Nitsa Zuppas—established the Meth Project to address the problem.

I'm running out of time, but I know there are no other coalition speakers after me, so I'll be back in five minutes to finish the story.