She was 19; she was only 19. She was Greek Australian. She was someone’s daughter. She had loving, supportive parents. She started taking ice a year and a half ago. She mixed with the wrong crowd, she had low self-esteem, she met the wrong man who involved her in the world of sex work to aid her addiction. She went to jail and got clean. The future looked good, she was going to stay clean, go back to school, she left jail positive and confident she had kicked ice out of her life, she had supports in place to do so.

Not two weeks out of jail she was found dead with a needle still in her arm. She was ice’s victim – the cruel, highly addictive drug took her young life.
As sad as this story is, of a wasted life caused through a drug that is as cruel as it is predatory on lost souls, who unwillingly find themselves the victims, it is not uncommon in the Greek Australian community.

In 2012, the Greek community was shocked when a 25-year-old Greek Australian boy gunned down his grandparents in their Yarraville home just three days before Christmas. The young man was on a cocktail of drugs including methamphetamines. Before the shootings, he was convinced he had to kill his grandparents after becoming obsessed with a “paranoid fantasy”.

This year, three people, including Inimi and Savvas Menelaou, died in an Oakleigh car crash caused by 30-year-old driver who was on ice. Their son Menalaos Menelaou was in a critical condition in the Royal Alfred Hospital following the crash. And another Greek Australian was impacted by the same car crash. Passenger Elias Mesiridis was in a stable condition and 29-year-old Maria Mesiridis was in a stable but serious condition at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. The Greek community was rocked following this car crash that impacted the lives of more than the two families who suffered at the hands of the driver – an ice user.

Helen Andrianakis, Mental Health, Drug and Alcohol Petitioner, psychiatric nurse, Mental Health Services, was the nurse who found the young 19-year-old Greek Australian girl dead, alone in her house. It’s her job to follow up on drug users after their release from prison. When the young victim wasn’t answering her phone, Ms Andrianakis called the police and together they broke into her house to find that she had overdosed.

For her this was a sad case, but not uncommon in the Greek Australian community. She gives another example, of a 48-year-old family man who proves once again, this drug does not discriminate.

“He was 48, and had never used drugs in his life,” she starts.

“He was a successful businessman, father of three, he started chatting to this woman on Facebook; she was 25-years-old, worked as a prostitute and was on ice.”
She says he began using ice because of her and within three months he was hooked. He destroyed his family, his business, his wife kicked him out and when he got caught dealing in ice, he was incarcerated.

“It’s an unpleasant drug,” says Ms Andrianakis matter-of-factly.

The destruction this drug has caused, and the destruction that is yet to come as warned following the release of a report by the Australian Crime Commission, is unparalleled. According to the report, the number of national Amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) arrests continued to increase, with 22,189 arrests in 2012-13 – the highest on record.

Amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) stimulate the central nervous system and speed up messages travelling between the brain and the rest of the body. Made in illegal clandestine laboratories, ATS pose a serious health risk to users due to their unknown content and purity.

“You see things completely differently, you are hot and cold, it’s like you have a split personality,” Ms Andrianakis tells Neos Kosmos of the effects of ice.
“One minute you are okay, then the next minute you are neurotic, anxious and nervous.” The drug ice affects a user’s brain, memory, so they feel as though they are “constantly scattered”.

“They have aggressive outbursts, their kidneys fail, their heart fails, they are at high risk of having seizures, they get depressed, they get anxious, they are constantly paranoid.

“Their brain is damaged severely; there is evidence that ice damages the brain cells,” she says.

Not only this, but it also affects your appearance as you begin to develop scabs on your face and body, it damages your teeth and you lose a lot of weight, and she says, you see all these changes in a person within only a few months of use.

But it’s the impact this drug has on families, friends, on day-to-day relationships that seems to impact the Greek community the most. Being a Greek Australian, Ms Andrianakis says she gets a lot of parents contact her who are suspicious that their children may be taking drugs, specifically ice.

“You can’t maintain a relationship [with an ice user],” says Ms Andrianakis. From the Greek Australian point of view, she says simply “it destroys families”.
*Mary (whose name has been withheld for anonymity) says her family has been destroyed by her brother’s addiction to ice. When he started using ice, his family suffered due to his violent outbursts and mood swings. He also nearly sent his parents’ business bankrupt as “he took everything from [his parents’] business”. The ice addiction made him become a chronic liar and she says the family is unsure of what to believe and they question everything he says. And now her relationship with her brother is non-existent – all because of ice.

In some cases, Ms Andrianakis sees ice users turn to criminal activity to fund their habit, but in other cases she sees parents being abused, bashed, left bankrupt by their children using ice, and parents who accept these behaviours as they don’t want to be seen as “giving up on their child”.

“What a family member should do is try and engage with family services; in the community parents can go to local community health centres, their local GPs, there are drug and alcohol clinicians,” she says, adding if the user is incarcerated then they have other channels of support.

Ms Andrianakis has observed an element of denial in the Greek community, adding “mental health and drug and alcohol addiction are not a sexy topic to the community” and that the community needs to be more aware.

In some cases, the parents can’t understand why it’s happened to them, why their child is on drugs when they’ve given them a good home and education, but Ms Andrianakis says they need to understand that drug addiction is not about them and they need to be supportive to their child. She has noticed that it may be difficult for first generations to understand mental illness that can be the result of ice addiction.

The reason this drug is so addictive is because it gives users a “sense of power”, with Ms Andrianakis adding she’s seen clients who haven’t slept for weeks. Because it’s a relatively new drug on the market, she says the full impact is yet to be seen and has gathered momentum in the last eight or so years.
“It’s getting worse,” says the psychiatric nurse, “a lot of people think it’s a party drug and you stay up and dance all night, and you do … but you also destroy your life.”
Australia has been warned by the report that the ice problem is reaching “pandemic” proportions.

Victoria Police deputy commissioner Graham Ashton revealed to the media that bikie gangs and overseas criminal syndicates were taking advantage of the highly addictive aspect of ice “to actively hook thousands of young Victorians”.

One of those was the 19-year-old Greek Australian girl, who died alone, with a needle in her arm.

She could have been your sister, your cousin, your daughter.