Australian Police seized au$1 billion worth of the drug “ice,” Australia’s Justice Department announced February 15. Discovered in a shipment of silicon bra inserts and art supplies in late December, the catch was one of the biggest drug seizures in Australia’s history. At approximately us$700 million, it was the world’s largest seizure of liquid methamphetamine ever, equivalent to 3.6 million individual hits of the highly addictive drug.

The drugs were discovered and tracked from Hong Kong, leading to the arrest of four men in January. But the seizure is just the tip of the quite literal “ice-berg.”

“Methamphetamine poses by far the greatest threat to the Australian public of all illicit drug types, and by a significant margin,” Australian Crime Commission NSW State Manager Warren Gray told reporters.

Authorities are locked in a deadly war to prevent ice and other destructive illegal narcotics hitting Australian streets. It’s a one-sided battle that is being waged in the ports, cities, and suburbs, on the highways and streets of the small-town communities of the outback. The ice war is a nationwide battle.

Similarly futile wars against drugs are being waged across the Western world. (Read our article “The High Life” for a detailed look at how the drug culture is shaping America.)

Combatants

On one side you have law enforcement, the medical profession and the families and friends of addicts. On the other, you have dealers and the addicts themselves.

The addicts tend to have a foot in both the villain and the victim camp.

Many who oppose the use of ice are also victims—not of drug use, but of having to handle life alongside users. Australian Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione wrote for Australia’s Daily Telegraph on March 31, 2015. “[I]f we don’t adequately address this problem, it’s not an overstatement to say that it could bring us to our knees as a nation.” This is a national crisis that involves every level of society.

Police

The law enforcement usually battles ice addicts as they come off their drug-induced highs. It can take days to come down after a hit, but when they do, addicts often experience paranoia, hallucinations and confusion. Combine that with heightened irritability—rage—and you have a volatile concoction that oftentimes blows up in domestic disputes or seemingly random and violent public encounters. The wild, raging addicts sink into what is known as ice psychosis.

The meth reacts with the nervous system, temporarily allowing the body not to feel pain. An addict will fight tooth-and-nail with the police, meanwhile his body doesn’t recognize that he has exceeded his physical limitations—muscles and tendons are literally tearing and snapping inside his body.

Law enforcement officials responding to ice-related offenses face psychotic violence. Sadly, they often arrive on the scene as backup to the first responders, the medics.

Medical Profession

The medical profession has had to adapt to the inflow of users who come to the hospital in an ice-induced rage. A Daily Telegraph interview with Owen Kortlang, a security officer at Royal Melbourne Hospital, gives one chilling account of the power imbued in the users.

“I’m not a small guy. I’m 6’3'’, over 100 kilograms [220 pounds]. I’ve had guys 5’7'’, 70 kilograms [154 pounds] pick me up off the floor. It’s superhuman. It’s unbelievable. I’ve seen them rip doors off hinges. You just—it’s out of control.”

The Daily Telegraph witnessed one account of a 23-year-old taken into the Royal Melbourne Hospital. It took 15 staff to restrain him. The 23-year-old can be heard in the Daily Telegraph’s video threatening self-mutilation if they didn’t let him go. Addicts must have all four limbs secured to a bed and must be administered with “chemical restraints” before they can even be properly examined. Gone are the days when police and paramedics had to revive drug addicts to administer a cure. Ice addicts are very much alive when first responders arrive on the scene.

“The violence comes out of nowhere—unpredictable, superhuman strength,” critical care paramedic Julie Hughes told abc News.

The Criminals

Years ago, there was talk of drug highways. Biker gangs funneled drugs along certain lines; a thin supply chain took meth from creator to user. But not anymore.

Meth, and all drugs in the country, is everywhere. The immense volume of drugs being trafficked is hard to determine. Despite all that are caught, it seems Australians are still getting the drugs they yearn for. The last bust may have been worth $1 billion, but that was just one shipment. A man was caught last August at the Brisbane domestic airport with 750 grams of the drug strapped to his torso. The street worth was au$240,000. That was on one man heading out to his little hometown of Mackay. The town has just 120,000 residents. Now think about a city like Sydney where the population is approaching 5 million. Think of how many drug mules there are out there. Think of the numbers that aren’t going by plane, but rather just driven town-to-town or city-to-city. The country is completely saturated.

Police are struggling to contain the influx of the lethal drug to all levels of society. At one time, dealers would dilute the drug in order to turn higher profits. Today, however, reports suggest that highly enriched ice is commonplace; dealers and mules increase in correlation to demand and availability. The ingredients necessary to make highly concentrated ice are legal, easily shipped into the country unchallenged. They can be used by any lab set up in the back of someone’s car.

The Victims

In the war, everyone except the dealers could be considered a victim in some way. The entire nation is falling prey to the drug pandemic, users and non-users alike.

Highly purified meth can enslave users on a single hit. While addicts often have themselves to blame for the addiction in the first place, even if they have a change of heart, few can break free and those who do carry the mental and physical scars.

The Daily Telegraph summed it up well: “Ice is tearing at society from the bottom up, hurting and criminalizing the poorest before making its way up the income ladder.” Former dealers have stated in interviews that they have sold to every level of society, from kids to elderly, homeless to doctors.

According to the Australian Drug Foundation, 7 percent of Australians age 14 and older have tried meth/amphetamines one or more times. On average, young Australians between 14 and 24 try meth for the first time at 18.6 years. Of 12-to-17-year-olds, 2.9 percent have tried amphetamines.

“It is clear that an entire generation of rural youth is at risk, threatening the future prosperity of those communities,” Victorian Police Deputy Commissioner Graham Ashton told the Herald Sun.

Users old and young are often shunned by family and friends and usually end up unemployed. They then turn to crime. One report suggested that up to 70 percent of property crimes are committed by drug addicts.

The juxtaposition of destruction set against an ever growing popularity of the drug can seem hard to comprehend. Why, when the effects are so obvious, do people keep turning to drugs? And why is it so hard for police to combat?

Escapism

The simple fact is there would be no drug trade if there were no buyers. Australians use ice more frequently than any other nation in the world, and that statistic could yet blow out even further as ice prices plunge. So many—not just in Australia—are trying to escape the reality of daily life through drug use. Look at the United States. U.S. citizens spend more than $100 billion annually on illegal drugs—$1 trillion from 2000 to 2010! Society can’t go on as it is when so many try to escape it.

The facts about drugs are well known. But users are so entangled in the culture and desire that they willingly overlook the effects.

Drug users take the narcotics to experience the high. It is a completely selfish habit—nobody takes drugs for someone else. Drugs provide people with a temporary “out,” a chance to escape from the reality of their current situation. But it is an artificial high.

Truth is, addiction to drugs is a form of slavery. The users might feel they are in some way paid for their servitude. But the high doesn’t last. The escapism comes to an end and the enslaved must realize the destruction they are bringing on themselves.

We Can Win

This war on drugs has been waged on so many fronts, and every time the traffickers and dealers have come out victorious.

But not every battlefield has to be a losing one. There is an arena where a real beneficial fight can be waged. It is in the home, and is fought by parents and children—family.

As Trumpet columnist Joel Hilliker wrote in 2008 in an article titled “A Key to Winning the Drug War”:

We must lead, and provide our own children with, a life worth living. Nurture their dreams and encourage their ambitions. Expose the empty, violent, seedy wasteland that is substance abuse. Give them hope and a spiritual foundation upon which to build a productive life.

All is not lost in the battle against addiction. Australians, Americans, everyone and anyone whose life is touched by substance abuse can fight the good fight. It all starts in the home, with the family.

Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in the April 2012 Trumpet print edition:

America is overcome by its drug problem. And “whatever overcomes a man [or a nation], to that he is enslaved.”We don’t talk much about the war on drugs today. People don’t like to talk about losing a war. Many people began to see their own families and children caught up in drugs and felt they needed to tone down their approach. They didn’t want to be involved in a war so close to home.

But this war must be waged, and we need to look to a higher power to fight on our behalf. He continued:

God’s law brings us the ultimate, most wonderful freedom of all. It protects our families. It protects our children. It protects us from all the evil in this world.We should have joyful freedom. I want to be free! “Live as free men, yet without using your freedom as a pretext for evil; but live as servants of God” (1 Peter 2:16; Revised Standard Version).

If you worry about the drug war raging in Western society today, take a moment to read Mr. Flurry’s article. It could help you start to turn the tide of this war. Read “What Is True Freedom?” today.