Paramedics get front-row seats to the way a city gets wasted. When someone passes out, gets knocked unconscious, falls, freaks out, or gets found, mobile medics are usually the first on the scene. This is why, when we wanted to know what Australia's much-written-about ice (slang for crystalline methamphetamine) epidemic looked like, we contacted Ambulance Victoria.
Australia is now eight months into an official war on ice. In April former Prime Minister Tony Abbott ordered a task-force to find ways of tackling the use of the drug. On Monday, Prime Minister Turnbull announced a $300 million we doubled the amount of amphetamine users we were arresting. That's insane because we didn't see a proportional change in how many dealers we were arresting. There was a targeting of drug users," he explained.
Of course this is a simplification. There are numerous reasons why the Australian public is so fixated on ice. But again the paramedics we told us for all the excitement around illicit drugs, ice just wasn't their man concern.
Spending four nights in an ambulance was never a way to quantifiably prove the existence of an ice epidemic. In any case, it didn't. But it did illustrate the extent to which society suffers via alcohol. The issue is that we're throwing $300 million at ice, while comparatively ignoring the other.
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