Ice age

Ice is filling emergency wards with psychotic, dangerous patients, to the alarm of doctors who thought they'd seen everything.

 

"They're the most out of control, violent human beings I have ever seen in my life - and I've been around for a long time," says one. "It makes heroin seem like the really good old days."

 

This documentary goes to the heart of this destructive new epidemic. Reporter Matthew Carney takes his camera into a netherworld inhabited by hardcore ice addicts - or skaters, as they call themselves - who live for their next hit. This tribe of junkies roams the inner city, scoring and shooting up. They stay manically high for up to a week, without food or sleep. Finally, they crash and eat, before the welfare cheque arrives and the cycle starts all over again.

 

"We're the fringe-dwellers," says "Mick", whose veins are so wrecked he can barely find a place to inject. His mate "Mattie" can't imagine life without ice: "It just seems to find me, it's like everywhere I go, it's there. Who knows what's gonna happen in 10 years' time mate?"