Omnia   

AFLcountry thumbWeekly Times | POLICE superintendent Brad Dixon says it was in 2011 while he was working in Horsham that he first started to notice a “spike” in problems related to the drug ice.

Now working in Bairnsdale, Supt Dixon says there is no pattern to the drug in the various towns he has worked since, except that it is “everywhere” and indiscriminate.

And he has seen the effect it can have on football clubs, saying he saw a club in the Bendigo region devastated by the highly addictive drug.

“Whether that was (because) the club didn’t have the right support, whether the club didn’t have the right culture, hadn’t identified it as an issue, I don’t know why it got to that stage, but there was a lot of users in a particular club,” he said.

And Supt Dixon says the consequences were dire.

“The club was extremely poorly run and continues to struggle … it struggles with sponsorship, it struggles with the attraction of players. You lose your good workers, you lose your families, if you don’t act, and I’ve seen it firsthand.”

Supt Dixon was one of the speakers at the “Break the Ice” forum in Bairnsdale last week, which was headlined by the attendance of National Ice Taskforce chair and former Victorian Police commissioner, Ken Lay. The event was hosted by the Bairnsdale Football Club and AFL East Gippsland, but was not limited to the football frat­ernity. People of all ages from every section of the community packed into the clubrooms to hear from Mr Lay, Supt Dixon, and representatives from the East Gippsland Ice Prevention Working Group and Drouin’s The Ice Meltdown Project.

Last month Prime Minister Tony Abbott presented to the COAG meeting the ice taskforce’s interim report, which identified six key areas for action, including targeting primary prevention.

The taskforce received 1300 submissions, and Mr Lay said last week he believed the solution to the issues surrounding ice “lies within the community”.

He stressed it was a community issue, not isolated to football clubs, nor was it found in every sporting club in the country. He said its presence in sporting clubs was “not surprising” given data indicated the biggest users of ice are men in their 20s.

“(The taskforce) heard from time to time that there were some people in some football clubs who were using ice almost as a performance-enhancing substance,” Mr Lay said.

“We hear people talking about the drug making you feel very, very strong and invincible for a short time. I suspect that some people might be tempted to use it as a result of that, but unfortunately the story doesn’t go on about the downsides of this drug.

“Communities are going to have to own this, they’re going to have to work together, they’re going to have to support their community members to resolve this problem.”

Bairnsdale Football Club secretary Bernie Eastman, one of the forum’s organisers, said sporting clubs needed to connect more with the community to work out how to deal with the problems.

Supt Dixon said 118 people on methamphetamine were detected on his division’s roads last financial year.

Read Full Article