Leaving Australia and Making My Way to Vegas; One Party Scene to Another

I moved to the states from Brisbane, Australia, a country I barely got out of alive. It is a land of gorgeous women, stunningly beautiful scenery, and bath water oceans year round. But with all that magnificence, it is a country that almost killed me. It wasn’t the life threatening animals or the blistering lifeless outback that threatened my life. For me the danger lied deep in the streets of Brisbane, the party scene.
The world knows that we Aussies party, we're renowned as heavy drinkers, but what's less known is that it doesn't end with the booze – that's merely the start. We may have many worldwide titles in sport, but we have another title that is more dangerous than any rugby game ever could be. Our population of over twenty million can lay claim to the highest rate of methamphetamine use per capita, worldwide.
Like many others I fell into this drug culture and, like many others, continued to fall for quite some time. I'm sure I never would had stopped if it hadn't been for a friend. It wasn't that he told me to stop. No, that never would have made me try to climb my way back up; words don't make druggies stop.
He was a genius about to get his PHD in geology when I met him. He did a lot of ecstasy, a lot of pot. But his drug of choice was crystal meth, a dirty pointless drug with relentlessly addictive qualities. Hard to explain how a drug addict falls, but if truly an addict, they will fall. To him there really isn't very much of a change at all, if anything is changing it's the other people around him. The excessive amounts of ecstasy deplete his serotonin levels so that he needs it just to not feel depressed. Now the high levels of paranoia bought about by the crystal are accentuated by the depression from the ecstasy and needless to say it all goes to hell. By watching my friends life disintegrate, mine was saved. That's when I left Brisbane.

-strongmonty