Aboriginal Teens Caught in Wave of Gas-Sniffing

A two-foot lizard sizzles on the coals of a campfire while Elva Cook shelters from the searing midafternoon heat beneath a shade tree.

It’s a harsh environment, but Cook’s desert home has become a haven from an affliction that is killing Aboriginal children and threatening their ancient culture--gasoline sniffing to get high.

“They come here when they want somewhere where they can sit down and dry out. When they come here, they don’t sniff,” she says.

Gasoline sniffing has occurred periodically in remote Aboriginal communities in outback Australia for decades. Researchers say the level of abuse fluctuates greatly, washing over communities like a wave and then dissipating.

At Hermannsburg, about 11 miles west of Injartnama, the wave is cresting and is carrying a generation of teenagers and children as young as 4 into crime, delirium, brain damage and early death.

There are about 70 sniffers in Hermannsburg, mostly teenage boys. In a dry creek bed, they hold soft drink cans containing gasoline over their nose and mouth, then roam the streets intoxicated, some with the cans tied around their necks to maintain the high.

Hermannsburg’s sniffing outbreak is among the worst of what a draft report for Northern Territory government says are at least 10 central Australian communities that have a total of 200 sniffers. Social workers say there are many more, and the communities affected stretch to the nation’s north coast.

“There is currently a crisis of inhalant substance abuse in central Australia,” the report says.

For their high, sniffers pay with brain damage, headaches and hallucinations, memory loss, malnutrition and epilepsy. Prolonged use leads to lead poisoning and death. Some sniffers die or are horribly burned in accidents when gas ignites.

Sniffers can be abusive and violent. They commit break-ins and assault family members and tribal leaders. The effect on their communities is “far beyond their numbers,” the report says.

Aboriginal elders say gas sniffing and other substance abuse threaten to break the cycle of handing down “dreamtime” stories, dances and paintings that have kept the world’s oldest continuous culture alive for more than 40,000 years.

Maggie Brady, Australia’s leading researcher on gas sniffing, likens its use among Aborigines to drug experimentation by teenagers in all societies. But relative poverty and extreme isolation mean street drugs like cocaine are not available to many indigenous people.

Gasoline sniffing is “the most accessible and efficient substance with which to achieve a mind-altered state,” Brady says. Boredom and rebellion are key factors.

“Petrol is easy to obtain. It’s a very good high. It, from [the sniffer’s] point of view, is a slightly cultish and exciting and risky thing to do.

“They are off the beaten track. There are limited job opportunities. There are virtually no youth workers; there are often no discos. There is often just simply nothing else to do.”

Gasoline sniffing has been recorded among other indigenous peoples, including the Inuit of Canada, the Pueblo, Navajo and Plains Indians of the United States and the Maoris of New Zealand.

In Australia, it is difficult to measure the problem’s extent, or how many have died. Sniffing is not illegal, and there are few official records until sniffers show up in crime reports.

One recorded death was that of a 14-year-old chronic sniffer who bled to death while in withdrawal and having visions of devils. He punched out a window and sliced his arm to the bone.

Experts say sniffing has been characterized by periodic outbreaks that crop up, ricochet across the country, then drop off. But Brady, who estimates there were 63 deaths in the decade ending in 1991, thinks sniffing has been intensifying over the last 30 years.

One sign of the demand is that Aboriginal sniffers pay as much as $38 dollars for about 2 1/4 pints of gasoline. Many Aborigines live in areas so remote that the nearest gas station may be 100 miles or more away and few have cars, so traffickers can charge high prices.

Affecting almost exclusively the most out-of-sight group in Australian society--poor black people living in the outback--sniffing has been given low priority by state and federal governments. Total government funds for gas-sniffing programs is around $2.1 million a year.

Brady says Canada spends twice as much per capita on fighting substance abuse among its indigenous peoples.

The Northern Territory government says it supports the work of Aboriginal outposts like Injartnama, which lies 100 miles west of Alice Springs, but it provides no training and no long-term backup.

Cook and her family keep sniffers busy with manual work. It’s a simple theory: Keep teenagers busy and they will stay out of trouble.

They also try to instill Aboriginal skills being lost in a haze of gas and alcohol fumes.

“Every afternoon, they go out hunting goannas and witchetty grubs,” Cook says, referring to the local bush food of lizards and moth larvae.

They also go camping and learn to construct shelters and fences.

But Cook despairs for the future.

“The old people are tired now. Our kids are going the wrong way. What’s going to happen when we are gone?” she asks. “All the old stories and ceremony, they are all gone now. They don’t remember.”

Peer pressure and boredom remain threats.

In a corral behind Injartnama, two recovering sniffers harness horses in the late afternoon sun, which turns the desert sand a rich red ochre.

Where will they ride this evening? To the newly discovered water hole nearby?

One teen looks up with a coy smile. “Hermannsburg maybe,” he says.