WA News

Save
Print
License article

Look out Perth! We are one of the most dangerous cities in the world

51 reading now

Perth is on the brink of a meth-induced zombie apocalypse and is one of the most dangerous places on the planet.

Well, if you believe the UK's Sun Newspaper our humble and quaint capital city has been lumped in with "drug cartel run hellholes to war-ravaged cities where head chopping ISIS fanatics run wild."

Bugger me, that shatters the Dullsville tag that has been hanging around Perth's neck for so long.

The Sun has even gone to great lengths of using a graphics map to explain "the most dangerous corners of the earth".

The ISIS stronghold in Raqqa in Syria, where thousands of innocent civilians have been killed, has been described as a city that lacks human rights and where terrorism and murders are rife.

Hard to argue that one.

Advertisement

According to the Sun, San Pedro Sula in Honduras has a murder rate of 173.6 per 100,000 people, the highest recorded in the world. It is also notorious for its gangs and drugs.

Fun place for the family to visit.

And Naples gets labelled as one of the worst organised crime hot spots on the globe which is riddled with gangs, murders and drugs.

Then there is Perth. On the map where Perth is, the Sun puts a marijuana leaf.

Ouch. Pot smokers in Perth are shrugging their shoulders and rolling a spliff in celebration.

If anything, that will bring tourists to WA.

And just to emphasise how "scary" Perth is, the Sun has used a glorious picture of the state's capital at night, while the rest of the snaps of the "dangerous cities" show harrowing and confronting images of dead and bloodied bodies strewn on the streets.

"A dark secret is lurking far from Australia's famous tourist hotspots," the Sun says.

At first I thought the Sun was referring to the tourist obsession of taking selfies with ice-addicted quokkas on Rottnest Island.

The number of holiday-goers attacked by drugged up quokkas is something the media is refusing to highlight.

But the newspaper goes onto say "crystal meth abuse Down Under has turned rural areas in Western Australia into what have been dubbed "Ice Towns".

"The state's largest city, Perth, sees its hospitals filled with addicts who commit crimes to fund their habit.

"Western Australia is also reported to have the purest form of the drug leading to fears users could accidentally overdose."

Holy crap, I thought my neighbour looked like Walter White from Breaking Bad.

WA does have the unenviable tag of being the meth capital of Australia.

I mean Colombian drug lord and narco-terrorist Pablo Escobar once thought about switching his drug of choice from cocaine to meth and moving his operations to a seaside town of WA to control the flow of ice in the state.

Not really, but the Sun makes it sound like Perth's streets are paved with ice.

I decided to stroll around the CBD on Thursday to see if I would be left just wearing my thermal underwear after a druggie held me up and stole my clothes.

When I wasn't walking over shattered glass from meth pipes, I was "confronted" by an elderly tourist who wanted to know where the train station was.

Time to declare Martial Law and bring in the troops.

I wanted to scream at woman and suggest she needed to jump on the next plane out of the city before she succumbed to the scourge of drugs.

Seriously, placing Perth into the category of one of the world's dangerous cities is like saying the Teletubbies run meth labs out of their homes in the sloping green hills in Wimpstone.

It's like the Sun needed to fill its dangerous places quota so the newspaper Googled Perth and stuck a mull leaf over it.

At the risk of sounding parochial, Perth last year was voted the seventh most liveable city on the planet.

Lord Mayor Lisa Scaffidi said by world standards, Perth is a very safe, liveable and vibrant city with a diverse community.

"For more than ten years, Perth has continued to score highly in global liveability rankings from credible organisations such as the Economist Intelligence Unit," she said.

"These rankings are highly regarded; using metrics such as safety, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure."

Buy hey, if some genius comes up with a tour that scours the world's most dangerous places, holiday-goers coming to Perth will be left a little disappointed because meth is so expensive here.