Luke Williams was an award-winning journalist researching the country's ice epidemic when he spiralled into drug addiction.

Williams, from Bundaberg in Queensland, moved to Melbourne to get an intimate look at the highly addictive drug and what it did to the people who fell under its spell.

When he moved into St Kilda's Gatwick Hotel, home to this year's Channel Nine show The Block, Williams made the transition from observer to user and soon replaced his family, friends and career with crystal methamphetamine.

The Gatwick Hotel was well-known in Melbourne as a boarding house for drug addicts, the mentally ill and ex-convicts, before it was bought by Channel Nine for $10million for the reality TV show.

Williams said the building, which housed low-socioeconomic tenants, had an uncanny ability to suck its residents into an unsavoury lifestyle.

Not long after he moved in, he said the decaying three-story mansion, known by some as 'the Ghetto', 'Hotel Hell' or 'Hotel of Horrors', was his 'home'.

Observing the day-to-day lifestyles of those who lived within the Gatwick's four walls, Williams said it was less dangerous than it was sad.

Police and ambulance visited on average about five times a week, a guy took some meth and started screaming 'incest' while smashing a window. Otherwise, the residents just seemed bored,' he said.

'They don't have jobs, they don 't play any sport and, in the end, for most of them, there really isn't much to do but find drugs and get smashed.

'Most of the Gatwick crew live in a Sisyphean cycle of highs and lows, Centrelink paydays and dry days, with nothing much of what many of us would consider to be a meaningful life in-between.'

Williams said his decision to write a book about Australia's ice epidemic was not an easy one.

He started using drugs when he was 17 years old and struggled with addiction for years before finally getting clean.

He knew his decision to investigate the country's drug problem, and place himself at its centre, was a risky one.

Williams said it was no more than a week into his stay at the Gatwick he succumbed to the temptation.

The Queensland man said he was lured back in to addiction by a 'cranky, flabby-tummied man with a grotty tracksuit'.

'One curly-haired female Gatwick resident told me in her inflectionless voice "if you don't take drugs here you won't like it",' he said.

One night when he walked in on a woman injecting meth into her neck, Williams said he realised his new normal.

'I came back one night to the musty, grotty Gatwick one-night drunk, and saw a woman injecting crystal meth in her neck. When I asked her why she was injecting in her neck, she said, 'straight to the brain, brother,' he recalled.

'She huffed and puffed, eyes wild, she purred, she introduced me to the woman standing behind her, her daughter Anna, who repeated her mother's ritual with her own syringe.'

Soon enough, Williams' drug abuse led him into psychosis and he believed his roommate and parents were conspiring to kill him.

'I retreated to my Gatwick room and saw maggots crawling all over the floor, said out loud "this place is disgusting" as plots began to form in my head,' he said.

'The morning progressed, I concluded that somebody had broken into my room while I was out, stolen my laptop, given the laptop to a journalist who had hijacked my internet history – my internet port history to be precise – and broadcast it on the TV news.'

Williams took himself to hospital fearing the worst.

After being reassured he was not on the news, nor the target of an assassination plot, Williams left and returned to his home at the Gatwick.

'When I went back, I saw the Indigenous woman and her daughter and they said, '"you are part of the family now"'.