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Chapter 1
Introduction
Ted Legget
Given the formidable array of obstacles facing the emerging South Africa, why should the country worry about drugs? In the progressive moral climate characterising the democratic era, one might infer the right to consume mind-altering substances alongside the rights to abortion and consensual sodomy. The common premise is that people have sovereignty over their own bodies and the state should not second-guess the choices adults make concerning their own physical and spiritual health. Looking at the expensive and largely futile attempts of the developed world to stop drug use, pragmatism would seem to echo principle in advocating a 'hands off' approach to chemical experimentation.
Furthermore, compared to many legal substances, illegal drugs produce relatively few deaths. Mortality studies in South Africa find a far closer correlation between alcohol and unnatural death than any other substance,1 and this is a country where less than half of the population drinks.2 Deaths attributed to chronic use or acute overdose of illegal drugs pale next to the number of tobacco smokers who die from their habit annually.3 And while the death of a young person poisoned at a dance party attracts major headlines, it is not even a drop in the ocean of the thousands of equally preventable deaths due to HIV or the more than 20 000 murders the country suffers each year. Indeed, in a nation torn by crime and AIDS, the state might well deem other priorities more important than the recreational use of chemicals. But this would be very short sighted, because certain drugs have been found to be pivotal in promoting both crime and HIV in other countries around the world. Until now, little formal research has been done into the drugs-crime link in South Africa. This monograph is the first step in addressing this gap in the research.
Drugs and crime
There are at least three ways drugs can effect crime:
- People on drugs, just like people on alcohol, act out in ways they would not ordinarily behave. Some drugs distort perceptions, some impact mood, and most 'disinhibit' in some sense of the word. While much is made of those freak incidents in which murder is committed by people too deep in hallucinations to appreciate the nature of their acts, this is hardly the norm. Far more common is the violence that comes from that little push a chemical can give towards acting on impulses that would otherwise be ignored. Alcohol has been used for years to provide both the excuse and the recklessness to perform acts most people in their right minds wouldn't do, like robbing a liquor store. Drugs can be used in very much the same way, if one prefers to smoke, snort, or inject one's Dutch courage.
- Being illegal, the retail price of drugs far exceeds their production costs. Prohibition creates a very lucrative market for those willing to chance incarceration. This group generally includes those who are otherwise criminally inclined, including violent offenders. Even well established, mainstream markets have their frictions, and legal commerce relies heavily on the dispute resolution mechanisms of the state's courts. These, of course, are not available when peddling drugs, and violence is often required to sort out business disagreements.
- Some drugs are highly associated with drug dependency or addiction. This means that some users become quite convinced that they cannot live without them. Feeding this acquired imperative requires money, and being dependent on drugs can make finding the time to hold down a job quite difficult. The fact that they are illegal aggravates this dilemma, as it pushes up the price and ensures that drugs can only be purchased from criminals. The need for large amounts of instant cash without having to work a regular job tends to lead women into prostitution and fraud, while it tends to lead men into more direct forms of acquisitive crime. As the urgency of addiction increases, these crimes can often become violent.
From the above discussion, it should be clear that the fact that drugs are illegal is responsible for much of the illegality surrounding them. But even without this factor, drugs do disinhibit and they do form the fixation point for costly and debilitating dependencies. Countries with liberal drug policies have found that providing support for addicts is an expensive process, both in terms of social services and in terms of lost productivity. Common sense would dictate that where a national drug habit can be curbed, it should be. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Alcohol and cigarettes have had many generations to achieve market penetration, and uprooting these dependencies is a slow and painful process of public education and increasingly unfriendly regulation. But is it possible to prevent the abuse of currently illegal substances in South Africa? To answer this question, we need to look at how far our national drug epidemic has advanced.
South Africa and drugs
The nature and extent of drug abuse in South Africa has been in a state of flux over the last several decades. The introduction of Mandrax (methaqualone) in the 1970s, and the creation of the 'white pipe' means of smoking the drug shortly thereafter, changed forever the way many South Africans chose to get high. But while members of all the country's ethnic groups became involved with the drug, it became especially entrenched in coloured and Indian communities.4 This 'ethnic segmentation' of the country's drug cultures was reinforced by apartheid segregation, and similar associations are found with other substances.
As it became clear that the years of repression were coming to an end, things began to change further. In the early 1990s, white youths introduced the international rave culture to the country, and with it, an increase in the use of the so-called 'club drugs', principally ecstasy and LSD. After 1994, the country experienced an influx of chemicals that international isolation during the apartheid years had kept out. Chief among these were cocaine and heroin, both of which have shown dramatic increases in popularity since the first democratic elections. Crack has thus far outpaced heroin in popularity, but both are expanding beyond the communities in which they found their initial consumer base.
Certain drugs seem not to have yet found their market niche in South Africa. Several forms of 'speed' are consumed by white ravers, but this is usually in combination with ecstasy. Direct amphetamine and methamphetamine use is not common, with certain forms of ingestion being virtually unknown. While the prescription painkiller Wellconal was popular some years ago, the black market for prescription drugs is not well developed, perhaps due to the fact that prescription access is relatively easy. The extent of this problem is difficult to track, since it often occurs within the boundaries of the law. Similarly, the lack of popularity of hashish may be due to very inexpensive and readily available cannabis. Injection as a method of ingestion is still uncommon and, where it does exist, highly regionalised. But even given these minor anomalies, South Africa can be said to have fully globalised in the range of drugs consumed, and there are few popular substances that cannot be bought in the urban centres of the country.
There is a paucity of data on the extent of drug use among the general population in South Africa. As will be discussed below, this makes the interpretation of the present study more difficult, because it is hard to gauge how the subject population (arrestees) differs from the citizenship at large. Presently, no regular series of national surveys aimed at assessing the situation is in place, and much of the survey data that does exist is either limited in its focus or very dated.
Probably the best source of trend information is the South African Community Epidemiology Network on Drug Use (SACENDU), a project coordinated by the Medical Research Council of South Africa. Since 1996, this project has drawn on figures and qualitative data provided by a range of actors, including treatment centres, the South African Police Service, specialist researchers, and hospitals and mortuaries. SACENDU has shown a steady growth in drug use of all kinds, and a sharp rise in indicators relating to cocaine, club drugs, and, in some areas, heroin.
The situation described above has drawn a rather uneven response from law enforcement, with no clear priorities being shown in arrest figures. For example, arrests for possession of cannabis showed a steady decline to less than a quarter of what they had been between 1990 and 1996, but then doubled between 1996 and 2000. Last year, police arrested 40% more people for possession and sales of ecstasy than they did for cocaine. The present study is designed in part to gauge whether such a strategy is likely to bear fruit in terms of crime reduction, and to guide future efforts at creating effective approaches to the drug issue.
This monograph describes the methodology (Chapter 2) and the findings (Chapter 3) of this study. This is followed by a discussion of the findings in light of what is presently known about drug markets (Chapter 4) and an exploration of the policy ramifications of this study (Chapter 5). After a concluding statement (Chapter 6) are attached data tables for each of the three metros (Appendix).
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