Johannesburg – Fathima Odendaal is so frustrated by police indifference, she is prepared to take the law into her own hands and kill the drug dealers who are supplying her family with narcotics.
“I’m ready to attack these drug dealers with hand grenades and petrol bomb their homes,” she told the Saturday Star, from her drug-riddled street in Lenasia this week.
“I’ve gone the legal route and I’ve seen there’s no justice. We are either too poor or too ugly to get any sort of justice.”
It’s threats like these that has Joburg’s mayor Herman Mashaba worried the city’s residents will increasingly turn to vigilantism to deal with a growing drug problem.
Last week, fed-up residents of the south Joburg suburb of Rosettenville tried to set fire to an alleged drug den. “It scares me people are that desperate they would take the law into their own hands and risk being criminals themselves,” Mashaba said on Friday.
His administration will be targeting all “illegal activities related to drugs”.
But experts warn a fresh approach is needed to tackle the drug problem as traditional heavy-handed police tactics are not working.
Narcotics prices continue to fall and conviction rates remain minuscule.
The 38-year-old Odendaal lives on Gladioli Avenue, where as many as 15 dealers ply their trade. Her whole family is hooked on drugs. “Nobody cares our children are being killed and our husbands spend all their time on the corners taking drugs.”
But Shaun Shelly, an addiction specialist and researcher in the department of psychiatry and mental health at the University of Cape Town, believes South Africans are increasingly angry and frustrated, and see drugs as a scapegoat.
“The first step to rooting out drugs is to stop trying to root out drugs. It’s impossible to ever reach the target of, as laid out by the UN and our own National Drug Master Plan (2013-2017), a drug free world. We don’t even have a consistent definition of what a drug is.
“Firstly, we cannot arrest our way out of drug use. It further marginalises people who use drugs. It provides the fertile recruiting ground for gangs, and virtually guarantees the person arrested for non-violent drug crime is exposed to violent crime and criminals.”
Simon Howell, a drug researcher at the University of Cape Town, said over the past decade, police were increasingly making more drug arrests. But still, conviction rates are small. “You have a 2.7% conviction rate for cannabis.”
This statistic can be further broken down, said Howell, and this illustrated the burden the poor bear when it comes to drug arrests. “The chances of a white middle-class woman being arrested and convicted for cannabis use falls to 0.0038%.”
While arrests have risen, Howell has found the price of drugs has fallen over the past decade, an indication the state’s drug policies are failing.
The latest update in November from the South African Community Epidemiology Network on Drug Use, for the first half of last year, reveals cannabis is the most common substance of abuse in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Northern Region.
The network is funded by the Department of Health and the SA Medical Research Council (SAMRC) and uses information gleaned from drug treatment centres, which its researchers say is the “tip of the iceberg”.
The update warns the increase in fentanyl abuse, heroin/nyaope use including in the under-twenties, injection use of heroin in Gauteng and elsewhere, and the sharing of needles containing blood to get a high, are key to monitor.
Nadine Harker Burnhams, a senior scientist in the alcohol, tobacco and other drug research unit at the SAMRC, says the best drug prevalence data is from a survey conducted in 2001/02. It found the lifetime prevalence of substance use disorders among adults was 13.3%.
Professor Charles Parry, the director of the unit, said South Africa does not have data on the economic costs of drug abuse. “But some studies done in other countries have come up with a figure of around 0.5% of a country’s GDP.
“Instead of charging someone with two packets of dagga in their pocket, you need to go after the dealers and cartels,” said Cheryl Pillay, of the local drug action committee in Eldorado Park.
While academics question South Africa’s drug police, the SAPS are committed to achieving the objectives of the National Drug Master Plan.
“We can only confidently say we’re winning the war on drugs if we know for sure that none of our men, women and children are addicts and that they do not have access to drugs,” said police spokesperson Brigadier Vish Naidoo.