Durban - All three of the Upper Highway teenagers who ended up hospitalised because of drug overdoses last week were from broken homes, according to one of their fathers.
They consumed dangerous, carelessly-made ecstasy-based pills containing dubious additives, called “Mitsubishi” tablets, similar to the “Mercedes” type that killed three of their peers in KwaMashu in March.
“Generally, families that are (a unit) are always more together when it comes to problems than one that is broken up for whatever reason: divorce, death or work separation,” the father told The Independent on Saturday in an exclusive interview.
He may not be identified as doing so would identify his 17-year-old son.
“Parents need to know that divorce is not simple. It actually affects older kids worse.”
He said he and his son were close, his boy played sport and he had no idea anything like this would happen.
“I didn’t know he was suffering so badly.”
What further shocked and angered him was that the substances in circulation that children had access to were no longer just drugs. “They are poisons.”
He vowed to act against the dealers, as well as help get to the root of problems that may have caused his son to take the tablets. He acknowledged that it was not the first time the boy had tried drugs.
“I know I can’t stop the dealing, but I can stop the poisoning,” he said.
He said drugs were a scourge in the Highway area.
“The government can’t stop it. We, as individuals, have no chance, but we can try to alleviate the problem by making sure reduced volumes come into our areas.”
He said he was out to “get” the dealers of these “poisons” and had been working closely with the Hawks and private investigator Brad Nathanson.
From this experience, he had come to realise that nightclubs, as well as all-night trading places, were where drug dealers hung around.
He added that since the incident he would check up on the condition his son was in when he returned home and that he would be forbidden to sleep out.
Recalling the horrific evening when he found his son was in trouble, he said: “Within 10 minutes of taking it, he started having problems. In 20 minutes he was unconscious.”
However, the boy had managed to summon a passer-by on the streets of Pinetown, which led to both him and his ex-wife being alerted.
“An elderly guy from a local neighbourhood watch, taking his dog for a walk, and a young woman with medical training came to their rescue.”
On arriving at the scene, the father put his son in his car and took him to hospital.
“He was unconscious for at least three hours.”
He praised the boy’s school for having a visionary approach to the problem, but did not wish to elaborate.
The father said he was himself “very anti-drug” and showed scars on his shoulder from an altercation with a local cocaine dealer.
He also said he neither smoked nor drank alcohol and that his son had been aware of his attitude to drugs.
“But I was also naïve. All that was around during my youth was dagga and mandrax. Stuff like cocaine and heroin hadn’t come into the country very much.”
He said he found it scary that it was now easier for youngsters to buy cocaine than to enter a bottle store to buy a six-pack of beers.
Meanwhile, the South African National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (Sanca) has said it’s not only in illicit laboratories that dangerous drug concoctions are made.
Dangerous mixes are also emanating from medicine chests, using legally sourced medication, according to the organisation’s Durban office.
In KwaZulu-Natal, it was mainly men who were treated for such over the counter addiction.
The acting director of Sanca Durban, Walter Petersen, said on Friday at the start of Sanca Week that the human body was not designed to deal with such combinations.
A Sanca statement added that parents were often unaware that their teenagers were raiding their medicine cabinets and having “fishbowl” parties.
“This is where everyone throws medication in a bowl and they share it.
“Normally alcohol, cigarettes and/or other illegal drugs are involved,” said Petersen.
Independent on Saturday