Durban - Whoonga addicts have, by default, found themselves a place in the economy.
A Pietermaritzburg e-hailing driver told the Independent on Saturday that he and his colleagues preferred to employ “amaparas” as car washers “to give them some money for their drugs rather than have them smash our windows (to steal)”.
This gelled with comments made recently by former UKZN alumnus Professor Mark Hunter, now at the University of Toronto in Canada, that users of heroin-based whoonga were often people who lived at home with their families and worked in casual cash-earning jobs.
“Whoonga users can get up early and work very diligently,” he said, adding that their motive was to afford morning hits to avoid painful withdrawals.
He was addressing a recent webinar titled: “Connections Between Unemployment and Drugs from the 19th Century to the Era of Whoonga”.
“Most money (for whoonga) comes from cash work. Some is from stealing but not most because there are consequences if they are caught,” said Hunter.
“The media portrayal of young addicts living off crime are flawed because crime is an unreliable means of securing regular amounts of money compared with piece work.”
South African National Council on Alcohol and Drug Dependence (Sanca) KZN director Fathima Hussain thinks differently and believes most whoonga addicts live on the streets.
“Hence we have Whoonga Park,” she said, referring to the notorious open space close to Durban’s city centre.
“They are unable to cope in a formal work environment because most of them are chronic users.”
Hunter said whoonga had taken the place of mandrax, using the network the latter had already established in the market.
“If mandrax opened the door to young people who saw little positive future in their lives, whoonga pushed tens of thousands of people through it.”
He added that almost all young males between the ages of 20 and 29 interviewed in uMlazi who used whoonga had started the habit at school, where they performed poorly.
Hunter said his studies showed that Xanax pills were currently a popular drug in schools, taken equally by boys and girls to curb anxiety and available for R5 to R6 a tablet.
He said they know that formal education would help them in the job market, but if they worked hard and went into debt for studies, there was no guarantee of work.
“They use drugs to get through and Xanax does not cause them to drop out the way heroin does. It’s a way of staying in school even if they are not engaging.”
Sanca’s Hussain said that while Xanax was considered to be an anxiety medication, young people consumed it for the “good feeling”.
“Xanax is also consumed by youth in primary schools and drug dealers are targeting young people. During adolescence, young people will experiment with anything because of peer pressure and for a sense of belonging. Dagga is still a major problem among the youth at school followed by Xanax, flu and pain medication.”
Hunter lamented that there were not enough drug rehabilitation centres where drug abuse was most common in Durban - the townships.
He said that in uMlazi there was not a single rehabilitation centre for a population of about half a million people.
“There has to be a starting point of some sort of state structure to address the problem,” he said.
He added that there had been a change in drug use since the days when the economy was desperate for wage labour. Now, it was one with high youth unemployment.
Hussain said there was only one government facility in the KZN Coastal Region.
“Sanca renders community-based services in uMlazi twice a week, making our services more accessible to the most vulnerable members of society,” said Hussain.
She said that a substance abuse rehabilitation centre required a structured programme with a multidisciplinary team of medical experts and was extremely expensive to operate.
“Furthermore, the addict is often not motivated to go into a rehab centre and most of them still enjoy using the drug to be on the high. Admission to a rehabilitation centre is offered on voluntary capacity where an addict must be committed to want to make a difference in their lives.”
Hunter said suburbs, where expensive drugs such as cocaine were more commonly consumed, were better equipped with rehab facilities.
“During apartheid, (the government was) obsessively concerned to keep drug abuse down in white areas because it made youth into hippies, not suitable for conscription.
“The sad irony is that drugs played such a huge part in creating the wealth of the country,” he said, referring to the history of beer halls, the “dop” wages and use of alcohol and cannabis, especially, for people to cope with hard and dangerous work.
“But the state has largely abandoned the generation of young men and women who take substances.
“If you dissect South African capitalism, you’ll find drugs everywhere, but you’ll also see very little in the way of efforts to address the consequences of drug use for the poorest of South Africans.
“Worse still, the so-called ‘amapara’ can be denigrated, beaten up and even killed despite the fact that the police’s inability to deal with crime is, in no small part, through drug money.”
The Independent on Saturday