Why we’re gatvol

Original article appeared in the Cape Times on June 22.

About 90 percent of all tik users in the Western Cape are coloured people, with Mitchells Plain identified as the epicentre of the drug scourge, latest research has shown.

Mitchells Plain councillor Martin Fienies says the raging tik problem in the area is what sparked vigilante violence this week.

Lentegeur residents, fed up with the spiralling drug problem and incensed at the murder of an anti-drug and crime fighter Abduraghman Sydow on Sunday, took to the streets on Monday and Tuesday and torched alleged drug dens and vandalised cars.

‘They have to strap their kids to their beds’
A recent SA Community Epidemiology Network on Drug Abuse (Sacendu) report – a project carried out by the Medical Research Council’s (MRC) Drug and Alcohol Abuse Research Unit – shows that 90 percent of methamphetamine or tik users are coloured, 72 percent of them are men and most users are between the ages of 15 and 24.

The report, which comprised research gathered from 21 drug rehabilitation centres in the Western Cape between July and December last year, also found that people from African communities represented only 1 percent of tik users.

Another report, released by the Cape Town Drug Counselling Centre (CTDCC) last year, showed that most of their 748 new clients for 2005 had been from Mitchells Plain.

The number of drug abusers from Athlone, Bonteheuwel and Retreat followed close behind.

The CTDCC report found that 81 percent of their clients were coloured.

The figures are the tip of the iceberg as the statistics reflect only the numbers of users who access treatment at rehabilitation centres.

In 2002, not one user reported that tik was the primary drug of abuse, but the Sacendu report shows that tik quickly became the most common primary substance of abuse in just three years.

In 2003, tik had been the drug of choice for 2 percent of drug users; by the end of 2006 that figure had risen to a whopping 42 percent.

Fienies said the Mitchells Plain community had reached boiling point because they felt the police were not doing enough to curb its drug scourge.

“In this community, it is the people’s own children who steal them dry … they take everything in their house, then the neighbour’s house and then they take their crime to the streets,” Fienies said.

“Some people said that they have to strap their kids to their beds to prevent them buying drugs or selling their bodies for tik,” he added.

Fienies said the community had recently run a low-key programme aimed at monitoring alleged drug dealers and preventing addicts from entering drug dens in the area.

The Sacendu report further says the consumption of dagga and Mandrax in Cape Town has steadily declined from constituting 24 percent of drug users in 2003 to a mere 3 percent last year.

The director of the CTDCC, Grant Jardine, believes tik is replacing Mandrax because it is consumed in the same way.

He said Cape Town had always been the number one Mandrax city in the world but that tik had become a hot trend locally because it was cheap, accessible and consumed in the same way as Mandrax.

Charles Parry, director of the Drug and Alcohol Abuse Research Unit at the MRC, said the prevalence of tik in historically coloured communities, like Mitchell’s Plain, was directly linked to gangsterism being rooted in those areas.

“While (tik) is being sold in other communities, the market is sufficiently big in Mitchell’s Plain and other areas like Ocean View to not need to sell it so aggressively elsewhere,” Parry said.

“In areas where there is less gang activity it would probably be difficult to saturate the community with so much drug dealing,” he added.

Parry did not condone the action taken by the community but said the community also had a role to play in intensifying anti-crime efforts in the area and identifying possible drug dealers.

“The state (city and province) has been preparing for upping the response to deal with drug abuse for several months, but the situation in Mitchells Plain may increase the urgency of implementing such strategies and galvanising more resources to do so,” he said.