[inhaling deeply]
Woah!
Methamphetamine use is rife across South Africa,
and while official numbers are hard to come by,
it’s thought that the country might have
one of the highest per capita rates of crystal meth use on Earth.
Newsreader: Sadly, there’s a huge demand
for the drug in Cape Town.
Jamie: Because of its history of apartheid,
South Africa has developed one of the most chaotic
and misunderstood drug scenes in the world,
with people there taking different drugs
in radically different ways.
This is the wild story of how meth took over South Africa
and how this may have ultimately been caused by
a secret weapons program
run by the old apartheid regime itself.
[dramatic music playing]
Methamphetamine has spread like wildfire across South Africa,
sold under the street name “tik”
and concentrated heavily in poor and marginalized communities
But unlike in the US, Europe, or Japan,
where amphetamines have a decades-long history,
tik in South Africa is a relatively new drug,
only gaining widespread popularity over the past 20 or so years.
The origin story of South African tik
is one of the wildest
in the entire history of the war on drugs.
In fact, to understand the story of meth in South Africa,
you have to start with fish.
This is abalone, an endangered species of shellfish
native to the oceans around South Africa.
It's also considered a delicacy in many East Asian countries,
particularly China, where it's thought to act as an aphrodisiac.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s,
Chinese organized crime groups
began working with South African fishermen
poaching abalone for export to Hong Kong and mainland China.
It soon became easier for these criminal groups
to pay for the abalone in methamphetamine
and its precursor ingredients.
Precursor chemicals for synthetic drugs
are a huge semi-legal gray market economy in China,
and it’s often simpler for crime groups
to create barter economies
and trade chemicals for wildlife
than to ship large amounts of cash across the world.
The world has taken to abalone poaching in South Africa.
The dangerous business goes hand in hand with drug trading.
In the South African context,
we had fishing quotas that were held by families
who’d been fishing for a couple of generations,
and these were lost after the fall of apartheid
because big conglomerates took over the fishing quotas
and then got rid of the traditional fishermen.
These communities became very disenfranchised
and started doing what they knew best how to do,
which was catch fish and abalone and crayfish
and sell it on the illegal market
because they didn’t have quotas anymore.
The first waves of so-called Chinese meth
were created using precursors supplied by the Chinese crime groups
and cooked in makeshift labs by South African gangs.
This was the birth of tik, homegrown South African meth,
which became popular in the Western Cape region
and then spread out over the rest of the country.
In the last few years,
more than 11% of South Africans have addiction problems,
and despite the government’s best efforts,
many succumb to the drug lifestyle.
However, as the market for tik has developed,
it's attracted competition from other international criminal groups.
First, Mexican cartels reportedly set up meth labs in Nigeria
in collaboration with local organized crime networks.
These Nigerian trafficking networks have been bringing vast quantities
of this purer, more industrial-grade meth
into South Africa.
Newsreader: The recent violence was reportedly sparked by
an alleged drug dealer shooting and killing a taxi driver.
This has degenerated into diplomatic tensions
between two of Africa’s biggest economies:
Nigeria and South Africa.
Since around 2019,
an even newer player in the tik business has emerged:
Afghanistan.
Using chemicals derived from the ephedra plant that grows there,
Afghan traffickers have begun producing methamphetamine
on a massive scale,
and this new plant-based meth
has also been flooding into South Africa.
Cartels from Afghanistan
are believed to be targeting South Africa as a new destination.
The syndicates are using Mozambique
to ship hundreds of kilograms of crystal meth to South Africa.
Originally, in South Africa, we had Chinese production.
Then we have also seen Mexican methamphetamine coming in,
typically coming down through Africa
and in through the ports in South Africa.
And then, more recently, we’ve seen methamphetamine
coming down from the Middle East in the heroin shipments as well.
Law enforcement can do very little
about controlling the drugs entering into the country.
Interestingly, it was an entirely different drug,
also created with Chinese precursors,
that paves the way for the tik explosion—
something almost uniquely South African …
the smokable Quaalude.
Hamilton: I’ve always been fascinated by methaqualone,
a drug that was once sold in the United States
under the brand name Quaalude.
I analyzed some samples
and was surprised to find it contained not only methaqualone
but also a formulation sold under the brand name Mandrax.
Quaaludes were a prescription sedative
that became popular on the 1970s American party scene
because they made people feel kind of dreamy
and kind of turned on.
But in the early 1980s, they were banned
and all but disappeared across the world ...
until they suddenly made a dramatic comeback
in the late ’90s in South Africa
under the street name Mandrax.
Methaqualone or Mandrax or white pipe
is one of the drugs that has been in South Africa for a very long time.
Dissolved Quaalude that is smoked in a bottleneck with cannabis,
so you’ve got this drug which is essentially
a very strong sleeping tablet,
and then you’ve got this stimulant that comes in as well.
And the two went hand in hand.
This was the drug that first created
the connection between South African abalone poachers
and the Chinese suppliers of precursor chemicals,
which would later form
the basis of South Africa's methamphetamine boom.
Hamilton: Do you ever trade the abalone
directly for the Mandrax?
[inhaling deeply]
Then it became a tool
because it’s really difficult to move cash across borders.
Much easier to actually move chemicals across borders than cash.
It couldn’t meet the needs
of the Chinese trying to acquire all these poached fishing products,
and so they had to find something else,
and methamphetamine was the perfect response to that.
And this is where the story gets even more wild.
Why did South Africa in the 1990s,
uniquely among any country in the world,
experience a Quaalude revival?
The answer is thought to lie further back in time
with the apartheid regime itself.
Newsreader: Demonstrations against the South African government’s
strict apartheid policy.
Newsreader: Mandela could have left South Africa before he was caught.
Instead, he chose to stay with his people.
During the 1970s and ’80s,
the apartheid government in South Africa
operated an illegal chemical weapons program
called Project Coast.
The head of that program was this guy, Wouter Basson,
who allegedly tried to develop
race-specific sterilization techniques
and poisons to murder anti-apartheid activists.
One of the programs Project Coast worked on
was the idea of using various drugs as crowd control
to deter anti-apartheid uprisings.
Etienne: Methaqualone was one of the substances
that was manufactured with the intention of crowd control.
Now, if you think about it,
you cannot fly over them
and disseminate methaqualone over the crowd.
But possibly, you can start by getting the crowd ...
hooked on methaqualone.
And if they are hooked on methaqualone,
that very same crowd will become a more docile crowd.
As part of this clandestine program,
Basson created tons of MDMA and Quaaludes.
And one way or another,
those drugs found their way into South Africa's cities
and townships.
The previous apartheid regime had this project called Project Coast,
which was headed up by Wouter Basson.
And what the intention was to destabilize communities
using drugs such as methaqualone and MDMA
and try and disrupt the youth
and stop people from organizing themselves
into political opposition.
And so we had this methaqualone coming into the market,
and it set up a drug trade in amongst the gangs
and the local communities as well.
Did you ever suspect during that period
when you were first learning about Mandrax distribution
that the government could have been involved?
Though Mandrax has now largely been replaced by tik
on the South African drug scene,
there are pockets of the country where it’s still popular.
[splashing]
[clanging]
Hamilton: And are you worried about the fumes?
Should we get away from it now while it’s cooking?
You know that this is toxic?
It's not good for you.
There was blood in your—
Blood in your urine?
You know, it’s known to cause bladder cancer.
Bladder cancer.
While secret government drug programs
and trading exotic seafood for meth precursors
may seem like a uniquely South African story,
there are underlying patterns here that are more universal.
Problematic use of tik
is concentrated in poor and marginalized communities,
and attempts to control the trade through law enforcement
only makes the problem worse,
pushing people towards harder drugs,
enriching organized crime, and driving corruption.
As unique as the story of South African meth is,
the key problem here is the war on drugs itself.
[ambient music playing]
We’d like to congratulate drugs
for winning the war on drugs.