Poor rural communities of South Africa have long been cultivating cannabis in illegal conditions of risk. Now they face the loss of corporate interests and the wealthy.
Why did the stakes get so high and so unequal?
A recent historical study of mine helps answer this question. It reveals how an apartheid-era drug law incited a “war on drugs” that was in effect a “war on cannabis.”
In 1971, a law was passed which subjected the cannabis plant and its products to the strictest possible controls. This set in motion a structurally racist policy which continued well into the post-apartheid era.
The Apartheid Drug Act of 1971
In 1971, the apartheid South African government passed the Addictive Substance Abuse and Rehabilitation Centers Act. Lawmakers boasted that it was the toughest drug law in the Western world.
The law’s primary target was young white “hippies”.
The law followed the recommendations of a state-sponsored inquiry, the Grobler Commission. The commission focused only on the abuse of synthetic and pharmaceutical drugs by white South Africans such as LSD, Mandrax (methaqualone) and heroin.
While the commission actually found no evidence of a widespread drug abuse problem, it still recommended a harsh crackdown.
To the ruling National Party, white drug use appeared to threaten Afrikaner religious culture and the future of a white South Africa. They advertised the drug problem as a more dangerous form of terrorism than the armed terrorism we know on the borders of our country.
This crisis language has allowed apartheid lawmakers to borrow from the country’s draconian anti-terrorism laws, such as the 1967 Terrorism Act, used to crack down on anti-apartheid activism.
Like anti-terrorism legislation, the 1971 Anti-Drugs Act provided for harsh minimum prison sentences and detention without trial for questioning purposes. It also removed the court’s discretion in sentencing drug offences.
When discussed in parliament, the principle of “toughness” appealed to all lines of the party, with the exception of the lone voice of Progressive Party MP Helen Suzman. Suzman noted that although the Grobler Commission barred research into substance use by a majority of black South Africans, the law would still apply to them.
Similarly, he said, the commission had failed to investigate cannabis, a substance considered by many to be less socially harmful than legal alcohol or tobacco. Yet it was to be included in the new law as a “prohibited dangerous drug,” along with heroin and cocaine.
Solitary voice of reason
For centuries in Africa, including parts of South Africa, the cannabis plant has held important indigenous cultural value and has been cultivated for a variety of social and pharmacological uses.
Cannabis was first criminalized in the country in 1922. But the drug police remained relatively weak for three decades. In the gap, and with the growth of urban markets, commercial cannabis livelihoods have emerged to combat growing rural poverty.
Under such conditions – as Suzman pointed out – punitive drug control, created to combat the consumption of white pills, would clearly fall on black South Africans for cannabis offences.
Suzman fought hard. He pointed out that there was an ongoing “Marijuana Commission” in the United States, which documented how the alleged dangers of cannabis were greatly exaggerated. You have advocated for a less criminal status for cannabis in South Africa.
His views were defeated, and apartheid’s extraordinary drug legislation was easily passed. Cannabis has been ranked among those substances marked for the most severe suppression.
The impacts of the law
This decision proved to be a watershed. The effects of the 1971 Anti-Drug Act were immediately evident, falling dramatically on black South Africans. Cannabis accounted for well over 95% of drug-related arrests and convictions across all “race” groups.
In a 1972 assessment by the Provincial Supreme Court of Natal – in the case of State v Shangase and others – the judges showed that prison sentences ranging from two to ten years were imposed even for the minimum possession of a single “zol” (joint) of cannabis .
The “rehab centers” portion of the 1971 law applied only to white offenders because, as Suzman had pointed out, the segregated state did not have drug treatment programs for blacks. But, even for convicted white users, sentences involving treatment were enforced in less than 1 percent of cases.
Paradoxically, but not surprisingly, illegal cannabis cultivation has increased within apartheid’s segregated spaces, and could end Cape Town’s drug wars
An illegal crop in great demand was profitable to grow, and even more profitable to trade. Helicopters spraying herbicides and multiple checkpoints have upped the ante on drug policy for all sides.
The racism built into the laws meant that, while the harsh drug crackdown continued after the end of apartheid, so did its racist effects.
You have to deal with history
The 1971 Anti-Drugs Act was replaced in 1992 with a Drug Trafficking Act. The new law maintained harsh sentences and cannabis remained illegal. The African National Congress, which came to power in 1994, reproduced the heavy-handed tactics it inherited from the apartheid National Party: militarized repression, spraying and jailing.
In 2017 and 2018, government cannabis policy was successfully challenged in the courts, on grounds of cultural and religious freedom. This has also opened a window for the liberalization of cannabis as a commercial enterprise for some products. Yet the actual policy remains unclear and contested.
The 1971 apartheid law and the parallel growth of an illegal economy shaped the unequal cannabis landscape in South Africa. Now, in an opening-up cannabis economy, rural growers remain in a vulnerable position to more powerful interests.
The decolonization of drug knowledge and policies in South Africa requires a deeper reckoning with history, including from apartheid to the present.
(Thembisa Waetjen – Associate Professor of History, University of Johannesburg -, su The Conversation del 05/02/2023)
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