Surprising news reaches us here at the Mahogany Ridge somewhere between the fourth or fifth round of wife-beaters with mescal chasers: a third of middle class South Africans use drugs for recreational purposes. This is according to a report released by the Anti-Drug Alliance. 

Their findings provoke the usual snorts of disbelief and derision from the regulars. "Only a third?" "Who can blame them? It's apparently far safer than using a bicycle or a paraglider for recreational purposes."

But enough with the cynicism already. The ADA describes itself as a group of professionals in the drug treatment, intervention and education business who "have come together to form an alliance in the war against drugs". What gets our attention, though, is that they've conceded defeat in that hopeless war, and its chief executive officer, Quinton van Kerken, has called for drugs to be legalised. 

In order to get, in the words of The Cape Times, "a clear picture of drug abuse in the country", the alliance had conducted a survey in which 57 809 respondents participated -- 34 percent admitted to using drugs, with dagga being the most popular. "It showed us a nation under siege," Van Kerken said of the results. "The reality is that everyone seemed to be saying the war against drugs was lost, that South Africa had been hit by a drug tsunami, and that fighting the problem was ineffective."

The alliance's report has been welcomed by the decriminalisation lobby, particularly activists Jules Stobbs and Myrtle Clarke, Gauteng's so-called "Dagga Couple", who want to take the issue to the Constitutional Court later this year.

Stobbs and Clarke will claim that, in addition to violating their human rights, the prohibition of dagga costs the South African taxpayer millions of rands each year -- money which could be used more effectively elsewhere. Re-legalisation, as they call it, would also spark a growth in the industrial cannabis sector, and they argue that the country's climate is ideally suited to growing hemp, a crop which for centuries has been used for food, textiles, paper, fabric, medicine and fuel oil. 

They will also claim that the laws prohibiting dagga have their origins in the racist laws of South Africa's colonial past -- and it is this aspect of their case that is most interesting.

The British conducted the first and, to date, the most thorough inquiry ever into the drug. The findings of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, published in seven volumes in 1894, were remarkably unbiased and concluded that moderate use produced virtually no "evil results" in the subcontinent. The commission even warned against prohibition; taxation, it was argued, was the best method to restrict use.

It was a different matter however when those Indians, now indentured labourers on the Natal sugar plantations, tried to light up here. Although dagga was already in widespread use by Africans -- and tolerated by Europeans as long as it stayed "in the bush", as one cannabis history put it -- it was felt that the drug would have an adverse affect on sugar production, making cane workers lazy and ill. 

Oddly enough, in the goldfields on the Rand, the opposite was found to be the case, and miners were allowed to use dagga in smoke breaks in their shifts -- a practice which continued until the first law prohibiting the sale of dagga in South Africa was passed in 1908. 

International prohibition came in 1928, and it was the Americans -- particularly the paranoid Harry J Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics -- who set the tone of establishment anti-marijuana hysteria that followed for the rest of the century. 

Our own version of Anslinger, the monstrous interior minister, Connie Mulder, introduced draconian anti-drug laws in 1971 which were specifically meant to counter the possibility of inter-racial socialising among stoned young South Africans. As Mulder put it: "When . . . our very existence is endangered by an evil which is often as elusive as the wind . . . we are justified in taking measures which are commensurate with those available to us when the security of the State is at stake. If we fail to do so when it is necessary we might very before long fighting for our existence."

The Drug Act of 1971 carried a minimum of six months imprisonment for possession for a first offence, and according to the late Helen Suzman, an estimated 80 000 people alone were jailed for dagga offences in the first five years following the implementation of Mulder's laws -- most of them black. A further 10 000 were jailed for dealing. And still the country smoked.

Clearly prohibition has not and will never work. We should just follow the growing international trend and be done with such silliness. 

This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.

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