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.