South Africa: Crime, cartels and corruption — the drug policy debate we refuse to have

South Africa enters the new year still absorbing the revelations of the Madlanga Commission and the uncomfortable clarity it provided about criminal networks, policing failures and the erosion of public trust. And while our own institutions grapple with questions of accountability, the world has been jolted by the US’ military intervention in Venezuela and the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, under the guise of the War on Drugs.

We are justifiably shocked and scandalised and the public conversation has landed on a familiar and deeply misleading place: “drugs” are the problem, and harsher criminal justice responses are posed as the solution. Provocatively, we are asked to reconsider this popular, simplistic narrative: cartels are not infiltrating the state because drugs exist, they are infiltrating the state because prohibition creates a lucrative, unregulated economy, which criminal networks exploit.

South Africa is home to an estimated half a million people who use illicit drugs (such as methamphetamine and heroin), the majority of whom use occasionally, in a non-problematic pattern and in ways that pose little to no threat to the public. Yet our law continues to treat them as criminals, corralling people who use drugs and low-level drug sellers into the same punitive framework designed for large-scale traffickers and cartel operatives.

The Madlanga Commission’s hearings have exposed what research has shown repeatedly, that criminalisation of drug use creates enormous illicit markets, and illicit markets in turn create incentives for corruption. When a product is illegal but widely used, its regulation shifts from the state to whoever is willing to use violence and bribery to control the trade.

Decriminalising personal possession of drugs will not end drug use. But it has the potential to help end the criminalisation of poverty, free up our courts and alleviate our overcrowded prisons. It also has the potential to redirect resources towards prevention, treatment and harm reduction and, importantly, it has the potential to starve criminal networks of the low-level arrests they rely on to distract the public from high-level corruption.