The wisdom of Motlanthe shows in his cool approach to drug legalisation
South Africa’s former president argues that prohibition is a route to more severe problems.
Looking back over the post-Nelson Mandela era, there’s not much to be said for our presidents. Thabo Mbeki’s great sin was HIV denialism. An estimated 330,000 people died unnecessarily. Mbeki’s essential overriding problem was that he missed his true calling: he would have made a brilliant academic.
Jacob Zuma’s presidency rapidly devolved into a kleptomaniac asset-stripping disaster that turned the ANC into a centre-left nationalist cartel. Former acting president Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri lasted 14 hours.
As for Cyril Ramaphosa, his is an era of spineless dithering. Given his penchant for trying to insert himself pointlessly into the grand geopolitical events of the day, one could surmise that he’s grown tired of failing to manage domestic affairs.
Yet in among the crushing of hope one president stands out: Kgalema Motlanthe. From late September 2008 to early May 2009 he brought back a measure of sanity. Motlanthe chucked out Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and brought in Barbara Hogan, thankfully abolishing HIV denialism. Uniquely, he criticised Zanu-PF instead of fawning over a murderous dictator. He also tried to mediate between Morgan Tsvangirai and Robert Mugabe. And he mostly stood up for press freedom; essentially he was an actual democrat.
Of course, he fired then National Prosecuting Authority head Vusi Pikoli, unconstitutionally disbanded the Scorpions and was generally too loyal to the ANC for the country’s good. So, a mixed bag, but still the best of the post-Mandela lot.
What Motlanthe represents is the ANC’s once alive progressive and intellectual wing. People such as Sisa Njikelana, Ben Turok, Makhosi Khoza and Ahmed Kathrada. None of them was perfect; who among us is? Yet, Njikelana for president? That’s worth voting for. Alas, only a dream. The nightmare continues.
Motlanthe’s most progressive time is the present. For the past three years he’s been putting forth a revolutionary position, and one in which he is entirely correct. If you haven’t listened to him before, you should pay attention to him now.
In his capacity as a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, Motlanthe gave a speech at a drugs conference in Australia seven months ago. He said that “given the lack of evidence and scientific analysis upholding both prohibition and well-intentioned reforms, a repeal of drug laws is necessary ... end the criminalisation and incarceration of people who use drugs.”
Not just dagga. All recreational drugs. Coke, heroin, ecstasy, tik, acid, mushrooms, buttons, the entire pharmacopoeia either decriminalised or made legal. The war on drugs must stop.
Motlanthe hasn’t lost his mind. The current paradigm of prohibition started when the US Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, which regulated the sale of cocaine and opium. Before the act these products and their derivatives were widely available as over-the-counter medications — you could get the stuff via mail order. Pre-packaged syringes filled with heroin, for example.
The act was passed in a swirl of racial and religious hysteria. In the run-up to the vote The New York Times ran an article in support titled “Negro Cocaine Fiends Are New Southern Menace: Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower-Class Blacks”. The general discourse was that cocaine, opium and marijuana caused savage Chinese, blacks and Mexicans to rape white women.
When added to the contemporaneous and fundamentalist Christian temperance movement to ban alcohol — the law on that was passed in 1919 — the resulting frenzy doomed any rational and humane approach to drug addiction.
American prohibition fanaticism went global with the 1925 Opium Convention, which sought to control the production, manufacture and export of cocaine, morphine, opium, heroin and cannabis. SA was particularly interested in stamping down on the cannabis trade, much to colonial India’s ire. Then came the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs 1961, which basically outlawed everything except for tobacco and alcohol.
But have folks stopped getting high? Cocaine and meth production have skyrocketed. Are drugs hard to find? Not at all, eggs are harder. Have they become more expensive? Getting cheaper by the day. Are governments in control of the situation? A collection of gangs, mafias, paramilitaries, rebel groups and actors within states — all of them “humanitarians” committed to the quality and safety of product (not) — successfully run the $426bn-$652bn global trade.
The plain truth is that people want to use drugs and have been doing so for ages: the first archaeological evidence of opium use comes from 5,000 BCE. Even modern-day prohibitionists will offer you tea or coffee, both stimulants.
SA recently ran two nationwide experiments in drug prohibition. The first was to decriminalise cannabis. The sky didn’t fall down. We are OK. In contrast, lockdown bans on alcohol and tobacco turned millions into criminals and housewives into dealers. Bootleggers proliferated, dodgy cigarette factories made fortunes. Some of the booze and smokes available were particularly unhealthy.
We all know people who have a drug problem. We understand a family’s suffering when a son or daughter fatally overdoses. Nyaope addicts shuffle down streets like the walking dead. But under prohibition we can’t help those lost to drugs for, as Motlanthe points out, “prohibition and criminalisation have put people at even more risk, further stigmatising and marginalising people who use drugs”.
The alternative is harm reduction, which means taking people out of the shadows and into rehab. It means treating mental illness, often a cause of excessive drug use. It means dealing with the social problems of exclusion and poverty, again triggers for excessive drug use. And it means ending the most lucrative source of income for organised crime. Once legal, drug money becomes tax revenue.
Portugal decriminalised all drugs in 2001 and invested in harm reduction. The number of hard drug users subsequently plummeted, especially among young people, and the country has one of the lowest drug-related death rates among European nations. Argentina, Costa Rica and Ecuador have all decriminalised drugs for personal use. Possession of drugs in Uruguay has never been illegal.
So there is a solution to our drug problem on the horizon, we just have to be brave enough to surrender the war and win the peace. This is Motlanthe’s point when he says “the future is not a place we are going to but a place we create through our own actions”. Pity he didn’t have this road to Damascus conversion when he was president.
• Dr Taylor, a freelance journalist and photographer, is also a research fellow in environmental ethics at Stellenbosch University.