LESSON IN FAILED SUPPLY-SIDE ATTACK ON GANGSTERS' DRUG OF CHOICE

IT's official. SA is doing very, very well in the war against drugs. Word
has come down from the loftiest authority on the subject: 11 grey men and
one grey woman in Vienna, collectively known as the International Narcotics
Control Board.

In the latest of its voluminous annual reports, the board cannot praise SA
too much. It is particularly pleased with our work in the fight against
mandrax (methaqualone), the potent sedative young working-class men in
Western Cape have been smoking in vast quantities since the late 1970s.

"South African law enforcement authorities," the board writes, "made a
seizure of four tons of pure mathaqualone powder, which originated in
China, together with 100-million methaqualone tablets, in June 2003. That
seizure of methaqualone is the largest ever made of the substance." And if
that is not enough good news, "large consignments of the required precursor
chemicals, especially anthranilic acid, apparently destined for SA, have
repeatedly been stopped or intercepted outside the country, in countries
such as Mozambique and Swaziland."

What is one to make of this breathtaking news? Have the young and the
deviant in Western Cape discovered to their horror that there is no more
mandrax, and turned instead to Smarties and liquorice?

The surest way of evaluating whether drug seizures work is to monitor
retail prices. If drug busts are big and pervasive enough, supply will
thin, manufacturers will cost increased risk into their prices, and the
street value of mandrax will rise.

By this measurement, the spectacular mandrax busts of the past year have
been a waste of time the price of mandrax on Western Cape streets is going
down.

For the past three years, a large drug treatment centre in Cape Town has
surveyed several hundred of its patients drawn from all over Cape Town on
the prices they pay for mandrax. The findings, recorded by the Medical
Research Council, make for interesting reading.

In 2001, mandrax consumers who visited the centre paid between R21 and R40
for a mandrax tablet; the majority paid just under R30. The same survey
conducted last year found that consumers were paying between R20 and R40
per tablet; the majority R30.

Factor in inflation, and consumers are paying less for mandrax now than
they were two years ago.

There are no figures yet for early this year, but phone calls to several
community activists across the Cape Flats last week elicited consistent
reports that there had been no discernible rise in mandrax prices.

If an attack on the supply of mandrax is ineffective, you can be sure that
seizures of heroin, crack cocaine and club drugs are failing too. Unlike
other drugs consumed in SA, the only mass market for mandrax on the planet
is Western Cape.

In theory, mandrax supply should thus be thin and concentrated, producers
risk-averse, and street prices sensitive to large busts. In other words, if
there is one drug that might feasibly be vulnerable to supply-side attack,
it is mandrax.

That it isn't that a drug with one modest market on the tip of Africa is
produced in sufficient quantities to be impervious to seizures of several
tons means supply-side attacks against globally consumed drugs are little
more than a joke.

The news about mandrax, however, is good news. Bad news would be that
supply-side assaults on mandrax were succeeding, pushing street prices
sky-high. If this were the case, three things might happen, and only the
least likely is benign.

First and least feasible mandrax users would simply give up illicit drugs.
Second and more likely people would rob and steal more to fund their habit.
This is not just a scary bedtime story it is well documented. While there
is no thorough study for SA of the links between drug addiction and crime,
figures from the US don't make for happy reading.

According to a 1989 nationwide survey of convicted inmates in US prisons,
39% of cocaine and crack users claimed to have committed their current
offences to get money to buy drugs. Another study, conducted in New York in
the 1970s, found that among heroin addicts who committed crimes, 90c of
each criminally earned dollar was spent on heroin.

A third possibility is that users would abandon mandrax and start smoking
crack cocaine, something SA can ill afford.

So, as long as the good people of the board keep congratulating our law
enforcers for making no difference to the world, we are doing okay.