The Labour-Drug Question in Precarious Times: The rise of Heroin and Xanax

The Labour–Drug Question in Precarious Times:
                         The rise of Heroin and Xanax

                 Mark Hunter, University of Toronto, mark.hunter@utoronto.ca

                       --DRAFT PAPER, COMMENTS WELCOME --

Photo: author

This photograph of men carrying beer to restock a shebeen was taken in a south Durban
settlement early one morning when dozens of young men in their late teens and 20s hit the streets
to hustle for money to buy the heroin-based drug called whoonga/wunga. For much of the
twentieth century, nearby factories had a strong hunger for labour, but today these young men
live in the shadow of more than 50 percent youth unemployment: a figure that captures the
dearth of permanent jobs but somewhat obscures the many informal ways young people attain
money and goods.1 Heroin users, most of whom dropped out of school, replenish shebeens,
collect water for households, clean yards, and fix roofs, among other piecework jobs. Their
diligent work in communities challenges the stereotype that addicts live off crime and congregate
in drug dens such as central Durban’s so-called ‘Whoonga Park.’
         This paper considers what we might provocatively call the labour–drug question: in what
ways are psychoactive/mind-altering substances embroiled with the making and workings of
capitalism? Sugar, tea, and coffee were ‘drug foods’ powering European industrialization, as
Sidney Mintz famously noted; in colonial settings, European settlers saw the benefits of
exchanging or selling drugs—in the words of Jankowiak and Bradburd to create relations of
dependency and to increase the amount or the intensity of labour (drugs as labour recruiters and
labour enhancers).2 South Africa’s racial capitalism has been notoriously drug fueled, with
mining companies providing beer to workers, farmers paying workers in ‘dops’ of wine, and
municipalities brewing and selling sorghum beer. Yet attempts to think through connections

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between drugs and work have somewhat stalled in recent years both in South Africa and wider
afield. The International Labour Organization’s recent 600-page General Labour History of
Africa barely mentions drugs, and some of the classic South African texts are typically cited to
explain the horrors of racial rule and not to understand the present-day use of drugs.3
        To address the labour–drug question in precarious times, I extend the focus from drugs at
work to the (much less studied) connections between schools, drugs, and work. Like many
nations grappling with youth unemployment—although amplified because of its apartheid past—
South Africa places a strong emphasis on encouraging more learners to study for longer periods.
While the education system remains extraordinarily unequal, more than 400,000 students each
year do now pass the secondary school matriculation exam. Herein lies a paradox, one manifest
in the pressures learners face in many parts of the world: students know that when they have less
formal education than others they will be penalized in the labour market, but working hard at
school, sometimes accruing large monetary and social debts, does not guarantee that a person
will attain desirable work. This interface between schooling and work must, I believe, be an
entry point into young people’s drug use that too often is obscured by sensationalist media
headlines such as on the ‘deadly Xanax craze’ or ‘codeine craze.’4
        If the political economy of drug use informs one arc of this paper, I also hope to show
how schools have become key sites of drug education/governance and hint at how this in itself
changes experiences and understandings of drugs. In South Africa and elsewhere, drugs are not
only intertwined with spaces of work but drug users have been at various times institutionalized
in asylums, work colonies, rehabilitation centres, and of course prisons.5 Yet formalized
drug/addiction interventions have a patchy history in South Africa, and not only because of
racialized laws. Even in the West, where Michel Foucault famously showed how psychiatry and
sexology gave birth to new experts and identities—and where ‘addiction is a disease’ is a
commonly stated phrase—alcoholism/addiction partly escaped being medicalized in health
establishments, raising questions about other sites where drug use is governed.6
        The use of psychoactive substances can have devastating consequences for individuals
and their families, but scholars have shown the importance of the ‘set’ and ‘setting’ to drug
experiences, and have explored varied understandings of drug dependence, or different
‘addiction trajectories.’7 One common method for investigating the nuances of drug use is to
focus on a single drug, and I have written preliminary analyses on both heroin and Xanax; these
also provide an overview of my method that centered on interviews with schoolgoers and heroin
users in and around Umlazi Township.8 However, I am hoping that there are advantages in
bringing together these two drugs that both shot to prominence in Durban in the 2010s, and
placing this story in the longer history of drug–work connections. In Durban, a pill of Xanax, the
brand name by which the anti-anxiety medication alprazolam is commonly known, could be
bought illicitly in 2019 for only 5–7 rand. Xanax is associated with male and female learners’
coping with problems and signals a certain ambivalence to education when there are few
alternative paths to desirable work. In turn, heroin-based substances (called whoonga or sugars in
KwaZulu-Natal, more commonly nyaope in Gauteng province), which cost around R25 a
‘capsule,’ tend to be used by men in their late teens or 20s who quite recently dropped out of
school or who quickly drop out after starting to use the drug. Heroin’s painful withdrawal
symptoms help to recruit school leavers into low-paid piecework, such as carrying beer as
depicted in the photograph.
        I draw on the isiZulu term izidakamizwa for ‘drugs,’ which combines ukudaka (to
intoxicate) and imizwa (feelings). I do so to take seriously a very consistent theme, albeit from a

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limited sample of young people, and this is that collectively drugs, while having different
psychoactive effects—including enabling fun and reducing stress—are substances used to
distract a person from unwanted problems. These drugs might include alcohol, cannabis, cocaine,
ecstasy, heroin/whoonga, methaqualone/Mandrax, and products bought or illicitly acquired from
pharmacies and hospitals, which include Xanax and cough medicines/lean. The English-language
concept of ‘drugs,’ whose history is itself a subject of study, shares some of the associations of
illicit substances, but in some settings it is also used for licit pharmaceutical products (e.g.
‘drugstore’ in the United States), and sometimes drugs are distinguished from alcohol, as in the
phrases ‘alcohol and drugs’ and ‘drug dealer.’9 In contrast, izidakamizwa does not usually
describe substances prescribed to treat illnesses (whether by a medical doctor or an
inyanga/traditional healer), and the term does not evoke legal status in the same way as does
‘drugs.’10 Of course, language practices are always changing, and there is in fact considerable
fluidity between izidakamizwa and the English word ‘drugs,’ which itself can be loaned in an
adapted form into isiZulu as ‘amadrugs.’11
         The next section provides a brief historical review of work–drug connections—like the
literature weighted toward alcohol—and some notes on schooling and drugs.12 Readers familiar
with this scholarship might like to travel quickly through this part of the essay. The following
section draws on my research on heroin and Xanax, and the final part picks up on questions
around governance, drug moralities, and state interventions. My hope is that this structure helps
to capture both continuities (connections between drugs and work, the growing importance of
secondary schools to drug governance, the illicit use of pharmaceutical products) and some
major changes (decline in size and de-feminization of the illicit drug economy, South Africa’s
greater integration into global smuggling markets, and the growing significance of schoolwork
and a certain type of casual work to drug use).

Drugs at Work

For centuries sorghum beer/utshwala has been drunk in homesteads to reward, provide
sustenance for, and afford relaxation from, work.13 Cannabis (insangu), brought to the continent
from southern Asia around 1,000 years ago, was widely grown and smoked, including to offset
fatigue.14 However, European settlers to the region, as in many colonial settings, soon recognized
that habit-forming substances had a particular ability to ensnare groups in relations of work and
trade.15 Pam Scully traces the tot/dop system of paying wine for labour back to the 17th century.16
By the time the British took control of the Cape in 1795, David Gordon notes, tobacco, alcohol,
and cannabis were ‘standard items in economic dealings between settler farmers, slaves, and
Khoikhoi serfs.’17 Gold mines, central to the institutionalization of migrant labour in the region,
lured workers through the promise of beer provision.18 In the context of brutal living and
working conditions, workers could strengthen the alcoholic content of mine beer and cultivate
strains of cannabis that helped ‘manage appetite, stimulate willingness to work, and treat
generalized mental and physical malaise.’19
         South Africa’s drug history is marked not only by its mineral revolution but also the
development of a quite enormous illicit economy that, at least in terms of women’s brewing of
beer, and perhaps more generally, arguably peaked around the 1950s. International regulations
from the 1920s criminalized drugs that included cannabis, cocaine, morphine, and opium, but the
illegal sphere was massively boosted by the racial prohibition of ‘European liquor’ and the

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regulation of sorghum beer for ‘Africans.’20 As thriving industries drew workers into informal
city spaces that preceded the widespread building of townships, thousands of women brewed
sorghum beer to provide an alternative to profitable municipal-run beer halls—primary sites
from which beer could be legally bought by Africans. ‘Shebeen queens’ also sold stronger drinks
such as brandy and other banned ‘European liquors’ as well as homemade liquor with names that
point to their strength, including isiqataviki (‘kill me quick’).21 Cannabis was widely sold too.22
This illicit economy required not only brewers, but also lookouts and connections with those
permitted to buy European alcohol, but this did not stop frequent arrests: in 1956, 600 people a
day were arrested for the illegal possession of alcohol, and in the wake of expanded attention to
cannabis supply in the 1950s, seizures in South Africa accounted for more than half of the global
total.23
          Several relevant points about drugs in the second half of the twentieth century, a period
marked politically by the National Party’s implementation of apartheid, can be noted. First, the
legalization of ‘European liquor’ in the early 1960s initiated a decisive phase in the
corporatization of alcohol, especially through the mighty South African Breweries (SAB), and
therefore a significant decline in women’s brewing for and control over the illicit economy.24
Second, the country’s partial isolation as a pariah state dampened the smuggling to its shores of
illicit ‘hard’ drugs such as heroin and cocaine—although local legislation intensified the state’s
punitive control of drugs. Third, the production and distribution of pharmaceutical products
increased significantly.25 South Africa’s standing as the leading country in the world in the illicit
use of methaqualone/Mandrax, and more widely illicit pharmaceutical use, has to be seen in the
context of the latter two points. Mandrax, commonly smoked in a pipe in South Africa, is a
barbiturate prescribed as a sleeping aid that after its banning in the 1970s was produced illicitly
inside and outside the country, including as part of the apartheid government’s chemical and
biological warfare program against black South Africans.26 Other pharmaceutical drugs used
illicitly include the barbiturate Vesparax, cough syrups containing codeine and ephedrine, and
products used for dieting including Nobese, Thinz, and ephedrine (a stimulant used in Thinz).27
The synthetic opiate Wellconal is said to be the only drug abused intravenously in the apartheid
era.28

Education, Drugs, and Intoxication

Schooling has been intimately embroiled in not only the reshaping of work but also competing
moralities focused on—and indeed definitions of—alcohol and other drugs. Prior to European
settlement, the embeddedness of beer and cannabis in everyday life but also accounts of
intoxication are hinted at through written sources, all of which themselves have been the subject
of considerable discussion.29 The first isiZulu dictionary, published in 1861 by Bishop John
Colenso, described the verb daka as ‘Intoxicate, make drunk; make powerless, languid; strike, as
the sun’s heat.’30 Alfred Bryant’s dictionary described isidakwa as ‘drunkard; one given to
excessive hemp smoking.’31 References in the James Stuart Archive of oral histories associate
daka with ‘cause people to be weak,’ and make men ‘grow old’.32 If these terms suggested that
in certain moments psychoactive substances could weaken a person, European settlers often held
more exacting views, filtered through and shaping ideas of ‘race’: Christians could view alcohol
as a moral sin, racial tropes presented Africans (and elsewhere ‘aboriginals’) as childlike beings
who needed to be protected from alcohol, and mental asylums could classify intoxicated persons

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as ‘lunatics.’33 These uneven and interacting registers sometimes clashed and were disputed.
Mission-educated men, who formed the core of the early nationalist movement, exhibited both
enthusiasm for temperance but also—reacting to racial laws—opposition to racial alcohol bans.34
Gender also patterned and was shaped by these processes. Early accounts reveal an acceptance
that in some settings women could drink utshwala, but Christianity and the temperance
movements, in which Christian women played a key part, as well as anxieties about women’s
abandonment of rural areas for cities, created a gendered chain of meanings that could associate
morality with absolute abstinence.35
         Before the extension of education from the primary to the secondary level (for ‘Africans’
not significantly until the 1970s and 1980s), it is not drugs at schools that is notable but the ways
schools shaped life paths that might include alcohol and cannabis use or, in the case of women,
moving to cities and brewing and selling beer. A good example of this point is Philip Mayer’s
study of ‘schooled’ and ‘red’ male migrants in 1950s East London, where he reported that the
former abstained or drank privately whereas ‘red’ migrants drank in iseti as part of moral
‘incapsulation’ that ensured that they did not forget, or worse abandon, their rural homes.36 As
secondary schools grew in numbers, however, they became important sites of both drug use and
drug education. School inspectors in KwaZulu had to fill in a whole section on the ‘sobriety’ of
teachers.37 For students in the KwaZulu homeland, the controversial Inkatha syllabus, which
promoted allegiance to Buthelezi’s ethnic Zulu Inkatha organization, relayed firmly the ‘dangers
of smoking, alcohol and drugs.’38 Soweto student activists who rose up against apartheid in 1976
confronted shebeens and especially state-owned beer halls; the sentiment that alcohol thwarted
the liberation struggle and robbed families of wages continued in the 1980s.39 As in a previous
register of dakwa, alcohol was presented as a drug with social consequences—for families,
communities, and racial justice—and not just of individual concern. Meanwhile, cannabis, not
tainted like alcohol by state profiteering, appears to have been widely available at some schools,
with journalist Fred Khumalo describing how he and other students used and sold the drug in
KwaZulu in the 1980s.40
         It would be an oversimplification to present anti-drug campaigns at schools as filling a
gap in state interventions, but it is relevant that the institutionalization of addiction was both
patchy and directed mostly to ‘whites,’ and to a lesser extent to ‘coloureds’; for ‘Africans,’
‘prison was the default “treatment centre.”’41 In the post-Second World War period, the
‘addiction as a disease’ model, whose proponents had long sought to reduce the stigma attached
to alcoholism, circulated with added weight within the newly established World Health
Organization and governments, including South Africa’s Department of Health and Social
Welfare.42 The South African National Council on Alcoholism (later with the addition of ‘and
Drug Dependency’) was established in 1956, and state rehabilitation facilities were opened and
increasingly added to by private institutions paid for by medical aid and employers. A glimpse
into the recipients of public treatment comes from one government survey noting that
rehabilitation ‘inmates’ tended to have low education rates and be unemployed, and that 70
percent spoke Afrikaans.43 Institutions dedicated to drugs could feed into schools: SANCA and
the South African Temperance Alliance, while focused on treatment and prohibition
respectively, both also targeted education programs at schools.44

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Drugs after Apartheid

         Democracy was good for the drug economy. The election of the African National
Congress to power in 1994 disrupted the association between alcohol and state oppression, and
the always-astute SAB ramped up marketing that from the 1980s had presented alcohol as a
vehicle for multiracial sociability.45 Township shebeens—some losing customers when better off
residents relocated to middle-class suburbs—could themselves target young people with new
constitutional ‘rights,’ including women.46 If to a degree apartheid had fostered a ‘segmented
drugs market,’ the rise of a multiracial middle class meant that more available expensive illicit
drugs, such as cocaine, extended their reach from mostly white consumers to become ‘rainbow
vices’ in the words of Ted Leggett.47 Meanwhile, as democratization increased the openness of
the economy, South Africa became a major node in international smuggling networks, where
enforcement through violence tended toward male control. Driving the rapid uptake of cheap
heroin in the 2000s, and especially the 2010s, was the ‘southern route’ of smuggling from
Afghanistan via eastern and southern Africa to Europe and the USA.48 Finally, the desegregation
of health services brought new pharmaceutical products to citizens.49
         In terms of drug/substance abuse policy, which is located in the Department of Social
Development, the state came to give a nod toward ‘harm reduction’ approaches, but this was a
weak gesture, one that reflected not only politicians’ penchant for ‘tough on drugs’ rhetoric but
also how social policy became dominated by the rapid expansion of social grants today provided
to around a third of the country’s citizens. If you live in the KwaZulu-Natal province and have
no access to medical aid and private rehabilitation centres, you will have to wait months or years
to access one of only two public rehabilitation facilities. The non-governmental sector, which in
the 1990s and 2000s responded with fervour to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, has shown relatively
little interest in drug (ab)use.50 On the ground the state continues to criminalize drug users,
especially poor black users: between 2005 and 2015 drug arrests increased by 181.5 percent.51

Xanax and Schoolwork

According to students, teachers, and photographs I have seen of seizures, the generic version of
Xanax commonly sold in Durban is manufactured by the pharmaceutical company Mylan—
hence the nickname ‘baby blue Mylan’ (along with ‘Xanny,’ ‘Zanele,’ ‘Zandile,’ and others). Of
the students I spoke with, David, a ‘white’ student attending a formerly white school in south
Durban, gave the earliest account of its sale, remembering it being sold in 2014 at another school
he had attended in central Durban. However, he and almost every other learner I spoke with in
2019 (and teachers if they were aware of the drug) said that Xanax had spread extremely rapidly
through Durban’s schooling system in the previous year before my visits (thus 2018–2019).
Because I did not undertake a survey and visited only 14 schools (none of which were the city’s
highest-fee schools), I am unable to quantify Xanax’s use or difference among schools, and so I
focus on some general explanations for its rise in Durban. It is important to note that, given its
apparent sourcing in local pharmacies and health institutions (see below), Xanax’s supply will
likely vary considerably from city to city and from month to month.52
        To understand how a small pill, cheap enough to be bought with snack money, can sweep
so quickly across Durban’s education system, we need to start by noting the simultaneous
desegregation and marketization of schooling, the latter especially through fees.53 Both changes

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drove the daily travel of learners to out-of-area schools which, in turn, upheld inequalities in the
system. Today, a family’s income is a key determinant of whether a child attends a private
school, high-fee public school, or—for the majority of South Africans—no/low-fee public
schools, with massive consequences for the future. Relatedly, if a young person does not
complete grade 12 (drops out), their chances of finding work are greatly reduced. Because of the
high-stakes nature of an enlarged schooling system, I locate Xanax in the context of not work
undertaken in factories, mines, and farms—previously dominant themes—but in attending
school, or schoolwork. Obviously, I am taking some liberties in the use of ‘work,’ but I think that
this wider definition of (school) work is faithful to drug histories in the region because
substances long allayed mental and physical malaise in difficult and insecure conditions, and
drug moralities could be framed in contingent and social rather than absolute terms.54 Indeed,
both schools and factories are hierarchically organized institutions, regulated through time-
discipline, and harboring cultures of paternalism and violence. And while (around the world)
education can be fulfilling and life-changing, it can also be boring, expensive, and poorly
connected to desirable work.
         I cannot capture here the enormous variety of experiences at schools, but a general point
is that learners have a strong incentive not to drop out, and some can use drugs to get through the
school day—whether to promote fun, camaraderie, or simply to make time pass quicker. There
is, in fact, no definitive line between drugs’ use as ‘antidespondents’—in Reinarman and
Levine’s terms—and the way that they are said to entertain people and provide pleasure.55 An
account of the many problems learners face is beyond the scope of this paper, but Wandile, a
grade 11 student, from a township school, gave a sense of some of the multiple reasons young
people give for using drugs: ‘Boyfriends, girlfriend, family issues, school. Also they are things
that you can’t talk about but by using drugs you will forget.’
         What is clear, however, is that Xanax found traction not only because of its
pharmacological effects but also because it fit into well-established understandings of
izidakamizwa/drugs: substances that alter feelings and help to distract a person from their
problems. Notably, several young people spoke of Xanax as a ‘new drug taken for depression,’
and no learner or teacher with whom I spoke relayed its official classification as an anti-anxiety
drug. Talking generally about izidakamizwa, a male student S’bu from a school in Umlazi
Township explained some of the school-centred reasons why learners take drugs:

         There are many reasons. One is stress, the challenges of schoolwork, you have a lot on your
         mind. You just need something to take your mind off things to ease it. Also, here at school
         something that I have noticed is that we were writing a test [if] one learner fails he is depressed
         and stressed so he needs something to calm him down, and that results in him using drugs.

        As a small easy-to-hide pill consumed orally, Xanax can be swallowed before or at
school. ‘You could be eating a sweet. No smell, nothing,’ said one learner. It is easier to hide and
cheaper than lean, another drug whose active ingredient is sourced from pharmacies (cough
medicine containing codeine, which is then mixed with soda). Xanax is contrasted with ecstasy
and cocaine, which have a reputation as (expensive) party drugs used in night joints. Bottled
alcohol is quite expensive, and it is associated with taverns and other drinking places that are
usually visited during the weekend.56 As we shall see, heroin/whoonga is said to lead someone to
drop out of school.

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Xanax finds favour among young women as well as men. Discussions in school about
democracy and rights, including gender rights, are commonplace. These narratives play out in
numerous ways, including being employed to justify schoolgirls using drugs. What is relevant to
these contestations is that Xanax draws on pharmaceutical registers that are not gendered in the
same way as cigarettes and weed, which are smoked outside the school or in discreet spaces such
as next to the toilets. Indeed, surveys suggest that over-the-counter/prescription drugs are the
only category used almost equally by young South African women and men; in contrast, half as
many schoolgirls compared to schoolboys admitted to smoking tobacco, and a third admitted to
using cannabis.57
        Xanax is often presented as having similarities with, and sometimes used together with,
cannabis/weed. According to Themba, a grade 11 student at a school in Umlazi, students ‘wanna
upgrade to it’ from weed. Everyone I spoke with at the schools I visited said that weed was the
most commonly used drug at schools, smoked or eaten in ‘space cakes.’ The longstanding
popularity of cannabis among South Africans of all ‘races’ always troubled the distinction
between (legal) alcohol and (dangerous) drugs, and this collapsed further when a 2018
Constitutional Court decision effectively decriminalized the drug. Cannabis/insangu has an
unparalleled ability to evoke very different registers of authority, helped by it being known by
multiple names—weed, zoll, dagga, insangu. Sipho, who attends an Umlazi Township school,
told me that his uncle smokes insangu to cope with the stress of having three wives, but then
went on to celebrate the moment when Canadian rap artist Drake controversially smoked weed
on stage.
        Teachers I spoke with tended to relay the negative effects of cannabis on learners,
describing those who return from break time after smoking as sitting in a dreamy state at the
back of class. However, learners also described how weed, particularly certain strains, can
enhance concentration, and therefore the ability to work. Contrasting weed to Xanax, Thandi,
based at an Umlazi school, said, ‘Some they are clever when smoking.’ Lerato, based at another
Umlazi school, said, ‘The person that smokes weed in the house is always clean … even students
most of them they concentrate in class I actually don’t know how.’
        Xanax is not associated with aiding concentration, but it does exceed or enhance the
distracting qualities of weed. For this reason, several students said it made learners like
‘zombies,’ and one said it put them in ‘la la land.’ Said Zodwa, ‘Goofed [from cannabis] is
basically when you’re just high you know, you feel high. But when you’re zwanging [from
Xanax] it’s to a point where you can’t even like text on your phone.’ Zobuhle continued:
         When you take the Xanax on its own, it just makes you feel tired. You yawn, drowsy, you just
         want to sleep. Now what people do is … they take it and then they smoke weed. [It is] like when
         you smoke weed on its own but now just extra, you know.

         Popping a Xanax pill represents a counterculture to schooling, and a number of students
discussed enthusiastically global music icons, including rap stars Travis Scott and Drake, who
sing, ‘I did half a Xan, 13 hours ’til I land / Had me out like a light, ayy, yeah.’ It is possible that
the identification of the generic substance by the brand name ‘Xanax’ reflects these transnational
influences more than Big Pharma’s direct marketing of the ‘blockbuster drug,’ a powerful
dynamic in the US in particular.58 However, while certainly part of a school counterculture,
Xanax and weed do not fundamentally challenge the foundations of schooling. Both drugs are
compatible with attending school and are said to be taken less around the time of exams and
more on Fridays, that is to say at the start of the weekend. The two drugs are clearly

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distinguished from whoonga (and Mandrax/ngidi), which is presented as a powerful drug that
might cause someone to leave school, abandon their future, and live an aimless life of crime. One
male learner in an Umlazi school said that ‘we like using fashionable drugs,’ whereas whoonga
was a ‘low-life drug.’
        Being goofed from weed or zwanging from Xanax (or both) would seem to undermine
the core messages of drug education programs. But one point of overlap between the perspective
of young people and anti-drug campaigns is the very word ‘drugs’/izidakamizwa. For young
people, izidakamizwa can be seen as an array of substances—whether locally grown, smuggled
into the country, or manufactured by pharmaceutical companies—that distract users from their
problems; for schools they are a collective danger that must be resisted. Though the
entanglement of izidakamizwa and drugs, including in classrooms, needs fuller investigation, one
site where izidakamizwa has been energetically circulated is campaigns and speeches portraying
drugs as the enemy of post-apartheid freedoms (notably the isiZulu word did not appear in early
dictionaries).59 The view that drugs/izidakamizwa pose a threat to youth is central to the new
school subject of ‘life orientation’ that replaced a more top-down ‘drugs as a danger’ message,
with a vocabulary of young people making positive choices to avoid the danger of peer pressure
(which is almost always coded as bad). On a day-to-day basis, and in the context of the patchy
drug interventions noted earlier, schools can deal regularly with drugs, for instance directing
parents of suspected drug users to labs where their children undergo drug tests and calling in the
police to undertake visits/searches. Thus, while drug interventions at schools play out in many
and varied ways, it is of note that the concept of drugs/izidakamizwa not only reflects ongoing
practices but also helps to shape understandings of and experiences with—and sometimes the
attractiveness of—psychoactive substances.
        Xanax trade provides work for some young people. As we have seen, South Africa’s
relative isolation in the apartheid era helped generate a demand for illicitly attained
pharmaceuticals. The sources of Xanax, as reported by Funani and another young person I
interviewed (who lived with a dealer) are illegal sales by local pharmacies, thefts from hospitals,
and sales by patients who are legitimately prescribed the drug. A senior police officer with
responsibilities for addressing the drug trade showed me Mylan/Xanax pills he had seized and
said that they were investigating one local pharmacy for its illicit provision of the drug; he also
noted the difficulty of controlling pharmaceutical drugs that are provided legally to those with
prescriptions. Funani said that dealers of hard drugs see little profit in Xanax, and the pill is often
sold in schools by students. Funani also described how student mobility in the schooling system
connects people, places, and drugs in new ways. He no longer deals drugs but used to buy a dosh
(container of 100 pills) for R300 from close to his school, and then sell them 10KM away in his
Umlazi section. As illustrated below, Funani, Lungelo, and Themba, described the trade in
Xanax.
         Lungelo: It started with the youth that are coming to school. They brought it in school and it was
         a fashion.

         Funani: High school, everything starts in high school.

         Themba: And then everyone from school started to introduce Xannies to everywhere, where they
         live. You see like we’re in [place] but we live in different places…

         Funani: Like me, I was the only person in my area [section in Umlazi]. … I first sold Xannies
         and got into big trouble with my parents. They didn’t really find out that I was selling, but I got
         into trouble now everyone is coming to knock. … It started [when the dealer] gave me his

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number, I called him. … I think he first checked that I’m not a cop. … So when we met up he
         sold me [a dosh] at the full price, by the full price. The second time, full price, then the third
         time he took like 30 percent off. … Maybe I bought like seven times.

Heroin Hustles

In the 1980s and 1990s, heroin was primarily used by a relatively small number of young white
men.60 However, in Durban by the 2000s, and especially the 2010s, heroin-based drugs had
gained a strong foothold in formerly Indian, coloured, and African townships (the drug’s
influence partly hidden by its naming as ‘sugars’ in formerly Indian and coloured areas and
‘whoonga’ in formerly African areas).61 In 2018 I interviewed whoonga users in and around
Umlazi Township, and almost all were men aged 20–29, identifiable because of their ubiquitous
search for piecework. Heroin users usually start smoking whoonga mixed with weed, but most
go on to ‘chase the dragon’ (burning whoonga on tinfoil and inhaling/smoking the fumes); no
one I spoke with had injected the drug intravenously. Heroin generates a feeling of euphoria and
well-being, and leads to painful withdrawal symptoms (‘arosta’) that include stomach cramps,
aching bones, and difficulty sleeping. However, the opioid does not negate work: Preble and
Casey’s classic account in New York is just one study showing that heroin users ‘are actively
engaged in meaningful activities and relationships seven days a week.’62 While heroin is a
powerful drug, it is the time-discipline of schools and factories, rather than the inherent
properties of opioids, that is typically incompatible with a someone using heroin regularly to
stave off withdrawal symptoms.
        Xanax and other drugs are used by young men and women, but the vast majority of
whoonga users in the area in which I worked are young men. As we saw, masculinities long
shaped moral views on drugs, for instance migrant workers drank beer in groups to uphold a
shared commitment to rural families. Malose Langa’s contemporary study of masculinities in
Alexandra Township shows that when young men value and have a sense of being on a path of
academic achievement, this is a powerful protective factor against their involvement in crime and
substance use.63 Young men he shows do their best to achieve facets of manhood, for instance
fathering and supporting a child, and this can lead to a rejection of drugs; as one young man said,
‘You can’t buy it when you are a father.’64 In this regard, it is notable that heroin users I
interviewed tended to have done poorly at school: none matriculating and half starting to use the
drug while attending high school.65 It is difficult to separate two scenarios with contrasting
causal direction—doing poorly at school increases the chances that a person will use heroin, or
heroin use leads someone to drop out of school—but the outcome is undeniable: that heroin users
are caught in a cycle where they have few prospects of finding formal work.
        Derogatory words used for young men in Umlazi who do not try drugs include
impatha/isilima/isiphukuphuku (roughly ‘fool’), isitibane (‘gay/effeminate man’), cheese boy,
and uyazitshela (‘you tell yourself/look down on others’). Uyazitshela is a relevant term when
considering class-based divisions in the schooling system because it is also used to deride
learners who attend model C (formerly white) schools, speak with a posh ‘white’ accent, and
over time attain the security of formal work. These are all contested terrains, and Langa’s careful
noting of the ways men try to navigate masculinities also affirms an important point, which is
that in many cases young people do not take drugs, take them and stop, take one and not another,

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wait until the weekend, and so on. Evoking longstanding meanings of isidakwa, men who take
drugs excessively and lose control of themselves can be positioned as unmanly.
        It is also important to note that whoonga users are generally from poor but not necessarily
the poorest communities, which tend to be rural areas. The piecework described below that
supports whoonga use requires local families to have available cash to spare. Also of note is that
some parents of heroin users, especially if enrolled in medical aid policies, are able to help their
children access a growing number of private rehabilitation institutions, though it is rare to hear of
this leading to an end of drug use. The majority of the heroin users with whom I spoke, but not
all, expressed a strong desire to stop using the drug.
        The account of one whoonga user, Xolani, illustrates the interweaving of drugs with
inequalities in schooling, painful personal problems, and the difficulty in envisioning a path into
desirable work. Xolani was born in Umlazi Township but now lives in a settlement nearby. He
lives with his grandmother because his mother died in 2000 and his father died in 2011. He
smoked cannabis from grade 7 but heard about whoonga from a friend when he was in grade 10,
and they mixed it with cannabis and smoked it. He reported that it was much more pleasurable
than cannabis, and he dropped out of school shortly thereafter. Xolani said that one reason he
used it in the early days was that he had problems with the mother of his child; she did not
respect him and was cheating on him. He was even thinking of committing suicide but then
turned to smoking whoonga to get rid of the stress. He reported that when he smokes heroin he
does not remember his problems and that he smokes as much as he has money for, saying, ‘If
you have 150 [rand], you don’t think about buying food.’ Sometimes, however, he helps his
grandmother by buying small items for the house, and other times he gives small amounts of
money, maybe R5, to his child. To earn money, Xolani undertakes a variety of casual jobs
starting at around 7 am, including collecting scrap metal, which might earn him R25 in two hours
(enough for one ‘capsule’), cleaning igceke/yard (he says he can get around R30 per house but is
underpaid because residents know he smokes whoonga), and collecting water from a communal
pump (R5 for a large container). In 2004, he was caught and incarcerated for housebreaking in
another area. In prison whoonga was sold for R50, but he had no money to buy it. After he was
released, he was still unable to find a decent job, and he got back in with friends he had been
smoking whoonga with, and continued on that path.
        Xolani’s grandmother added some further context. She underscored young people’s poor
work prospects by noting that her other grandson who lives with her undertakes casual work in
construction. From her perspective, the first sign of Xolani’s whoonga use came when he started
asking for increasing amounts of money to take to school. He then stole small items from the
house, including blankets, which he sold for as little as R50. She thought about telling him to
leave home but feared that he would steal from the community and be caught and even killed.
She said, with an air of hope, that Xolani now takes better care of his appearance. But like many
guardians of whoonga users, she railed that the drug ‘is finishing our children.’
        As this story suggests, heroin users are renowned for committing petty intimate crimes,
and families have been known to lock doors in their own houses to keep out their sons. In the
2010s, the derogatory term ‘amaphara’ arose in conversation, songs, and the media to depict
whoonga users (some say the word comes from ‘parasites’).66 Heroin users are wary that being
cast as ‘iphara’ and banished from their communities will separate them from vital support, and
perhaps force them into central parts of the city, such as Durban’s notorious ‘whoonga park.’ I
heard of young men being estranged from families. However, a more common situation is

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families, especially mothers, enduring deep pain because of a son’s drug use, but maintaining
hope that this might end, and the son sustaining heroin use not from crime but from hustling.
         The work outlined below is described as hustling in English and ukuphanta/ukuphanda in
isiZulu.67 The casualization of the labour market accelerated after the end of apartheid, and one
side of this is that local employers now widely use labour brokers to hire workers, or employ
workers themselves on casual contracts.68 The heroin hustle has some similarities to other local
casual work (itoho), for instance the temporary work in one of South Durban’s factories that
other men in the area might undertake, in that it is not seen as allowing a person to build a viable
future (denoted more by the verb ukusebenza). However, temporary work in a firm, which is
usually weekly paid, can come with an outside hope that it will be upgraded to a prized
permanent job. What the hustling jobs whoonga users undertake all have in common is that they
allow heroin users to integrate income generation with the repeated purchase of R25 heroin
capsules. The work heroin users undertake can be undertaken individually, or sometimes in
groups, and John Keketso Peete’s study of heroin users in Soweto Township captures very well
the sociability and camaraderie of heroin use and its relationship to hustling; similar hustling
activities by heroin users are reported in Wentworth Township, a formerly coloured township
close to Umlazi.69 The following table gives some examples of the work undertaken by the
heroin users interviewed for this study.70

 Paid activity            Number of people       Amount earned, in
                          saying they had ever   rand
                          undertaken activity
 Wash private cars        10                     25–30
 Clean yard/igceke        7                      30–100
 Local building work      6                      100–150/day
 Wash taxis               3                      50
 Collect and sell scrap   3                      25 for 2 hours
 Collect water            3                      5 or 10/container
 Repair cars              2                      Varies
 Carry goods from car     2                      Varies
 Work in scrapyard        2                      80/day
 Fix appliances           2                      Varies
 Wash clothes             1                      100/basket
 Taxi conductor           1                      150/day

Many of the jobs noted above are in fact familiar to not only heroin users but also other poor
South Africans and, indeed, the ‘labouring poor’ around the world.71 As Peter Alexander and
colleagues show, those without support from family members can be ‘too poor to be
unemployed’ and forced into very low-paid informal work.72 What is notable about many heroin
users living in communities, however, is that they usually attain food and housing from family
members, but then undertake piecework in order to buy regular capsules of heroin. This work is
understood through a number of registers, hinted at by Xolani and his grandmother. Community
members can be derided for exploiting others’ dependence on heroin to pay low wages. Some of
the work itself can be seen as suitable for women or children, such as washing clothes or
sweeping a yard; sometimes parents will decry their own educated children not wanting to
undertake these duties. At the same time, this piecework can be presented as a form of help, for
instance a better-off family can say that by employing a neighbor’s son they are preventing him

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from undertaking crimes. The work can also be viewed as socially useful, for instance if a heroin
user collects water from communal taps when the piped supply to houses fails.
         A minority of whoonga users sell the drug, but the heroin economy is not a big employer,
at least compared to the massive (feminized) illicit drug economy of the past or what Phillipe
Bourgois describes in a US setting as the ‘enormous, uncensored, untaxed underground
economy.’73 Said one schoolboy about the kingpin dealers, ‘Whoonga is sold by people who
kill.’ Drug arrests are sometimes made, but large dealers pay off police and gain some protection
in the community through both fear and supporting neighbors. The need for lookouts and runners
is limited because Umlazi has only one main road, and it can take 30 minutes for the police to
travel across the township of 500,000 people.

Interventions: Schools, Drugs, Governance

‘Angisona isidakwa               I am not a drunkard
Ngihlushwa ukuwoma’              I am just thirsty/troubled by thirst

‘Angisona,’ Babes wodumo, 2017 (based on older rendition of song)

To challenge punitive approaches to drugs, the addiction-as-disease model has proved to be a
remarkably durable framework. In recent years the US’s influential National Institute on Drug
Abuse (NIDA) drew on new brain imaging techniques to purportedly show how drugs
permanently change brain functions.74 South Africa’s latest National Drug Master Plan says, ‘As
a result of scientific research, we know that addiction is a disease that affects both the brain and
behavior.’75 The disease model opens up important political and policy spaces, and most
advocates for drug users now align themselves in some way with the harm-reduction paradigm
that emerged in the 1980s.76 This puts the onus on states to treat and not punish drug users and is
backed by incontrovertible evidence that punitive approaches fail to prevent drug use, result in
additional harms (such as HIV infection from shared needles), and disproportionately target poor
and black users. But despite nods to this approach in South Africa’s policy documents, there are
few institutions that care for and support drug users in the public or non-governmental sector.
Though the police can be ineffective and corrupt, it is well stated that in practice the South
African state adopts an essentially punitive approach toward drugs.
        A labour perspective offers an alternative, or at least a supplement, to the addiction-as-
disease model to centre the dignity and humanity of drug users. It shows how drug use is
intertwined with racial capitalism, as employers actively sought to make workers dependent on
mind-altering substances, but also as workers sought relaxation, socialization, and pleasure and
drew on longstanding experiences of psychoactive substance use in the region. Today, in the
context of catastrophic youth employment, drugs, collectively called izidakamizwa, are said by
some learners—and we have to take this seriously—as needed to cope with life. Thus, I extend
‘work’ to ‘schoolwork’ when seeking to understand the meteoric rise of Xanax in schools.
Heroin, used mainly by young men, on whom there is a strong burden to work and support
others, is associated with learners who drop out of school and hustle in piecework activities. It
says a lot about labour market changes in South Africa that drugs no longer serve as labour
recruiters for large mining enterprises but as recruiters for piecework jobs such as sweeping a
yard.

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Schools play a central role today not just in shaping how drugs are used but also in how
they are talked and thought about. It is tempting, if one compares past authoritarian messages on
drugs with the emphasis now on rights-bearing individuals opposing peer pressure, to draw a
conclusion that schools are imposing a new regime of neo-liberal governance. Parallel arguments
have certainly been made for instance that the availability and use of home drug testing kits in
the US means that ‘youth choose “freely” … not to use drugs.’77 But the labour–drug question
has long been sewn into struggles in South Africa, and deeply embedded in stories of rural life,
shebeen culture, and cannabis use—these cannot be easily evacuated from South Africans’
everyday lives.
         Histories of drugs therefore are immersed in struggles over meaning, resources, and
policies that have wide implications, and learning from these can refresh and destabilize
conventional wisdoms. South Africa’s history bequeathed multiple moralities of drug use that
exceed common terms today such as ‘peer pressure.’ Isidakwa was not simply a person who
succumbed to the intrinsic dangers of alcohol (a sentiment reflected in the temperance
movement), nor a person with an inherent propensity to drink (as in the Alcoholic Anonymous
line: ‘I am an alcoholic’), but a person whose habits of taking drugs undermined moral
economies of love, support, reciprocity, and racial justice. Depending on context, an intoxicated
person could signal the fight against apartheid and commitment to building a home or
acquiescence to racial rule. Innovative attempts at harm reduction are being proposed in South
Africa, and these are and can be further informed by the fact that for generations drugs were used
to offset the harms of racial capitalism but today are being used to deal with the pain of mass
unemployment and an expanding schooling system that is partially delinked from desirable life
paths.78

Endnotes

1
  One recent study found the youth unemployment rate to be as high as 75%, see
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-06-01-first-quarter-unemployment-rate-hits-record-high-of-43-2-
youth-jobless-rate-74-7/
2
  Sidney Mintz 1985, Jankowiak and Bradburd 2003.
3
  Bellucci and Eckert 2019. Many important South African texts are cited in this paper, but of particular note are
Van Onselen 1982, and Crush and Ambler 1992. Recent writings that do draw on this tradition include Klantschnig,
Carrier, and Ambler 2014; Mager 2010; Waetjen, Hodes, and Parle 2019.
4
  For example of such headlines in the UK and US see https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8708952/uk-xanax-teens-
anxiety-pills-celebrities;https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/communities/north-county/sd-no-xanax-schools-
20171102-story.html; https://www.foxla.com/news/the-serious-effects-of-the-codeine-craze
5
  See Chanock 2001, Parle 2007, Roos 2015.
6
  See Valverde 1998. This work is in conversation with Michel Foucault’s analysis of power/knowledge and how
modern institutions engendered new norms and subjectivities; the work of Meghan Vaughan (1991) and Julie Parle
(2007), among others Africanist scholars of health, notes the limits of Foucault’s analysis in settings when all
Africans were deemed ‘other.’
7
  On the ‘set and setting’ see Zinberg 1984, ‘addiction trajectories’ Raikhel and Garriott 2013, ‘structural violence’
Bourgois & Schonberg 2009, and how marginalized groups can use drugs to ‘self-medicate’ including to act as
‘antidespondents’ Reinarman & Levine 1997.

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8
  Hunter 2020, 2021a, 2021b. These pieces include more interview material and a longer discussion on my method
and positionality. Briefly, my research, still at an early stage, combines interviews with around 100 schoolchildren
and teachers (the former in groups of usually three) in 14 schools in south Durban in 2019, most of which were in
Umlazi Township, and with 42 young heroin users and family members in and around Umlazi in 2018. Pseudonyms
are used in this paper. Umlazi Township is a township of a half million built in Durban in the 1960s for ‘Africans’
removed from central city spaces (to draw inevitably on the racial categories enshrined by apartheid: ‘white,’
‘Indian,’ ‘coloured,’ and ‘African’). The school interviews were undertaken with grade 11/12 learners in small
gender-divided groups usually of 3 persons, 11 in Umlazi and one in a formerly white, Indian and coloured area.
Interviews for this project were conducted in isiZulu and English and I worked sometimes alone but mostly with a
research assistant who lives in Umlazi. This paper of course offers only a partial account of an immensely complex
topic; the Coronavirus pandemic, for instance, will have affected work and sociability in ways I cannot consider.
9
  On the history of ‘drugs’ see for example Breen 2017, Courtwright 2002.
10
   On differing frameworks for understanding health in the region see particularly Ngubane 1977.
11
   Thanks to Liz Gunner for pointing out the use of ‘amadrugs’ on Ukhozi FM radio as one example of the porous
boundary between English and isiZulu. A final introductory note on definitions: tobacco, prohibited only by age
(unlike alcohol, for which the criterion has been race), and generally seen as quite a weak substance, has a
particularly ambiguous position as a drug, and I do not discuss its use in this paper. Though there are longstanding
accounts of the use of snuff as a stimulant, see James Stuart Archive (Vol. 5, p. 87), edited by Webb and Wright.
12
   Much historical material on drugs in South Africa is directed toward alcohol, although scholars who include
Thembisa Waetjen, Rebecca Hodes, Julie Parle, and Phumla Innocent Nkosi are unearthing new histories of drug
use and connections among pharmacological substances, to which this paper is indebted. See in particular the
introduction to a special issue of the South African Historical Journal on ‘Drug Regimes in Southern Africa’
(Waetjen, Hodes & Parle 2019).
13
   Eileen Krige’s (1932) shows the social significance of beer as a food, means of payment, tribute, creator of
obligations, means of reconciliation, and more. Patrick McCallister (2005) provides a more dynamic account that
locates beer within a wider framework of changes to labour, households, and agriculture in the twentieth century.
The James Stuart Archive, edited by Colin Webb and John Wright and based on Stuart’s oral histories taken in the
nineteenth and early twentieth century, provides a variety of accounts of beer use including at dances (Vol. 2, 122),
and to praise the ancestors/amadlozi (Vol. 6, 390).
14
   Cannabis was ‘home-grown in every kraal’ according to missionary scholar Alfred Bryant 1949, 223; see also
Bourhill (1913). For a book-length history of cannabis in the continent see Duvall 2019.
15
   See Room 2006; Jankowiak and Bradburd 2003
16
   Scully 1992.
17
   Gordon 1996, 63.
18
   See van Onselen 1982, Baker 1992; Moodie 1994; on opium and Chinese workers see Waetjen 2017.
19
   Baker 1992; Duvall 2019, 161-2
20
   On the legal regulation of drugs see Chanock 2001; on alcohol and the production of ‘race’ see Tallie 2019.
21
   See Hellman 1948, 48. On beer halls see Swanson 1976, Edwards 1996, Mager 2010.
22
   Pauw 1962.
23
   Mager 2010, 13. For a discussion on cannabis seizure statistics see Nkosi, Devey and Waetjen 2020. On
mailer/gweva intermediaries, see Bailey and Seftel 1994. A limited number of Africans were exempted from laws
banning the sale of European Liquor, and the better-off could pay ‘admission of guilt’ payments to the police. The
writers of Drum magazine documented some of these dynamics, including the paying of fines, see Bailey and Seftel
1994.
24
   Shebeens remained numerous in newly built or expanded townships, if still illegal because the sale of liquor was
supposed to take place through outlets run by municipalities (by administration boards from the 1970s). However,
the growing popularity of clear malt beer yielded a dramatic reduction in women’s work involved with home
brewing, a trend abetted by the granting of township houses in most cases to married men and not single women.
Many shebeens remained run by women, but by the 1980s men had exerted greater control over the shebeen industry
and its associations (Mager 2010)
25
   These included sedatives and tranquilizers (mostly aimed at whites) and contraceptives (heavily promoted to
Africans from the 1970s), see Parle 2019; Parle, Hodes and Waetjen 2018. On local production of skin lighteners see
Thomas 2020.
26
   see Goga 2014; Leggett 2001.

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