UK link to South Africa drug craze

POLICE are investigating links between British businessmen and chemists and a hallucinogenic drug which is devastating South Africa's poorest townships.

The trade in mandrax, which has the chemical name methaqualone, has led to vicious turf wars and left thousands of members of the black and coloured populations with crippling drug dependencies.

Evidence was provided to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the summer that the apartheid regime had stockpiled mandrax for possible use in riot control.

The drug causes extreme drowsiness and many South Africans suspect that the security forces encouraged its use in the townships as a means of suppressing any resistance.

But South African detectives believe that British sources are now playing a key role in the supply trade.

The National Criminal Intelligence Service in London has been informed that British business interests are providing key ingredients for a network of illicit laboratories in which the drug is manufactured.

The South African criminals have turned to Britain for supplies of Anthranilic acid, which is not a controlled substance in this country and is widely used in the manufacture of dyes and perfumes.

The acid, along with other precursor chemicals used in mandrax production, are being shipped, often via Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique to the laboratories in remote parts of South Africa.

The South African Narcotics Bureau (SANB) claimed a major victory in their efforts to break the supply trade when they raided a lab at a farm on the outskirts of Lichtenburg in North-West province two years ago. As well as seizing enough methaqualone powder, precursor chemicals and pressing machines to make mandrax tablets with a street value of pounds 1.5m, they also arrested a British chemist and six other suspected members of the drug gang.

Sidney Frankel, 60, from London, is still being held in a South African jail facing charges of illegal drug manufacture and supply, and is likely to be brought to trial next year.

Mark Silver, of the NCIS drugs unit, said: "Mandrax is a serious problem in South Africa. We know that a number of British nationals have been involved in purchasing the precursors. Often they will set up businesses which appear to have legitimate end users. Then the chemicals are re-routed."

Mandrax was first marketed in 1965 as a sedative drug produced by the chemical company Roussel. The pills soon became a popular drug of abuse in Britain, marketed on the streets as "downers" and known by the nickname "mandies". It became a controlled drug in 1971 and was withdrawn from the British market in the early 1980s.

On the streets of the South African townships, mandrax tablets are known as "buttons". Since the early 1980s, it has been the predominant drug in South Africa, which accounts for at least 75 per cent of the world's mandrax market.

With the tablets passing hands for around pounds 5 each and many users taking six or seven buttons a day - often crushed into a cannabis joint called a "white pipe" - the trade has proved very lucrative for some.

One officer from the SANB in Cape Town said: "We have got people here that have got four or five houses, each with a value of 3m Rand (pounds 400,000) just because of the profits of mandrax."

With such money changing hands in environments where well-paid jobs are scarce, gangs have inevitably formed to carve up the market.

In the Western Cape township of Mannenberg, where the mandrax problem is at its worst, the dealers have formed street-gangs like the Sexy Boys, Terrible Josters, Americans, Mongrels and Hard Livings.

Exasperated by the police's failure to control the gangs, an armed vigilante organisation, People against Gangsterism and Drugs, began to fight back.

In one of a series of violent clashes, Rashaad Staggie, the twin brother of the leader of the Hard Livings, was attacked by armed PAGAD members as he sat in his Nissan four-wheel drive, two years ago. Staggie was shot in the head and set alight with Molotov cocktails in the full glare of television cameras.