On life and why we get high
Meets Durban teenagers who use ecstasy, a drug that has caused the deaths of many young people in the city’s townships
Durban, the warmest place to be — if you believe the touristy billboards — is a mix of tourist-friendly beaches, capitalistic expansion and gigantic metropolitan townships. One of the busiest seaports on the continent, it is also a node for drugs to enter or leave the country.
The underbelly of its freeway junctions were, until recently, a mass of drug dens devoted to wunga-heads but its sprawling townships have become home to another curse.
It is ecstasy, known locally as indanda and qoh. Between late March and early April 2016, local newspapers reported seven deaths and more than 40 hospital admissions caused by a deadly batch of Ecstacy. Some of the dead and more than 30 of the 40 were of schoolgoing age.
The township complex of Inanda, Ntuzuma and KwaMashu (INK) is described in municipal documents as the second-largest agglomeration of poor neighbourhoods in South Africa, with high levels of social dislocation, poverty and crime.
In this article, three schoolgoing teenagers speak about using qoh, even if they speak about it in the past tense. Their names have been changed.
Zweli Mpungose (18)
Istarted taking drugs, qoh in particular, from watching my friends. They would just change. Some would go into a deep joyful silence. Others would be just very generous. So I thought I would test it out.
I started about three years ago. I was 14.
When my friends would be planning to have a get-together, it was always a part of the discussion. I guess pills have always been there but they were not that popular, especially in the township.
My first trip was pure bliss. I had never felt anything like it. I would be listening to beats and I would hear things I had never heard before in music I am familiar with. It was much more enjoyable. That’s why it goes so well with gqom because of the way it is produced. I would also fall into these deep, satisfying silences.
I could only click with a woman if she was also tripping. I was soon taking it every second weekend.
When I started having sex, soon after I started taking it, I found that it actually shrinks your penis and inhibits your sex drive. But, for platonic fun, it is the best.
Because some of my friends’ parents would work night shift, we would sometimes go to their house under the pretext of studying. We would take pills and end up bunking school or going to school high, having not slept, with music blasting through our headphones.
It didn’t make me bunk school that much because I would pop half to be able to buzz enough to make it to school. I couldn’t bunk because my mom doesn’t work all the time.
Even though it was, like, R50 a pop, it would deplete our pocket money because we would end up taking, like, three pills in one night, because, like alcohol, it wears off and you want more. When your high fades in the middle of the night, it’s depressing. Other kids would borrow money right there in the party, or do whatever they have to.
I know of kids who have died from taking it. Here in Inanda it has happened. I know at least three people that I knew here. What I heard is that it could be the pill called Mercedes. Apparently it can give you a three-day high.
Also, more people are taking this now, so some don’t follow the protocols. Like these kids in KwaMashu that died. It was this Mercedes pill. You’re supposed to take like half of that pill, not the full thing. If you take the full pill, if you are weak, you die. The girls that died here in Inanda, just last month, were on that pill.
Phumlani Nkabinde (17)
Ido not only take qoh. I also smoke weed. But the popularity of qoh has to do with people knowing that it is there as an option that goes well with drinking.
People know exactly how it will make them feel — they will be more sociable in some cases, but they will definitely want to dance their life away.
If I am on weed, I do not like people’s company. So the ecstasy is like a protective shield where I can have fun and be confident in front of others.
You can have bad trips. That’s just a part of the process. But that happens if you are in a different township and you have to get your stuff from someone you are not used to.
Sometimes there’s an expression used where they say “ubishile”. It describes an intense trip that can cause physical discomfort. Some bite their tongues or get quivering jaws and need gum. Sometimes you can “bisha” and it’s fun if the drugs are good quality and you’re with people you know. But to avoid that, I buy from people I know.
If I visit my dad in Jo’burg, I will do what the kids there are doing. In Jo’burg, I know guys my age. For me, it’s just a matter of relieving stress of school and just home bullshit.
As far as I know, drugs have always been around. I can’t speak for their infiltration and how they enter ekasi.
When I was young, there was a song by Thebe called Goodman, he was apparently a dealer in pills. It’s the same thing. Maybe then it was purer, but now there are a lot of chancers because people are seeing a business opportunity. It’s just like the cocaine. A lot of people call cat (methcathinone) ntash but ntash is cocaine.
Thirty years from now, they will call qoh by another name.
What makes it more available now is that people that work buy it for younger girls that go to school. A lot of my friends end up taking it that way.
If you can buy 10 pills, worth R500, you can get a discount and only end up paying R350.
People usually associate weed with wunga so the pills hold more status.
What I can tell you is that, as far as the recovery period, this shit is the worst. I can sleep for 10 hours, by way of recovery, and that’s unlike me. I will be dehydrated and feel horrible about myself. But when the next pill comes my way, I am not passing it up. Life is short.
Thulani Ngcobo (17)
Istarted noticing this is a trend here around 2009, somewhere there, when these four rooms became drug dens.
I actually sold it for a few months and then left it alone. I was selling to my friends in high school. They are the ones who are into “explosions”, which are house parties.
It was basically for people who didn’t like taverns. It was a chilled-out type of vibe, more indoors.
But, at the same time, while people are chasing that intimacy, it can completely fuck with your brain. It can make you live like you have money when you know you are actually dead broke.
You can give someone your cellphone to keep if they ask for it, you can feel so deeply connected to people as if you have loved them your whole life.
You can have such incredible compassion or stupidity that someone can tell you they are HIV positive and you will still sleep with them. You will say, no, I won’t get it in one day. That’s how far it can take you.
So imagine the danger that that can bring. So it’s “shap” but it’s also a flop.
For me, normality only returns once you leave it alone because it takes a while to exit your system.
For me, the lethal aspect of it is partly the thrill of it and it is tied to its availability. It is home-made, it’s a cheap thrill, so you can’t vouch for its consistency. One minute there is 50% of an ingredient, the other minute 60%, [but] when it hits 80%, we are singing Amagugu at your wake.
For me, I take it because I have no other way of rebelling. We, the Zulus, were once a great people but what do we have? We manufacture nothing and all our rivers have dried up. All we are left with are townships, as large as Umlazi, as small as Clermont and 50-million ways to kill us.
That’s why other people I know do it. It’s a search for respite in hell. I can be in heaven until daybreak.