Grass not greener for underground

The boom in dispensaries and bud shops has seen traditional growers and sellers driven out of business while the government drags its feet

It’s nearly as easy to order some of the finest cannabis money can buy as it is to get a beer in Davenport Road these days, with six dispensaries of the holy herb operating in the restaurant zone that has become Durban’s Green Mile.

Easier, actually, if it’s 11am on a Tuesday — most of the restaurants are still preparing to open at lunchtime, but the cannabis shops are already trading.

Dirty Kush Breath; Strawberry Cough; Alien Cookies; indoor, outdoor and greenhouse; hash, dab and shatter — they’re all on offer, a range of cultivars, growth methods and extractions as diverse in price — and effect — as the whiskey collection at the more sophisticated of the bars in the party zone.

It’s all going rather smokingly along the Davenport ganja strip, where the shops range from a hole-in-the-wall operation with a small smoking deck in front to the more sophisticated premises offering infused meals, live entertainment and a more rarefied atmosphere in which to puff and pass.

It is still illegal to sell — or buy — cannabis in Davenport Road and anywhere else in South Africa.

After the constitutional court ruling in 2018 overturning the 80-odd year prohibition of the plant, the state was given two years to change the law. They missed the deadline — badly — and enabling legislation will only be put in place after the Cannabis for Private Purposes bill is signed into law, most probably after the 29 May national and provincial election.

Only after that will the laws enabling a commercial cannabis industry — and a national cannabis master plan curated by the agriculture ministry — be put in place.

However, the government’s tardiness hasn’t stopped entrepreneurs operating in Davenport Road, or anywhere else in Durban and the rest of the country, from pushing ahead with the green economy President Cyril Ramaphosa has been talking up in his State of the Nation addresses every year since 2020.

The upsurge in dispensaries and new entrants — and money — into the industry hasn’t been good news for everybody.

Anwar (68) has been selling cannabis in Durban’s Warwick Triangle area for more than 50 years and is among those whose businesses have been swept away by the city’s postprohibition green wave.

The eldest of a family of 10, Anwar started selling cannabis in his teens after leaving school in what was then standard three.

“I started selling zol when I was 16 and I’m still selling zol now,” Anwar told the Mail & Guardian this week.

“The family was battling. There were 10 of us. I am the eldest brother. I had to leave school and go hustle and do something.

“My father was a smoker and used to send me to go buy his zol, so I got into selling it myself.

“I got married, had a family with no job. My only income was puzzling and selling zol. I never had a job my whole life,” he said.

While money from cannabis put food on the table, paid the rent and put his four sons through school, it also brought trouble with the law and — in 1989 — a lengthy jail sentence for dealing in dagga.

“The first couple of times, I paid a fine and got suspended sentences.

Then I pulled time in jail, because of having previous convictions for the same thing.

“The magistrate told me the suspended sentences weren’t teaching me a lesson, so he gave me six and a half years in jail,” Anwar said.

On release from prison, he reverted to the cannabis game.

“I came out of there, no job, so I went straight back into this thing, ducking and diving, paying fines when the law changed, paying the cops. Money in zol is small, so it was R100, R200, like that,” he said.

“I never made big money, because of paying lawyers and jail and paying tax to the cops, but my sons are all educated and we lived with the same zol money. I’m still selling it now, what else can I do?”

Anwar’s business survived throughout prohibition but the advent of walk-in dispensaries, shops and lounges has pretty much killed it off.

His profit has dropped from between R20 000 and R30 000 a month in 2019 to between R3000 and R4000 today as the above-ground dispensaries draw in both newcomers to the market and his old clientele

“With these new shops now, there is no show for us. I was selling a kilo a week. Now I’m lucky if I sell a litre (100g) every two weeks. It’s no more what it was.”

“We went to jail for this thing but there is no show for us now.”

Age — and a lack of access to finance due to his criminal records for selling cannabis — have prevented Anwar from opening a shop himself.

“I can’t get money to get into the industry because of my criminal records for being in the same game,” he said. “What do you think of that?

“This is a young man’s game now. You have all these laaitjies that know nothing about zol and who have money but what can you do?’ he said.

The effects are also being felt in the Eastern Cape among the growers who previously supplied the underground market in Durban, East London and Cape Town.

With the majority of the shops working with their own growers — or buying backdoor product from medical growers with export licences — they have no need to do business with long-standing growers from the Eastern Cape and elsewhere.

Bantubonke Mfanekiso, a fourthgeneration cannabis grower from the Lusikisiki area, is also feeling the pinch.

His family and others in the area have historically grown the local pondo cannabis, which has gone out of fashion in favour of higher tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) strains and have also transitioned to growing the more potent cultivars.

However, the lack of demand from the sellers he has supplied over the years — they, like Anwar, are battling to retain a slice of the market — means prices have dropped, along with the volume the retailers they work with are moving.

“Things are very bad. It’s worse if you are still growing pondo,” he said this week.

“There is no market in local and it’s only the people that are growing ‘cheese’ that are surviving.”

“Those that are able to open shops are better off. They are buying a gram for R15 and are selling for R40. It is only them who are making money,” Mfanekiso said.

Herschel Maasdorp, director of business development at Jse-listed