In-Depth – Effects Of Nyaope

A cheap and deadly drug, known as nyaope, is ravaging townships, fuelling crime and tearing families apart. Yet, officials seem as helpless to stop it as the desperate users themselves!

In January, a BBC Africa Eye documentary shook viewers across the world and notched up nearly 100 000 YouTube hits. Saving Jesus tracked Joburg crime reporter Golden Mtika as he visited the graves of his twin nephews, then set out to save their friend, Jesus, from the same fate – in the grip of a highly-addictive heroin-based street drug.

Called whoonga in townships around Durban – where the problem first surfaced around 2010 – and nyaope in Gauteng, Mpumalanga and Limpopo, where it has spread, it’s a variation on ‘sugars’ – a cocktail based on low-grade heroin. It’s thought to be smuggled in largely through Durban’s port, and is believed to include ARVs and Rattex. However, toxicology analysis of 40 samples by Professor Aye Aye Khine at Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University found ARVs in only

three, and no Rattex. All contained heroin, caffeine and other substances such as codeine, morphine and MDA.

THE HIGHS

Nyaope is mixed with soil, sand or, in some cases, cement powder, Khine says. It’s then rolled in Rizla, newspaper or dagga leaves and smoked, or heated and injected. It gives strong addiction, and after ongoing use, severe withdrawal symptoms. Clinical studies have shown that interactions between various substances “aggravate the body’s addiction reaction and cause effects such as acute abdominal pain, seizures, vomiting, salivation and psychosis,” Khine adds. “This makes the user consume more and more nyaope in the belief that it will relieve these symptoms. Nyaope is relatively cheap (about R20 to R40 a hit) and a person can become highly addicted.” So driven are some users to ease the experiences of withdrawal, that occasionally, one will shoot up then draw blood from a vein and inject it into another user to ‘share’ the high, in what first made headlines in 2017 as ‘Bluetoothing’. “Any effect would be imaginary,” says Walter Petersen, director of the South African National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (Sanca) in Durban. “The other person is very likely to get hepatitis B or C, or HIV, but they won’t get high.”

THE LOWS

Jesus and his friends are vivid evidence of the costs of such dependency. The once immaculate dresser from a good home and father of a toddler, says on camera: “Nyaope has cost me my wife. It’s cost me my child. It’s cost me everything… The pain feels like it’s taking out your soul. To get a fix, I’d literally do anything. If it means I’ll have to shoot somebody or stab somebody, I’ll do it.”

It’s a feeling Tremaine M understands: “I even broke into my gran’s house with a tyre iron to steal money for a hit.” Tremaine is proof of the wide reach of nyaope – for while research by the South African Community Epidemiology Network on Drug Use (SACENDU) shows users to be mainly black, male and lower class, Tremaine is a young white woman from a middle-class home.

“Mom drank heavily and was in abusive relationships,” the 29-year-old says. “My earliest memory is a man holding her head under water in the kitchen sink. When I played up, desperate for attention, she’d say ‘I wish you’d just die’, and beat me with a belt. After she married my wealthy step-dad and had my brother, we moved to Verwoerd Park and she told me to ‘f*** off’ because she had a new family.”

Tremaine says she started drinking in Grade 7. “In Grade 9, I fell for a guy. I remember sitting on my futon, and he brought out a packet with brown powder, fixed it on a piece of tin foil, and said ‘smoke this’. It tasted disgusting and delicious. I fell in love with it instantly! It numbed me from fear and insecurity, heat and cold, hunger and thirst. I became a zombie, dead, which was what I wanted. Later, he told me it was Thai (heroin).”

By Grade 10, Tremaine was a habitual user and had dropped out of school, stealing from her family to finance her habit. At 16, she was arrested while trying to score – she was sent to rehab. She found work as a receptionist and at 19 bought a car. “Then I broke up with a guy and went looking for heroin again,” she continues.Unable to hold down a job, Tremaine lived in her car, and when she lost that, moved on to the street and on to nyaope, which she shared with 20 to 30 users in Windsor East in Joburg for six years. “I was one of three women, the only mlungu. They treated me like a sister and I loved them like brothers. Tshepo shared his cardboard and blanket with me. On nyaope, you’re not interested in sex – only your next hit.”

Rather than sell sex like many, Tremaine hustled in malls, begging for nappies and baby food, which she sold to Malawian and Nigerian moms for cash. “But I was dying. My skin was grey and I weighed 40 kg. One day, three years ago, I tried to inject myself with 12 bags to kill myself, but missed the vein. In total desperation, I called my biological dad, who lived in Dubai, and begged him to help me.”

Her father flew back and got her into Viewpoint Recovery Centre in Boksburg (now closed), where she was given methadone to ease withdrawal in detoxification, and support from caring counsellors, then by Narcotics Anonymous and its 12-step programme. Today, Tremaine is a fresh-faced new mom, and works as a marketing executive assistant.

Private rehab centres are, however, an unimaginable luxury for most whoonga users, who are mainly black. With Mtika’s support, Jesus finally found salvation at the Tenth Commandment rehab centre in Tembisa, where methadone is unaffordable, and patients are simply locked up until they’re ‘clean’, and given food and emotional support. But without an education, skills and job opportunities, it’s easy to slip back. “Addiction is a disease of relapse. I live each day with gratitude and a call to my sponsor,” Tremaine says. Her forearm has a tattoo that reads, “Never forget the pain.”

THE LOWDOWN

The full extent of the whoonga/nyaope problem is impossible to gauge, as the only data is collated by SACENDU from rehab centres – and only a small proportion of users access them. Last year, the recorded heroin admissions in Gauteng increased

from 14 % to 22 %, but remained static elsewhere. Ncumisa Ndelu, spokesperson for the Department of Social Development (DSD) in KZN, says, “Most admissions in treatment centres are for whoonga and alcohol.” Those providing healthcare to drug users on the streets, like Ruth Birtwhistle of the Denis Hurley Centre’s Usizo Lwethu Clinic, report seeing far more people ‘spiking ’ (injecting whoonga).

The DSD’s drug strategy rests on “identifying hot spot areas, offering counselling services and providing psychosocial and medical services,” Ndelu explains. Three state-owned treatment centres can accommodate about 150 patients in total, and three state-funded NPOs, including Sanca, another 60. It’s clearly a drop in the ocean, given that already in 2015, several hundred whoonga users were living in Durban’s infamous ‘Whoonga Park’ (near Albert Park) alone.

Whoonga’s effects are devastating — driving crime and prostitution, feeding on individuals’ underlying issues, and preying on families. Birtwhistle tells of Ayanda, 23, who lives in a plastic shack and has been smoking whoonga for eight years: “She fell pregnant last year and at her first antenatal visit, found out she was HIV positive. We engaged with her family to see if they’d look after the baby, but her mom was adamant she couldn’t. She was already battling to look after Ayanda’s three other kids, aged 3 to 9. Ayanda had a miscarriage and has no plan to stop smoking.”

So what can be done to stop more lives going up in smoke?