THE HELICOPTER ORIENTATED OPERATION along the Tugela River in the KwaZulu/Natal Midlands in the winter of 2006 lasted three weeks. Though conditions were tough, we ended up destroying the equivalent of about 20 tons of what some people like to call ‘wacky backy’. Others know it as marijuana, pot, cannabis, grass, widow, ganga, weed or, more colloquially to Amsterdam’s coffee shop imbibers, Durban Gold.
On this trip to KwaZulu/Natal (still called Zululand by the majority of people who live there), I joined a group of cops searching for the drug in a huge inland part of the country that adjoins the Indian Ocean.
Because of the season, it wasn’t the plants that we targeted. There were many of them, of course, sprouting early in just about every little valley, cranny and secluded canyon, but it was the seeds we were after.
Backed by a combined paramilitary police and army contingent, armed elements were dropped at short notice by chopper into some of the most remote corners of the region. The men would go in and without formality, knock down doors and, on several occasions, walls. The search was basic: a hunt to find the secreted little kernels that were perhaps a quarter the size of the average match-head. In places they were found bundled together in tins, 44-gallon fuel containers and plastic bottles, sometimes millions of seeds in a single hideaway.
Most were hidden in drums, sometimes a hundredweight of seeds at a time. Others were wrapped in plastic and covered in sack-cloth to keep the damp out. Still more were stashed under beds, in cupboards or buried in the ground. One batch that must have weighed 50 pounds was discovered under an old bath that had been turned upside down in the back yard of a school.
There was a lot of money invested in the business, especially when you consider that a lone marijuana seed can fetch anything between $2 and $8 dollars on the clandestine London market. Much depends on supply and demand and, obviously, when the time is right, a bagful might easily be worth a fortune. One South African visitor who smuggled the dried, seed-rich bud of a single marijuana plant to London recently and boasted about it afterwards, said that he sold his little pile – that probably wouldn’t have filled a matchbox – for almost $300.