At one stage while working with the police out of Winterton, a small town in the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains, I had a drum of the stuff in my hotel room and it stayed there for a week. Under appropriate conditions and with the right contacts, the pile (that could have weighed about 60 pounds) might easily have bought me a comfortable home somewhere outside London.

Finding the stuff wasn’t easy. Marijuana seeds are an extremely valuable commodity in societies where money is scarce. The narcotic is composed largely of a dry, shredded, green-brown mix of flowers, stems, leaves and seeds and is more commonly called dagga in South Africa. It is said to be regularly used by about four per cent of the world’s population and, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, about 0.6 per cent daily. While it is not the most potent mind-altering substance, its major biologically active chemical compound is tetrahydrocannabinol (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol), commonly referred to as THC,¹ and today it is acknowledged by the experts to be about a dozen times stronger than the same weed passed around by some parents and grandparents during the 1960s and 1970s.

What is immediately obvious to those involved, on both sides of the law, is that like cocaine and heroin, the sale and export of marijuana has become a hugely lucrative business. Also, the ramifications are thoroughly international. One of the chief suppliers of pot – specifically to the European market – is Southern Africa.

Intrinsically, our role was to remove – by force, if necessary and invariably backed by firepower – what was sometimes the only source of income for a community. In some places it was the sole means of support for entire groups of families. It was tough work, hard on the body and on emotions in an environment where many people hardly have enough cash to put bread on the table for their kids.

However, whether in KwaZulu/Natal in South Africa, in British Columbia or Peru, or along the length of the Rogue River in Oregon where some of America’s finest dope is produced, it is against the law to possess the stuff, never mind grow it commercially for an always expanding export market. In all these countries, national or parliamentary edicts dictate the law.

One of the immediate consequences of what we were doing was that while we remained active in the eradication process, we were under constant threat. While our choppers weren’t fired on from the ground in that operation, they had been at other times. Also, quite a few of those arrested in this pursuit were armed.

More worrying, this was ‘high octane work’ as it was phrased by a journalist who accompanied us, accentuated by the fact that almost all of the cops with whom we operated had been wounded at least once before, because such is the nature of crime in South Africa these days.

Zwoyo Ntoshabala was a member of our group. A 28-year-old constable with South Africa’s crack National Intervention Unit (NIU), his list of wounds in action included blast trauma in an explosion in a house that had been booby-trapped by a drug lord.

Sterre Wandrag, a 37-year-old captain with the NIU had been shot in his buttocks before he joined us in Winterton. Even more serious were wounds sustained by Captain Craig Benn, a 42 year-old NIU Captain. Apart from being hit on the head with a hammer – a powerful blow that was intended to kill him – he had previously been shot twice in the chest, once more in the thigh and another time in his foot. Craig has since left the force in disgust.

The man running ground operations in Zululand was 48-year-old Captain Bazil Da Silva, who’d been shot twice by the time we worked together. He’d taken a bullet in his torso and another in the arm, as well as machete blows to his trunk.

Overall, the routine that faced these cops wasn’t as difficult as it was demanding. The air component was headed by René Coulon, a fiftysomething South African Police Services (SAPS) Senior Superintendent in command of Durban’s Air Wing, KwaZulu/Natal. Married with five children, René originally flew choppers in the South African Air Force in Angola and in his ‘new’ job; he’d been chasing criminals for more than a decade.

Louis De Waal, another Senior Superintendent in command of the Cape Town SAPS Air Wing, flew up specially to lend a hand with one of his unit’s Hughes 500s. Together with the balance of the air component, almost everybody was billeted at the Bridge Hotel in Winterton in the Natal Midlands. The rest of us stayed at what was probably the best little bed and breakfast joint in the region.

Susan le Grange took very good care of us at Lilac Lodge where her dinners were always home-cooked and exquisite, which was unusual for a low-key countryside tourist establishment. Her food was good enough for the SAPS guys to eschew most of what was on offer at their hotel and, instead, eat with us.

Then, before first light each morning, we’d head out towards the east in the choppers, the trucks having set out from base two hours before. At a predetermined RV – we tended to use different ones most days – the operation would start almost immediately.

The Hughes 500s that we used were all fitted with American spraying machines developed by an Oregon company. Compact, practical and light, they are used world-wide in drug operations – including those in Afghanistan to counter the annual poppy harvest. The systems are also used in more conventional agricultural pursuits, for which they were originally designed.

It was rare that we didn’t spot fields of dagga along the way as soon as we got away from the settlements. Sometimes there were scores of them, mostly secreted alongside the occasional river that we’d cross while heading east towards the coast. The pilots would arrive at their temporary base where the rest of gang was waiting, then fuel up and get started.