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Africa and the War on Drugs

Zed Books Ltd

Africa's drug habit

[T]here is now the risk of a public health disaster in developing countries that would enslave masses of humanity to the misery of drug dependence. (Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director, UNODC)

Teens Frenzied in Drug Abuse (Website of National Campaign Against Drug Abuse Authority, Kenya)

In the last decade, Africa's association with drugs has revolved primarily around the continent's role as a transit hub in the global trade of cocaine and heroin; in contrast, consumption within the continent has been low down the list of global priorities. Consequently, Africa's relationship with drugs often seems a function of demand in western countries. In this chapter, we bring Africa's own 'drug habit' to the foreground, following our general approach of examining the drug situation in Africa from an Africa-centric perspective. Drug use is certainly an issue of great concern within Africa, as demonstrated by the torrent of media reports by local outlets. Most of these reports are infused with the discourse of the war on drugs, and moral panic is evident in such reporting: drug abuse is destroying Africa's youth, making them 'frenzied' in the above words of Kenya's anti-drug agency, National Campaign Against Drug Abuse Authority. Africa is presented as threatened as never before by a crisis of drink and drugs.

This stereotypical portrayal of substance use in Africa does little justice to the complexity of the topic, conflating the myriad substances consumed in a diverse set of contexts into a western-derived model of addiction and pharmacological determinism. This chapter challenges this model, introducing the reader to a number of substances and their cultures of consumption, showing how intertwined certain substances are with African cultures and societies, and the historical depth of Africa's relationship with drugs: the use of certain substances goes back at least centuries. While recently introduced substances such as heroin and methamphetamine are justifiably of great concern, their conflation with other substances with more established histories in Africa – khat and cannabis, for example – leads to very skewed perspectives on these 'softer' drugs. After a section examining the interactions of chemicals, culture and society in drug use, we provide a survey of several important substances consumed in Africa. First, however, we look at the type of sources available for the history and contemporary patterns and trends of African substance use.

Sources for African drug consumption

In surveying Africa's historical and contemporary drug use, we make use of a wide variety of sources. The extent and reliability of source material is patchy, although for some substances it is more comprehensive than for others: for example, we know much more about alcohol and khat use compared with cannabis, despite the ubiquity of the last of these. Clearly this reflects difficulties in studying an illicit substance, as well as the priorities of funding bodies and researchers. For all substances, however, source material for pre-modern usage is the most scanty, although we know from archaeological research in other parts of the world that humanity's relationship with psychoactive substances stretches back millennia. Indeed, an ancient beginning for our drug and alcohol habit is certain: by the Neolithic period, 'cannabis, opium, betel, tobacco and even fermented alcoholic drinks were widely used'.

Regarding Sub-Saharan Africa, archaeological evidence is very limited, the best being a number of pipe bowls found with traces of cannabis dating from around 1400 in central Ethiopia. We have to rely instead on oral historical accounts of early substance use (for example, accounts of khat use in pre-colonial Kenya), and the writings of early visitors to the continent. Perhaps the earliest such source is the twelfth-century account of a Spanish doctor – El-Ghafeky – who refers to kola, while the Moroccan explorer, Ibn Battuta, reports being offered what appears to be betel nut to chew in Mogadishu in the fourteenth century, and an Ethiopian chronicle of the same century refers to the stimulant khat. Later European writings give further tantalizing glimpses of psychoactive substance use. For example, seventeenth-century reports from southern Africa refer to the root of a shrub called canna – a psychoactive member of the Mesembryanthemum genus – chewed by Khoikhoi. Some speculate that canna was an important commodity traded among groups in southern Africa in pre-colonial times. Reports of tobacco and cannabis use are also present in the exploration literature, cannabis being widely diffused in southern and eastern Africa, while tobacco cultivation and use had spread continent-wide through sixteenth- and seventeenth-century contact with the Portuguese. There are references to other plants used in southern Africa at this time, including species of datura, a member of the nightshade family familiar for its long, white trumpet-shaped flowers, whose dangerous alkaloids can generate powerful hallucinations. The use of khat in Kenya is also referred to by explorers in the late nineteenth century who reached the Nyambene Hills where it is still cultivated and consumed by the Meru people of central Kenya. While such sparse evidence can only hint at the full extent of drug use in pre-colonial Africa, and identifying plants from accounts of travellers is fraught with problems, we can extrapolate from these glimpses and the extensive contemporary pharmacopeia of many African societies, that knowledge of such substances was widespread, and that many were incorporated into the fabric of social and economic life.

Regarding the contemporary situation, despite growing alarm at an 'epidemic' of drug use in Africa, information upon which to assess trends in consumption is patchy and hard to generalize from. Of course, estimating demand and consumption trends of usually illicitly supplied commodities is hugely difficult, and the UNODC has moved in the last three years from giving point estimates regarding drug prevalence, to instead giving large estimate ranges: they themselves are clearly aware of the difficulties in providing accurate statistics regarding drugs. Much of the statistical information used to observe trends in global demand and supply is provided each year in the UNODC's World Drug Report (WDR). The neutrality of the WDR is doubtful, and pressure placed on those drafting it to adhere to the current status quo in international policy has been recounted by one of those previously involved in writing it (who subsequently resigned). Aside from doubts about its neutrality, the statistics used in WDRs are themselves open to criticism. These are based on responses by individual governments to questionnaires, the Annual Report Questionnaires. The methodology sections of the last few WDRs provide maps showing which countries have filled in the questionnaires either fully or partly, and African countries with thoroughgoing responses are well in the minority. In the WDR of 2010, only 30 per cent of African countries submitted their reports compared with much higher percentages for Europe, North America and Asia. Also, in the words of the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), a grouping of drug NGOs, in their response to the 2010 WDR, 'the quality of information provided on illicit drug supply is significantly better than data provided on drug use related information ... this is one of the consequences of the historical dominance of a drug control policy directed at the suppression of supply'.

To make up for this data deficit, further research and initiatives like South Africa's South African Community Epidemiology Network on Drug Use (SACENDU) that surveys and publishes reports on trends in drug use make a real difference. Despite the glaring holes in statistical data, other sources – academic dissertations, articles and books, media reports, grey literature, online sources and so forth – do provide much useful information and help form the foundation for this chapter.

Understanding drug use

The word 'drug' comes with plenty of baggage. It can conjure up the stereotypical portrayal of the addict compelled to seek out his or her next fix of the controlling chemical, and suggests the simplistic notion that those unfortunate enough to try a 'drug' become hooked and compelled to continue its use. This image is as potent in Africa as elsewhere, promoted in the media, and in anti-drugs campaigns. The war on drugs has led to a discourse where substance use is often reduced to pharmacology and this medicalized notion of addiction. In such a discourse, the explanation for drug use is all in the chemistry.

Of course, the psychoactive and physiological effects of drugs cannot be ignored, and a grasp of their pharmacological action is essential in understanding their appeal and dangers for African consumers. The ability of natural and synthetic compounds such as cocaine and methamphetamine to mimic brain chemicals, in particular those related to the release of dopamine and other compounds related to the 'reward centre' of the brain, powerfully explains the 'rush' and 'high' so often described by consumers. The similarity of opiate drugs to the brain's natural painkillers – endorphins – also explains how they can induce feelings of euphoria and dampen out both physical and psychological pain. The actions of such isolated chemicals are easier to understand than the combination of active compounds in such plant substances as cannabis, khat and even tea, where the effects of certain compounds appear to counteract those of others, and scientific experiments that take these different factors into account are difficult to devise. However, even here much progress has been made, and, for example, we now have a better grasp of how other compounds present in cannabis can moderate effects of its most studied compound: tetrahydrocannabinol. While the effects of such substances vary greatly depending on the individual consumer (due to idiosyncrasies in body weight, metabolism, as well as set and setting), there is still sufficient convergence in their actions for pharmacology to offer much essential insight in studying the whys and wherefores of their consumption, whether this consumption takes place in London or Lagos.

But psychoactive substances are soaked in sociality and culture, and understanding fully the effects and appeal of their pharmacology requires understanding the social and cultural contexts in which the drugs are consumed, many of which aren't recreational, but instead ritualistic or functional. As we will see below, cannabis consumption in Africa is often used to increase stamina, rather than in the recreational settings associated with the drug in the West. Also, attempts to explain too much through pharmacology can lead to reductionist theories that don't do justice to the sheer variety of factors influencing consumption and how problematic or otherwise it becomes. For example, theorizing that alcohol leads to disinhibition in its consumers has been critiqued extensively by anthropologists and others who point out the cultural variation in intoxicated behaviour and ideas about intoxication. The anthropological commonplace that people perceive and feel the effects of drugs – whether medicinal or recreational – through cultural filters is hardly a radical theory, but it is still a powerful counter to a pharmacological deterministic approach to drug use. The potential complexity that culture brings to perceptions of drugs is nicely demonstrated by the famous 'placebo effect' in medicine, and how meanings associated with, for example, the colour and taste of medicines can increase or impede their efficacy is well attested. The pharmacologies of drugs certainly help constitute the ideas and cultural worlds built around them; but ideas, meanings and associations in turn help constitute how these pharmacologies are felt and described. Even perceiving pleasure from the effects of drug use is not a simple matter, as Howard Becker demonstrated in his famous article of how people had to learn to become cannabis smokers – they had to learn how to inhale smoke, and to be socialized into feeling certain effects that might not be inherently pleasurable (dizziness, for example) as something to enjoy.

While anthropologists have been keen in general to relativize drug consumption, other approaches in the social sciences have been keen to have their say in explaining drug use. The importance of concepts such as 'social exclusion' and 'anomie' in such theories shows how the notion of drug use as something 'deviant' has a hold on people's perceptions, despite the near ubiquity of drug use in human society. Such approaches also downplay one of the main reasons for using such substances – pleasure; indeed, hedonism swirls around drug cultures such as that of Kenya, where consumers of alcohol, cannabis, heroin and khat all strive to induce the euphoric feeling of stimu (from the English word 'steam'), the general term used for intoxication. However, understanding the social settings of drug consumption is crucial, as is understanding the impacts of consumption for sociality and issues of poverty, well-being and power. Substance use clearly has much potential for social harm – especially where the substance itself comes to dominate a life – while it can also have a positive side, helping forge social networks, ward off fatigue and so forth. Social exclusion can be an important factor in drug use, but so can social inclusion, and problematic drug use is certainly not restricted to those deemed as 'socially excluded' or suffering from 'anomie'. There is no social theory of drug use that can account for all the particularities of each substance in each particular social and cultural setting. For example, the social and cultural worlds revolving around khat and cannabis in Africa (see below) often diverge from western ideas of what drug consumption involves, and one can't just assume that concepts such as 'addiction', 'anomie' or 'social exclusion' will explain satisfactorily their continuing popularity.

Nevertheless, there is convergence in African and western drug cultures. This convergence is seen in the similar modes of consumption used for particular drugs (smoking and injecting), and in similarities in the way particular drug effects are described. Descriptions of the (pharmacological and social) effects of heroin appear very similar in Africa as elsewhere, for example, as do those of methamphetamine in South Africa. Such convergence comes both from the effects of the substances, and from the globalization of drugs discourse. Another globalized feature of Africa's drug cultures is the embrace of reggae culture and its extolling of cannabis use. Also, poverty and social exclusion do play important roles – though not necessarily causal ones – in problematic consumption in Africa, as they do in the West; where much meaning and respect revolves around gangs, and where drugs are as easily accessible as in such deprived and marginalized areas as South Africa's Cape Flats, high rates of drug use are to be expected. And poverty is a considerable barrier to treatment for drug problems; as such treatment is generally only available for those few who can afford it.

In short, understanding demand for psychoactive substances in Africa requires a grasp of pharmacological, cultural, social and political-economic factors, and the way these interact. Sadly, the available research is not yet of sufficient depth in respect to many of these substances, but what follows will provide the reader with an overview of drug use in Africa: the many different types of intoxicating and stimulating substances used, their histories and social importance and the many different cultures of consumption that revolve around them.

Key substances

In this section, we focus in detail on some of the key substances used in Sub-Saharan Africa – khat, cannabis, heroin, cocaine, mandrax and methamphetamine – that are most targeted by the war on drugs. However, these are not the only 'drugs' used in Africa, and numerous other psychoactive substances are widely consumed. In what follows we also introduce the reader to some of these other substances too, beginning with those containing caffeine, which while of little danger to the health of consumers, are of great social significance. We also focus on two other legal, but more ambivalently regarded, substances: alcohol and tobacco. These are usually insulated from comparison with illicit psychoactive substances, but concerns about their health and social impact are leading to more and more campaigns for their tighter regulation. We then look at khat, a substance labelled as 'quasi-legal' as its legality varies so much from country to country. The other substances covered are those more widely condemned and under international control. Though, as we will see in the case of cannabis, its long history and its cultural validation among many on the continent means that it is soaked in much ambivalence too. Of course, we miss out many important and fascinating substances in the descriptions below, in particular iboga (the roots of Taberbanthe iboga, a hallucinogen used in the Bwiti cult of Gabon), solvents used by street children in Africa and throughout the developing world, and such pharmaceuticals as Rohypnol and diazepam, sold illegally and used recreationally in countries including Kenya.

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Excerpted from Africa and the War on Drugs by Neil Carrier, Gernot Klantschnig. Copyright © 2012 Neil Carrier and Gernot Klantschnig. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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