The Madlanga Commission didn’t reveal anything new. Communities already know that the war on drugs protects power, not people. The new year brings the illusion of clean slates.
Yet, 2026 arrives with a distinct heaviness: a reckoning with how fragile law, justice and political order have become, at home and abroad. South Africa enters the new year still absorbing the revelations of theMadlanga Commissionand the uncomfortable clarity it provided about criminal networks, policing failures and the erosion of public trust. And while our own institutions grapple with questions of accountability, the world has been jolted by theUS’ military intervention in Venezuela and the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, under the guise of the War on Drugs.
South Africa is home to anestimated half a million peoplewho use illicit drugs (such as methamphetamine and heroin), the majority of whom use occasionally, in a non-problematic pattern and in ways that pose little to no threat to the public. Yet our law continues to treat them as criminals, corralling people who use drugs and low-level drug sellers into the same punitive framework designed for large-scale traffickers and cartel operatives. This is a profound misallocation of state power: we chase people who use drugs away from the support they might need, we jail the poor, we ignore the underlying conditions creating problematic drug use, and we leave the cartels intact.
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A policing environment perfectly engineered for corruption and mismanagement and abuse of power. TheMadlanga Commission’s hearingshave exposed what research has shown repeatedly, thatcriminalisation of drug use creates enormous illicit markets, and illicit marketsin turn create incentives for corruption. When a product is illegal but widely used, its regulation shifts from the state to whoever is willing to use violence and bribery to control the trade.
The South African Police Service is not uniquely flawed – it is in many ways structurally overwhelmed. Its members are given an impossible mandate, which is to eliminate drugs from society while the law itself ensures that drugs remain profitable, unregulated and hidden. This is the same pattern seen globally, from Mexico and Brazil to the Philippines.
Prohibition does not dismantle criminal organisations, it feeds them. The costs are borne not by policymakers or police, but by marginalised communities, especially young, Black, poor and working class, caught between violent illicit markets and punitive legal systems. The South African government’s current, largely punitive, approach has not reduced drug use.
It has not made communities safer and it has not slowed drug trafficking. It has had the opposite effect by deepening inequalities and violent narratives such as the “War on Drugs”. It may feel counterintuitive to consider using less criminal law against individual users, not more, to deal with drug problems in South Africa.
But, consider the evidence: countries that have adopted non-custodial sanctions for minor, nonviolent drug-related crimes (use and possession for personal use) –Portugal most famously– have seen reductions in overdose deaths, HIV and hepatitis transmissions, in the number of people entering the criminal justice system and a refocus of law enforcement on organised crime. In other words, in Portugal they stopped confusing drug use with drug trafficking (selling of drugs) and they stopped hoping that policing alone can undo decades of inequality, trauma and social exclusion.
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