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After helping an elderly woman load her luggage in a minibus-taxi at a busy intersection in Soweto, a lean and stretched young man is rewarded with some coins for her efforts.
With nyaope, a street drug whose main ingredient is heroin, he is determined to make 30 rand ($ 2) within two hours after the onset of withdrawal symptoms.
"It's been 11 years now that we smoke without stopping," he told AFP while he was pulling a cigarette (tobacco) with his trembling hands.
"What made me start smoking, nyaope, was stress, I had too much stress in my life, so I ended up counting on nyaope to calm me down." said the 28-year-old girl, frail and distant-eyed.
Heroin has been wreaking havoc in cities and rural areas of South Africa since the early 2000s, according to a recent report from ENACT, an EU-funded project against the cross-border organized crime.
Highly addictive, the nyaope badtail is composed of heroin containing methamphetamine, codeine and other substances, ranging from antiretroviral drugs to the powder of flat screen televisions.
Smoked in a rolled joint laced with marijuana, or liquidated and injected, it often leaves users feeling sleepy.
"That's the reason people on the street corners are still sleeping, and from the moment you find the solution, you forget all the problems," said the user from Nyaope in Soweto, a town located at outskirts of Johannesburg.
The drug is known as "unga" in the Western Cape, "spice" or "whoonga" in Kwa-Zulu Natal Province, and "nyaope" in Gauteng, the province that houses Johannesburg and Pretoria.
"Foundation of the criminal economy"
The ENACT report – "Hide to the eye: stealthy takeover of heroin in South Africa" - estimates that there are more than 100,000 heroin users in South Africa and that the Trafficker market generates annual revenue of about 3.6 billion rand (260 million dollars).
"Heroin is a key product that underpins the criminal economy in South Africa and has facilitated the expansion of the criminal economy," said the report's author , Simone Haysom.
"The drug trade has had the most destructive effect on poor communities," she added.
The heroine comes from Afghanistan, the world's largest poppy producer from which heroin is produced, from the Indian Ocean to Eastern Africa, via southern Africa, and then inland to to be distributed.
"We can buy any drug over 50 meters around us – it's a well-known fact," AFP Robert Michel, a frustrated director of the Outreach Foundation, told AFP. AFP, in his office in a church in the Hillbrow district of Johannesburg.
Shaun Shelly, founder of the SA Policy Policy's outreach program, said: "As a stranger, you could probably get heroin in 15 minutes in the street".
In Hillbrow, one of the most notorious neighborhoods in downtown Johannesburg, heroin trafficking is mainly committed by gangs, organized crime syndicates and corrupt police.
"The worst thing is that the police do nothing, and in many cases we hear that the police and drug traffickers are working hand in hand," said Michel.
Children addicted
The plague has affected many children around the age of 15, and even some as early as the age of nine, according to Hillbrow's social worker, Sizwe Bottoman.
"Others stopped school because their brain was so touched that they were not concentrating," she said.
Last month, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa promised that a "national anti-drug master plan" would reduce demand, cut supply and "finally free our young people from the damage that they do." They cause ".
He said he was alarmed by the fact that "the average age of an addict is getting younger and younger".
"Drugs such as nyaope (…) fuel violence, crime, suicide and risky badual behavior," said the president.
The drug problem in South Africa is also exacerbated by poor social services and its youth unemployment rate of more than 50%.
After already overcoming his addiction to Crystal Methamphetamine and the Mandrax drug, the 38-year-old Caponian Ashley Abrahams said he regretted the day he had started consuming heroin there was 10 years.
"It's not easy to stay clean.You have to be busy, you have to find work," said AFP to a homeless person who was taking out the teaspoon and the lighter that he's using to get high
"Someone who consumes drugs, enters rehab, returns to the street and has no prospect of finding a job – and resumes drug use in a few days", has said Michel from the Awareness Foundation.
"It's a terrible cycle to break."
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