WHERE DAGGA IS GROWN

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3715, 19 October 1926, Page 7

WHERE DAGGA IS GROWN

NORTH COAST OF NATAL dodges of drug traffickers The growth of the dagga-smoking habit among the natives and colored people residing in the towns has aroused much concern recently among the police, wires the Durban correspondent of the Johannesburg Sunday Times.’ , , . . Although offenders are being prosecuted almost daily in every Court House in the Union, the demoialising effects of dagga smoking are spreading to an alarming extent. An altogether strange and inexplicable aspect of the insangu habit—a name by which it is known to the natives—is that the evil effects of the smoking are only very slightly apparent in the country districts, wheie umfaans are accustomed to the use ol dagga almost from the time they have sufficient intelligence to pick it for themselves. In crowded suburbs and towns, however, where altogether different conditions of living obtain, insangu has a far more disastrous effect on the mind and body of the smoker, and indulgence is known to cause 25 per cent, of the crimes against the person, while it is also stated to be a factor in the rapid degeneration of the natives. , Insangu is not new in this country. It was smoked by the South African natives probably hundreds of years before white men came to the country, hut it is only of recent years that the habit has been producing abnormal results; so that it seems obvious that the effects of dagga on the smoker arc purely relative to environment and conditions. CAREFULLY CULTIVATED A police constable who has, until quite recently, been engaged in lighting the illicit trafficking of insangu along the North Coast, informed the Durban representative ol the bunclaj Times’ that he was sure that nearly every ounce of hemp tobacco that linos its way into Natal was grown on the coast, particularly in the native loca-

tions in the neighborhood of Mapnmulo and Ndwedwe. Here, he said, the drug is cultivated by the natives and the Indians with all the care devoted to ordinary farming, and extensive holds are to be found neatly laid out in peifect rows. „ „ . , c ■ 1 “But how is all this leaf earned into the towns?” he was asked. “You would bo surprised, replied the constable, “ to know a few of the tricks these people get up to to get rid of their crop.” Indian buses, he said, played a very large part m the distribution of the drug, and, by moans of hundreds of shrewd dodges, carried very large consignments to Durban, where it was redirected. Ono of the methods at one time used by the growers to get their illicit produce past the police was to pack it in straw mats and send it by bus, but the abnormal traffic in thick mats soon aroused suspicions, with the result that the police made a big haul. NEVER AT A LOSS. But the insangu farmers were never at a loss to find some method of sale transport. Some natives were occasionally seen at the railway stations and bus ranks carrying unusually largo bundles and blankets, and on numerous occasions a search had resulted in a conviction. j ,, ~, On one occasion the constable told our representative he was standing near the railway station when he* saw a native suddenly snatch a bundle of blankets from another native who was about to board a train. The thief was overtaken and brought back to the railway station, and the owner of the blankets was asked to come along to the police station to lay a charge. To the constable’s surprise, the man said that be was satisfied at having recovered his blankets and did not wish to lay a charge. This generosity aroused the policeman’s suspicion, and lie removed both men to the police station, where the blankets were laid open and a large bundle ol insangu was revealed.

“The sellers charge half a crown for a fistful of dagga,” went on the constable. “Do you wonder, therefore, that a grower lias been known to produce £IOO for liis legal defence? As long as the natives in the locations on the North Coast are permitted to carry on this wholesale production of i'nsangu, the drug habit will continue to grow in the towns.”