'In Narcs We Trust' – What’s the Obsession with Delusions of Grandeur?

Recently I’ve been wondering what is the biggest threat to poor communities these days? I remembered that in the 1990s it used to be guns, during the Nelson Mandela Gun Proliferation Era.

I then discovered, quite by accident that communities’ biggest threat these days is actually drugs. Everybody I know is on drugs to the point that these past two weeks when I watched television; first etv on Friday and they screened DMX starring Never Die Alone and the theme was about drugs and their allure and the barons who make a living out of people’s addictions I was not numbed.

I remembered the first time I saw somebody overdosing on drugs in a film I went out and puked. But not today. Then as if that was not enough, or as if this was Narcotics Year etv’s Scandal is currently on a druggy theme. Mangi, Daniel Nyathi (Sello Maake ka-Ncube)’s son ‘has taken hook, line and sinker’ (in the words of Abigail) to the habit.

Then last night I watched Special Assignment and the issue was the devastation being unleashed by Tik on the Coloured communities of the Cape Flats. Whole communities are being wiped from the face of the earth with a single syringe up a vein.

Conscious rapper Nasir Jones once rapped that ‘we used to fear arms but now the weapons are chemical’. Those who couldn’t defeat poor communities through firearms just introduced crack, cocaine, heroine, alcohol, weed, mandrax, tik, ecstasy, mushrooms, valium and others in our communities to slowly erode our humanity.

They say that once in your system tik relaxes you, then you move to a state of euphoria, then psychosis, then violence since your brain mutates to that of an ape – or violent closest relative. It also gives you uncontrolled libido which then means that you fuck without condoms and spread AIDS.

You steal things to sell and at the end you have empty houses, hungry children and an AIDS epidemic that is out of control. In an episode of The Sopranos Tony asked his father Junior what to do with his beloved nephew after he started using and the old man said, ‘it’s like when your dog has rabies, no matter how you love it you have no option but to put it down’. Tony couldn’t, and that was his undoing.

During Special Assignment a Cape Flats mother was given three years suspended sentence by a court after she put down her rabies infected dog – she strangled her own son after he became uncontrollable violent.

But then looking at the erosion of the coloured community in Special Assignment got me wondering if some races are more susceptible to drugs than others? I mean when the CIA wanted to break the Black Panther resistance they flooded the ‘active’ neighborhoods with crack and got even disciplined activists like Afeni Shakur hooked. That’s when niggers started gangbanging.

It’s rather worrying me you know, because while coloureds are on some tik, our sisters are on mandrax and ecstasy, our brothers and fathers on alcohol and weed, our middle-class uncles and aunts (together with our cousins and nephews) on cocaine. Is this the future of poor communities in this globe? Are we so done shooting each other that we now committing suicide? I’m still trying to figure.