South Africa's craze for heroin-marijuana cocktail

In an open space near the railway in the South African township of Soweto, several young men and women in their early twenties are smoking nyaope, a new drug cocktail.

Some look like the walking dead they are so stoned.

Thuli, an addict says she got hooked at 14 and sees no future for herself. She is just 16 and hooked on an extremely addictive drug which is sweeping across this nation, seizing new victims everyday.
Nyaope is a whitish powder - low-grade heroin mixed with ingredients such as rat poison and sometimes even crushed-up medicine for people with HIV.
Sprinkled on top of marijuana, it is a highly addictive, life-wrecking cocktail.
"I must smoke this thing; it's our medication. We can't live without it. If I don't smoke, I will get sick," says another smoker, who did not want to give his name, as he breathes in a lung full.
Despite being high, these addicts all say they want to quit because they realise they have been imprisoned by a drug which is sending them down a dead end.
"When we were young we took marijuana first at high school and experimented with that before going onto the harder stuff," says Kabelo, a 32-year-old nyaope addict.

 

Twenty-three-year-old Nomvula, rolling another joint with her pink nail-varnished fingers, says: "My family wants to help me. They think jail would be good for me as a rehab."
Costing just a little more than $2 (£1.25) a hit, it is relatively cheap.
But as lives crumble, users soon start stealing to fuel the habit.

They make enemies in their own family and among the normally extremely friendly community.

Ephraim Radebe, a recovering addict, said he was caught by people in the very next street to his home.
"They set upon me, beating me with bricks, saying I must die. Then one man brought petrol and wanted to burn me," he said.
Mr Radebe says he was "sick and tired of being sick and tired" and has now managed to be clean for two months - much to the relief of his mother, whose life had become hell.
"When I came home, I would take off my earrings and put them in my bag," recalls Rose Radebe, Ephraim's mother.
"The next day morning they were gone. He would steal from me and even from my mother's home or the neighbours.
"This thing is destroying the parents even more than the child because everyday you feel like: 'Where did I go wrong?'"
Even though it contains heroin, the drug nyaope is still in the process of being classified as an illegal substance and the government says this has hampered efforts to prosecute cases involving the drug.
There have also been reports of police officers working in cahoots with the dealers.
Whilst nyaope is mostly found in Gauteng Province around Johannesburg, a similar cocktail known as whoonga is available on the streets of Durban and communities in the Western Cape have been ravaged by the drug Crystal Meth, known locally as tik.
Following the rapid rise in drug addiction, the government has pledged to set up a rehab centre in each of the country's nine provinces.

  By Will Ross. BBC News, Soweto