The Labor-Drug Question in Colonial Worlds: Mandrax, Heroin, and Xanax in South Africa’s Era of Unemployment

Abstract

How does drug use change in a country once desperate for waged labor but now marked by youth unemployment rates of more than 50%? This article considers historical connections between drugs and labor in South Africa, a colonial setting where capitalism was notoriously drug fueled. Drawing on oral histories, ethnography, and archival sources in the port city of Durban, I suggest that a gradual but important change in drug use occurred from around the 1970s. Drugs shifted from being used as forms of leisure and coping in relation to arduous waged work to absorbing the stresses of an economy marked by massive youth unemployment and precarious work. The study shows how the explosion in the illicit use of Mandrax (methaqualone) from the 1970s and heroin as well as Xanax (alprazolam) in the 2000s took place on and shaped the terrain of these political economic transformations.