KEY POINTS:
As green rubbery sea creatures are emptied from a bin liner into a sink in the police interview room at Muizenberg, Cape Town, a shabby white man looks on guiltily.
He is the first link in an international, multi-million-dollar illegal trade that has brought Triad gangs and drugs to South Africa and is tearing the Cape region apart.
The man's flippers and wetsuit lie on the floor. He was caught by game wardens poaching abalone - a saucer-sized mollusc prized as a delicacy in the Far East.
He could have earned around $600 for his catch of 12kg but now faces five years in Pollsmoor prison.
The enormous value of the delicacy has brought the Chinese Triad gangs to South Africa. In a cash-free transaction, the Triads swap the abalone for the ingredients to make methamphetamine, or "tik" ("P" in New Zealand and "Ice" in Australia.)
Hundreds of tonnes of abalone are smuggled out of the Cape every year, to be exported through Hong Kong, according to Wildlife Department officials who say that the local abalone is on the brink of extinction.
But it is the effects of tik on South Africans that are most noticeable.
Already suffering a murder rate of 50 a day, and a rape every 26 seconds, the Cape is gripped by an epidemic of tik - a highly addictive crystallised form of speed - that has resulted in a 200 per cent surge in drug-related crime in two years. It's driving the region mad - literally.
"Tik has a high propensity for causing neuro-psychiatric problems," says Dr Neshaad Schrueder, the head of the emergency unit at GF Jooste hospital in Manenberg, Cape Town.
"We were seeing about 40 patients a month, we're now seeing about 180 per month. So that's more than a quadrupling of psychiatric patients."
About 250,000 people, most of them white, live in the touristy areas of Cape Town. Under apartheid, two and a half million non-whites were forced fro" their homes in the 1960s and 70s and dumped in the dunes and swamps of the Cape Flats. Since then the mixed-race coloured communities have been plagued by gangs, drugs and alcohol.
Action, a member of the Americans gang, smokes tik with his mates in a cramped room he rents. As the drug takes effect he starts waving his .45 pistol about.
"We need about R400 ($77) a day to pay for the tik. None of us work, so we steal, we tax and we sell tik. If you've got tik, you've got money. We get lots of sex because the girls who want tik will give us sex for a straw [a one-inch measure of tik in a drinking straw]."
Provincial Prime Minister Ibrahim Rasool declared war on the drug with the slogan "Tikked Off". His efforts led to death threats from the Triads and Cape Town gangs.
His suggestion that it may still be "largely a coloured issue" may be wishful thinking. The tik epidemic is finally breaching Cape Town's apartheid-era walls.
In swish Camps Bay, bar manager Neville Crawford sucks deeply on a straw shoved into a lightbulb globe where heated tik is vapourising.
"Here and in Seapoint there are a lot of high schools where kids are doing it and it's getting out of hand. People say it's a township drug. Let me tell you, it's everywhere."
Observer
