I grew up in the 1970s. The hippy movement started in the late 1960s, so I was well poised to be a hippy. I wasn’t one.
The hippy movement was based on “drugs and sex and rock ‘n’ roll”, but most of this passed South Africa by. It was the time of the National Party government. The National Party government had the National Party government police force, and the National Party government police force had the National Party government drug squad.
Members of the drug squad were serious people. Missionaries, in a way. Calvinists to a man (and they were 90% men).
It so happened that a club in Cape Town made a noise that disturbed the neighbours. The police visited the club and told the revellers to turn the noise down. They did. But then they turned it up again. So, the police sent in the drug squad, who arrived with dogs and Uzi submachine guns. They put everybody against a wall and frisked them. On Tommy the dealer, they found some dodgy pills and some dope. They took him back to the cop shop and, after a few days, he remembered where he got the pills and the dope. He pleaded guilty and got six months.
The cops visited Pushing Pete, who, back at the cop shop after a few days, remembered that he had given the pills and dope to Tommy and a few others but he could not remember where he got them from. After a few more days, his memory cleared and so the cops went around to visit the house of Johnny Crack. After a brief gun battle, the cops hauled away Johnny and a few others and found in the house enough dope to render an army unconscious and enough pills to meet even the widest prescription. They also found R500 000, which, at that time, could buy more than one Clifton bungalow.
Crack and his friends kept schtum and the case was taken by some high-priced lawyer types. The public prosecutor had a word with them and Crack hulle pleaded guilty and got ten years each. Unless, of course, Crack could come up with a good reason, there would be no suspended sentence. This jogged Crack’s memory and, as a result, early one morning, the police boarded a ship and arrested the crew and impounded the ship.
The whole operation was under the control of Lieutenant Fireball, who, as a result of all the arrests and general cleanup, was promoted to Captain. Unfortunately, the drug people had taken such a knock that they decided to take Fireball out of circulation. So, they drove past his car while cruising down the M5 and emptied a magazine of 0.45 soft-nose bullets into it and the cop.
Whacking the fuzz turned out to be a very poor idea, since the drug squad fell on the drug community like the seven plagues. Every little merchant was taken into custody and every little one gave up another little one and the courts had to work shifts to sentence them all. The result of the crackdown was to unearth a whole treasure trove of guns, stolen goods, drugs, corrupt cops, corrupt magistrates, corrupt judges and corrupt politicians.
The authorities had to rush the completion of a new jail in a town near Cape Town. There was also an increased demand for medical services, since a number of the arrested had sustained gunshot wounds, broken arms, missing teeth, broken fingers and general battering while trying to escape. The message went out: do not shoot members of the drug squad.
I remember all this clearly. In contrast, about three months ago, we were called out to measure the noise levels from a club. They were very high. We wrote a report and it was submitted to the lawyers, among whom was a hot-shot R30 000-a-day advocate. In court, we were astonished to see that the club’s legal team consisted of a whole herd of even more hot-shot advocates who charge R60 000 a day each. Obviously, the club owners had a rich uncle with serious drug money. I wished for the days of Fireball . . . but they are gone forever.