Johannesburg — IT MAY seem bizarre but there is a link between tik, the drug so rife in Western Cape, and abalone, the shellfish popular on fine South African tables as well as in the east, there for its supposedly aphrodisiac qualities.

But tik and abalone have more in common than just the Cape .

For each, its consumers reflect their craving by paying hideously high prices for their fix, and now that the government has forbidden all abalone fishing, anyone caught in possession of either will be in trouble with the law.

SA's abalone stocks are almost depleted and the species will most likely be extinct soon. For this reason one can understand Environment and Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk's intentions in imposing the ban.

But the government has already banned abalone fishing and it hasn't worked. Artisanal fishing -- the only legal abalone fishing until Van Schalkwyk's ban -- is practised by a handful of coastal people who take less than 10% of the catch. The rest is illegal plunder.

The immediate effect of the previous ban on commercial abalone fishing was a drastic rise in the price. The abalone trade is run by large, well-organised crime syndicates, for whom the ban is a boon and the minister their best friend.

The previous ban also accelerated the depletion of the stocks as dishonest people found that policing the catch was woefully inadequate. That much is not about to change, which means that even more people will successfully exploit the government-created price bonanza.

The argument against banning substances, even addictive ones, has been made often, but never so graphically than by the US's catastrophic liquor prohibition. It failed to sober up the Americans and gave gangsters a boost.

In the Cape, the local abalone trade is controlled by the 28s prison gang, whose big business is tik trafficking. Abalone has become so intertwined with tik that the 28s accept it as tender.

The bitter irony is a handful of artisanal fishers will suffer the most from the ban. The gangs, of course, will soon find another banned substance to pass as currency.