The Madlanga Commission didn't reveal anything new. Communities already know that the war on drugs protects power, not people.
The new year brings the illusion of clean slates. Yet, 2026 arrives with a distinct heaviness: a reckoning with how fragile law, justice and political order have become, at home and abroad.
South Africa enters the new year still absorbing the revelations of the Madlanga Commission and the uncomfortable clarity it provided about criminal networks, policing failures and the erosion of public trust. And while our own institutions grapple with questions of accountability, the world has been jolted by the US' military intervention in Venezuela and the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, under the guise of the War on Drugs.
We are justifiably shocked and scandalised and the public conversation has landed on a familiar and deeply misleading place: "drugs" are the problem, and harsher criminal justice responses are posed as the solution. Provocatively, we are asked to reconsider this popular, simplistic narrative: cartels are not infiltrating the state because drugs exist, they are infiltrating the state because prohibition creates a lucrative, unregulated economy, which criminal networks exploit.
South Africa is home to an estimated half a million people who use illicit drugs (such as methamphetamine and heroin), the majority of whom use occasionally, in a non-problematic...
