They called it a laboratory

A laboratory. Say it out loud and hear what it’s built to do to you. White coats, glassware, a man in goggles cooking something that will kill your children. What was in that building, on the evidence of the state’s own photographs, was a fan, a light, an extractor and a lot of small plants in a lot of small pots. That’s a nursery. My mate’s aunt had one and she grew tomatoes in it.

The word isn’t an accident. It’s doing the lifting the facts can’t. Call it a grow room and the public shrugs, because half the public has a buddy with a tent in the spare bedroom. Call it a laboratory and the man in the pots is Walter White, the five human beings marched out with their backs to the camera are a hellish cartel, and the R1 million valuation by Dr Evil stops sounding like an estate agent’s guess and starts sounding like evidence.

It isn’t evidence. It’s copywriting, propaganda if you will. And it’s ours, because we paid for it.

Through the roof. For twenty seven grams.

Four days earlier, Kariega. A house in Stow Street, a 33 year old man, and an official account that says the members made a speedy entrance through the roof. Forty five plants counted. A black bag weighed at 27.2 grams. An unlicensed .22 with nine rounds in it, and that part is a real charge and I’m not going to pretend otherwise, because a gun without paper is a gun without paper and that argument belongs to somebody else on another day. The unlicensed firearm aside, where was the “crime” that justified the invasion contra Prince?

And here’s the answer to that question, from the charge sheet rather than from me. The tip-off was that drugs were being sold from the house. The man was not charged with dealing. He was charged with possession, plus the firearm. Forty five plants and 27.2 grams in a private dwelling, charged as possession, which is the precise ground the Constitutional Court cleared in 2018. Whatever else this was, the state itself did not call it selling.

Sit with the picture. Grown adults, armed, trained, paid out of a budget that leaves your salary before you ever see it, came in through the roof of a house in Central Kariega. For 27.2 grams. Twenty seven grams is a handful. A commenter under the post put it better than I can: that’s half a handful. And that was the day’s work, and it went up on the official page with the hashtags on it, drugs off the streets, guns off the streets, like somebody had rolled up a syndicate. Promotions and cigars all round. Pathetic.

And while we’re here, the calibre is doing the same job as the word laboratory.

A .22. Nine rounds. The .22 long rifle is the round you learn to shoot with. A tin can round, a rabbit round, the thing in the drawer at the farmhouse that somebody’s grandfather bought in 1974 and that gets used twice a year on a rat or a mole. It’s rimfire, the smallest thing in the cabinet. Ask anyone who has ever stood at a violent crime scene in this country what the recovered casings look like. Nobody, not once, is going to say .22.

What criminal of any standing runs a .22? The people doing cash in transit carry military-issue rifles with scopes and rails. The people doing the hijackings on the N2 aren’t worrying about magazine capacity in a rimfire pistol. The syndicates that actually frighten this country are better armed than the police and everybody knows it. So when the post goes up with guns off the streets stamped underneath, look at the size of the gun that came off the street. It’s the firearm equivalent of calling a grow tent a laboratory. Again, pathetic.

None of which makes it lawful, and this is where a lazy version of my argument falls over. An unlicensed firearm is an offence whatever the calibre, and it should be, and if that pistol had no paper then that’s a real charge for a real court. The charge isn’t fake. The charge is being merchandised. A rimfire pistol and 27.2 grams of leaf, packaged and sold back to us as a strike against die grootste gevaar, organised crime, and we’re expected to say thank you. Low-hanging fruit for sure!

And who pays for the roof?

Nobody mentions the roof again. It appears once, as a flourish, and then it’s gone: the members made a speedy entrance through the roof. Somebody’s ceiling is open to the Kariega weather tonight and not one line in any statement says who closes it. They honestly couldn’t care less.

That flourish isn’t decoration. It’s a legal position, and so is the sentence in front of it. Read them together. The suspect attempted to hide his contraband (again, somebody read Prince), and then the members came through the roof.

Now open section 27 of the Criminal Procedure Act. An official who may lawfully search premises may use force reasonably necessary to overcome resistance, including breaking a door or a window, but he must first audibly demand admission and say why he wants in. One escape from that, and only one: where he’s on reasonable grounds of the opinion that the article may be destroyed or disposed of if he knocks first. An entire nursery? What?

So the line about hiding contraband isn’t colour writing. It’s the trigger, the jurisdictional fact for going in unannounced, written into a press release before anybody argued it. If this is ever run properly it gets run right there. Bring it on!

Then the question the court asks and the Facebook post doesn’t. Reasonably necessary to achieve what? The section contemplates a door or a window. This was a roof. And if the fear was destruction, look at what was at stake. Twenty seven grams. A handful. Four seconds down a toilet. Nobody alive gets onto a roof and through a ceiling faster than a man can flush a bag, so as an answer to destruction of evidence the roof is the slowest one available. But, per Prince, he is allowed his weed!

Why not the gate. Why not the door. Why not knock and announce and go in the way the section actually contemplates. I can’t tell you, I wasn’t there and it isn’t my case. What I can tell you is that a gate is climbable, a door opens, and neither of them makes a photograph. And that coming through a ceiling ends the conversation at the front door before it starts, which is the conversation where a man gets to ask what you are doing in his house and on whose authority.

And don’t assume there was a warrant. On the police’s own account this started with information that drugs were being sold at the house, and the members went straight there. Section 22 of the same Act lets an officer search without a warrant where he believes on reasonable grounds both that a warrant would be issued if he asked for one, and that the delay in getting it would defeat the object. That’s very likely the authority here, and it’s lawful. Sit with what it means. Whether opening a man’s roof was lawful turns on two beliefs formed in one policeman’s head at the gate, and those beliefs get tested afterwards, if ever, by somebody with the money to test them.

Then the bill, and this is the part that should make you put the paper down.

Turn one page on in the Act, to section 28. A police official who searches premises without being authorised to is guilty of an offence, and liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding R600. Six hundred rand. That ceiling was set in 1977 and nobody has touched it since. Whatever it meant then, today it is a tank of diesel. That is the price the statute book puts on going through a citizen’s home without authority.

And compensation? Section 28 has a route, and it’s a keyhole. You get an award only where somebody swore false information on oath to obtain the warrant, and was afterwards convicted of perjury for it. Miss either limb and there’s nothing. Outside that keyhole the householder is on the ordinary claim against the Minister of Police: statutory notice on an organ of state within six months of the debt falling due, then summons, then years, then costs, to recover the price of a roof.

So when I say almost nobody does this, I’m not being cynical. The Act says it. R600 and a perjury conviction. This is very wrong.

And here’s the bit nobody thinks about. The man was in a house in Stow Street. Nothing says he owns it. If he rents, the hole belongs to a landlord who did nothing and was charged with nothing and has no case of any kind. He simply has a hole. Damages to his property. Po-po says not their problem.

Whether that entry was lawful is for the attorneys and the magistrates, and I’m not deciding it in a column. My question survives either answer. Even if every step was lawful, why is the state authorised to open a man’s roof over a handful of a plant that adults in this country may lawfully grow, and why does that decision get paid for by the householder instead of the department that took it? There’s a hashtag for the seizure. There’s no hashtag for the roof, for the aggressive violation of the sanctity of private property. Nanny State force-feeding.

Same metro. Same week. Not one working car.

Hold that raid in your head, because here’s what sits next to it.

Kariega is in Nelson Mandela Bay, and the operation was run by the district crime combating unit of Nelson Mandela Bay. On 27 August, four days after the roof entry, the Daily Maverick reported that the Flying Squad in Nelson Mandela Bay, rapid response for a metro of more than 1.2 million people, has no operational vehicles. Not a reduced fleet. Not an ageing fleet. None. Fokol. Members are on foot beat. Inside the service they’ve started calling it the Dying Squad. What is the area commander and various station commanders driving? Nobody asked.

Nobody can say they weren’t told, either. A parliamentary oversight visit in November 2025 found seven vehicles on the books, two of them belonging to the provincial accident response unit, leaving three BMWs, a double cab and a single cab, of which exactly one ran. That was nine months ago. It has gone from one to zero. A Golf GTI came through from Humansdorp, came back from the garage with brakes the members say were cheap imported parts, and then failed in a corner during a high speed chase and put the car into the pavement. The district took 28 new vehicles at the festive season launch. The Flying Squad got none of them. The last car they were actually handed arrived in 2023.

Members who tried to hitch a ride with other units so they could do some work were told to stay in their lane, and warned that an injury outside their mandate might not be honoured as an injury on duty. Police officers who wanted to work were told to sit down. And when the press asked about the cars, the answer was that the service couldn’t disclose vehicle availability because it might compromise the safety of members and the effectiveness of operations.

Fine. Take that seriously for a second. The fleet is a secret. The 45 plants and the 27.2 grams were not a secret, and went up on Facebook the same week with photographs attached. So we may not know whether anybody can come when we phone, but we will absolutely be told, in high resolution, about the handful of leaf they took off a man in Stow Street.

There were bodies available that day. There was transport available that day. There was a warrant (maybe not?), a plan and enough manpower to get onto a roof. In the same city, in the same week, a woman being followed home from the ATM had a rapid response unit that was walking. So we pay for the cops and for private security, but we only get private security. Prince said we could grow weed, yet we have roof raiders eagerly damaging private property, chasing headlines and promotions, in pursuit of that weed. WTF!

So what is a guy actually supposed to do?

The criminals are in top end German cars of their personal preference with the tracker cut out. The rapid response unit is walking, strolling about. The one performance car they were sent came back with cheap brakes and went into a pavement mid chase. And the thing the system did manage that week, possibly with a warrant, a few motor vehicles, a full assault team and a ladder, was take a handful of zol and a rabbit gun off a man in Stow Street. It would be funny if it were not so very sad.

So what is a guy supposed to do? It isn’t rhetorical. Answer it honestly and you land in the ugly part of this country.

What he does, if he can afford it, is buy his way out. Armed response contract, beam across the yard, some vicious dogs, a second gate, the neighbourhood group, a levy to a patrol car that actually arrives. That’s the market talking and the market isn’t wrong and I won’t pretend it is. But look at what it means. Safety is a subscription now. Pay and you have a rapid response unit. Don’t pay and you have a phone number that rings in an empty building where the cars don’t start. We privatised the one thing the state exists to provide, we means tested it, and it failed. Badly. Repeatedly. And nobody voted for that.

The man who can’t afford the subscription is left with the state, and the state, having no cars, does the thing it can still do, which is charge the softest target in reach. He isn’t protected and he is policed. Worst of both.

Nobody clapped

Somebody senior should be losing sleep over the comments. Not the activist pages. The comments under the official police page, written by ordinary South Africans in the middle of a working day. This is a herb, not a drug. Stop posting weed seizures. It isn’t a real crime. Stop looking for content that makes you look useful. Go after some real drugs. Go and get fit. You are embarrassing yourselves and your office.

That’s not a stoner rabble. That’s a public doing arithmetic. They know what’s happening in their street and what isn’t being attended to, and they can see with their own eyes that a man was pulled out of a house in Kariega for a handful of weed while whatever is actually terrorising their neighbourhood is still out there, unbothered, because it is harder and more dangerous to search an organized gang posing as a crowd outside a shop on Russell Road and it does not photograph as well.

Policing runs on consent. Not force. Consent. The moment the public reads an official post and laughs, something has broken that no amount of tactical kit welds back together. And the service did it to itself, on its own page, with its own hashtags. While its generals mumble and crash on social media.

The permission slip state

Now the law, because this is where the rage belongs.

In 2018 the Constitutional Court told the state it could not criminalise what an adult does with cannabis in private. What we got afterwards was a Private Purposes Act and draft regulations that read like a note from a school principal. You may have some. Not too much. You may grow some. Not too many. You may possess it in a private place, you may not sell it, you may not buy it, and nobody will say out loud where you are supposed to get it. You may exercise your right provided you exercise it in a way that never touches another human being, which is a long way of saying you may not exercise it.

That’s a permission slip, not a right. And a permission slip gets withdrawn, amended, gazetted into something narrower, or simply ignored by whoever is coming through your roof this morning. Anything that needs the state’s ongoing goodwill isn’t a right. It’s a lease.

Let me be exact about the two matters in the news. Nobody has been convicted of anything. Both are before a magistrate, Meyerton and Kariega, and they’ll be decided on evidence I haven’t seen by people whose job that is. I’m not saying the accused are innocent and I’m not saying they’re guilty. I’m saying something narrower and harder to argue with: a country that has decided adults may lawfully grow this plant has no business running counter intelligence operations against people growing this plant, and the line drawn between the man with four plants and the man with forty was drawn with a ruler and a shrug.

What total freedom actually means

The unfashionable thing, plainly, because this publication has stopped pretending it doesn’t have a position.

Cannabis should be a crop. Not a controlled substance, not a scheduled substance, not a substance at all. A crop. Like tobacco, like grapes, like the barley in the beer the state will happily sell you on a Sunday and tax on the way past. Grow it. Hold it. Dry it in the garage. Give it to your neighbour. Sell it to your neighbour. Put it in a shop with a sign on the door and a till behind the counter and pay tax like the bottle store on the corner does.

The state’s business with any adult is narrow and old. Don’t defraud, don’t use force, don’t touch the children. That’s the list. What a grown man puts in his own lungs on his own property at his own risk was never on it. It got on the list through a piece of colonial mine labour control policy nobody in this country would defend in daylight, and it stayed there because bureaucracies don’t hand back territory. They never have. They have to be pushed off it.

And spare me the health lecture. I’m not saying the stuff is spinach. Some people shouldn’t smoke it, some people shouldn’t smoke anything, and a teenager’s brain is nobody’s laboratory, to borrow a word the state is fond of. All true, and all of it an argument for honest information, which is what we publish here every week. None of it is an argument for a man coming through your roof.

Who wins

Cannabis is low hanging fruit and it’s there to be harvested for stats and for promotion.

Think about what a grow room offers a unit measured on numbers. It doesn’t move. It doesn’t shoot back. It has no lawyers on retainer and no political cover. It needs no eighteen month investigation, no informer, no wire, and not one moment of physical risk to the members going in. It sits in one place under a light and waits, and it has been waiting for weeks. You can plan it, photograph it, weigh it and file it inside a single shift.

Then look at the yield. Five arrests in one go. A seizure figure, and a generous one, because nobody audits the valuation. A firearm recovery, which is its own line. Photographs that look like a war on drugs. A media statement with hashtags. Every one of those travels up the chain into a quarterly report and eventually into somebody’s file when a post comes up. Nobody gets promoted for the arrest they didn’t make because the car was in the garage.

Now put them side by side. Chasing an armed cash in transit crew takes vehicles the metro doesn’t have, courage, and a real chance of being shot, and it produces one docket, maybe, months later, if it goes anywhere. Raiding a grow room takes a bakkie and a morning and produces a whole harvest of countable outputs. Both go into the same statistics. Both count as police work. Only one can get you killed.

Which is why this isn’t a story about wicked policemen, and I’ll be fair to the members, especially the ones sitting in an office in Nelson Mandela Bay with no car, who by every account want to work and are being stopped. It’s a story about a scoreboard. Point a scoreboard at any organisation and it optimises for the scoreboard, and the cannabis grower is the softest point on it. Prohibition doesn’t survive because anyone still believes in it. It survives because it’s convenient.

The valuation industry wins too. Somebody decided those pots were worth more than R1 million. On what basis? At what price per gram, of what material, at what stage of growth, sold to whom, in a market the same state insists doesn’t lawfully exist? The number gets conjured, then repeated, and by the third repetition it’s a fact in a headline and a paragraph in an annual report.

Who loses

The five from De Deur lose whatever the court decides, because the process is the punishment and it has already started. So does the man in Kariega, and his family, and his employer, and whoever was living on his income this month.

The small grower in Pondoland loses again, for the hundredth year running, while the conversation in Johannesburg is about export licences and pharmaceutical certification he will never afford.

The Flying Squad loses, and not because of me. Those members are trained for the hardest and most dangerous work in policing, they keep reporting for duty, and they’re sitting in an office because somebody couldn’t keep five cars on the road in a city of 1.2 million people. One of them told a reporter he doesn’t feel like ironing his uniform any more. That sentence should be read out in Parliament.

And you lose, whether you smoke or not, because every hour and every rand spent photographing seedlings is an hour and a rand not spent on the thing that actually happened to your cousin in April. That cost appears in no media statement.

Go fix a pothole

We don’t want a nanny. We aren’t children, the state isn’t our mother, and even if it were, this particular mother can’t keep the lights on, can’t keep water in the pipes, can’t keep the trains running and can’t fill a hole in a road it built itself. It hasn’t earned the standing to have an opinion about my garden.

Legalise the plant completely. Not a schedule, not a threshold, not a permit, not a licence with a waiting list measured in years and a fee that changes every time somebody gazettes a new one. Delete it from the list. Then take the counter intelligence narcotics unit, the K9 unit, the forensic laboratory hours and the helicopter fuel, and point the lot at people who are actually hurting South Africans, of whom there is no shortage, and about whom the public would very much like to see a media statement.

Then buy the Flying Squad a car. Buy them five. It’s the same failure as the pothole and the same failure as the roof in Stow Street: a state that can’t do the difficult thing goes looking for an easy thing to be seen doing. The pothole stays open because filling it is work. The grow room gets raided because raiding it isn’t.

So go and fix a pothole. Any pothole. Pick one. There’s one outside my office and I’ll hold your ladder.

Selah. Make it before they take it.