“The purpose of this paper is to describe the state of border control at Johannesburg International Airport (JIA) and Durban Harbour in regard to the detection of drugs smuggling.Before beginning the main business of the paper, though, a word on context is
necessary. What is the state of the southern African drug market? What is coming in, going out, and being transhipped? Which drugs enter and leave by air, by sea and by land, and which by all three? What sort of quantities are we talking about? All of these questions are notoriously difficult to answer. The size of illicit drug markets is measured by the rate and quantity of seizures, by changes in the rate of drug arrests, changes in retail prices, by the anecdotal intelligence of investigators, street cops and prosecutors, and by the self-reporting of consumers. The last of these, selfreporting, is the most accurate, but
only when data is collected through rigorous and systematic sampling. No drug consumption researcher has ever sampled for the total South African population.”
