AIDS patients in South Africa are being robbed of their lifesaving drugs so that they can be mixed with marijuana and smoked, authorities and health experts say.
The concoction is called 'whoonga' and it adds a bizarre twist to the war on AIDS in the world's worst-affected country just as it embarks on a massive distribution of medications.
Whoonga's spread is so far limited to eastern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa's most AIDS-stricken province, but AIDS and addiction specialists worry that it could reach other parts of the country.
There's no evidence that any ingredient of the AIDS drug cocktail is addictive or does anything to enhance the marijuana high.
AIDS is already a source of damaging myths in South Africa, such as that the disease can be prevented by sleeping with a virgin or showering after sex with an HIV-positive partner.
Some drug dealers are suspected of stretching the whoonga mixture with soap powder and even rat poison to increase their profits.
'We are seeing the use of whoonga in communities and its very widespread. It's a substance that is openly spoken about in communities,' says Lihle Dlamini of the Treatment Action Campaign, which has lobbied hard to improve the government's response to AIDS.
Drug dealers 'are taking this treatment that is supposed to assist people living with HIV and abusing it,' she says.
Vincent Ndunge, a police spokesman in KwaZulu-Natal, said whoonga was first noticed two or three years ago when officers found gangs were robbing people of medication as they left hospitals.
Initially users crushed the pills and smoked them straight, but added other substances later, Ndunge said.
Carol du Toit of South Africa's National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, a private organization, also says patients are being mugged for their medications or selling them, and that AIDS clinics are being robbed.
She says staff of her private organization are seeing increasing numbers of whoonga users, many of whom also test positive for heroin.
South Africa, a nation of about 50 million, has an estimated 5.7 million people infected with HIV.
The larger problem is the province's dire economic straits - 125,000 jobs lost in the global recession, and the poverty that young unemployed men face in places like Kwadebeka, a Durban neighborhood with no electricity or running water where Sokhulu and Langa work together to help addicts.
'The main problem is unemployment,' Sokhulu said. 'It's when they're hanging around all day with nothing to do - that's when they get hooked.'
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