R15m in mandrax off Cape Town streets as two courts deal with the fallout
A Grassy Park woman is held over R5.5m in tablets while three others face charges over a R10m Hout Bay haul, all in the same week.
More than R15 million in mandrax tablets were taken off Cape Town streets in a single week, and four people have now appeared in the same magistrate’s court over two separate seizures.
Shireen Francis, 58, of Grassy Park, stood in the dock at Wynberg Magistrate’s Court on a charge linked to a haul of 69 bags of mandrax tablets found in a building she occupied. Each bag held 1,000 units. Investigators put the street value at R5.5 million.
She will spend the next seven days in custody. The court postponed her bail application by a week.
Minutes earlier in the same building, three more accused, two men and a woman aged between 41 and 61, appeared on drug charges. Their case flows from an operation by the Hawks last week in Hout Bay, where officers took more than 170,000 mandrax tablets off the street. That consignment was valued at over R10 million.
The two matters are separate, but they land in the same court in the same week, and together they account for the R15 million figure that has pulled the numbers into one picture.
Mandrax, known on the street as buttons or white pipe, remains one of the most widely used hard drugs in the Western Cape, and the quantities involved in these two cases are not small. A single bag of 1,000 tablets is a wholesale unit. Sixty nine of them is an operation, not a habit.
The arrests did not happen on the same day and did not come from the same investigation. The Grassy Park matter was a police find. The Hout Bay matter was a Hawks seizure. Both sets of accused were processed through Wynberg, and the week’s total is the sum of the two.
What the cases do not yet establish is where the tablets were headed, who was financing them, or whether the two seizures are connected. None of that is on the record. What is on the record is the volume, the value and the fact that four people are now before the courts.
For residents of Grassy Park, Hout Bay and the wider metro, the practical question is what happens to the supply once a consignment of this size is taken out. The police and the Hawks have not said what they believe the seizures do to the local market, and this paper will not guess.
The bail hearing for Francis is set down for next week. The three accused from the Hout Bay matter remain before the court. Neither case has been tested, and none of the accused has pleaded.
Source: eNCA, Mandrax haul worth R15m seized in a week
