Deep Hanging | VICE | United States

In 2006, when Magnum photographer Mikhael Subotzky started his yearlong project documenting life in and around a prison on a traffic island in the rural South African town of Beaufort West, journalist Hazel Friedman published the crime novel Hijack!, written under the alias Guy Brown, the book is one of the first published references to nyaope, a popular street drug that is a cocktail of low-grade heroin, cannabis, and antiretroviral drugs. Friedman recorded that nyaope was (as it still is) “all the rage with the youngsters in Soweto, Mamelodi, Soshanguve, and Atteridgeville,” black settlements surrounding Johannesburg and Pretoria.