Sex enhancers have a special place in the policing of fake drugs. Warnings against fake Viagra, for instance, pepper public health announcements and policy documents. In line with this global concern, in , Zimbabwe banned over-the-counter sales of sex enhancers. In a context of severe economic crisis, a street trade in sex enhancers nonetheless continued. Here I explore this street-level trade and the forms of policing that have emerged around the ban: among traders, among the public, and among the police themselves.
I argue that Zimbabwe's attempts to constrain the circulation of fakes created a productive market where various players stepped into policing both the ban as well as this newly illegal trade and profited by doing so.
Mockery and disappointment led the online reaction. How Zimbabwean twitterati reacted was very different from the effect the police had intended. Everyone could read from the labels and location that the seized drugs were unregistered sex enhancers. But instead of recognising a policing victory against possibly dangerous items, people pointed to the complicity of police in the trade insofar as they had allowed it to proceed right outside their station and possibly received free products.
Such scepticism was evident in further responses too. Rushwaya was caught red-handed trying to smuggle gold and bribe officials at Harare's international airport but was granted bail and subsequently acquitted Ndoro People responding to the police tweet saw nothing to celebrate in the raid and confiscation. What they noted was the uneven distribution of policing. The recording of products and quantities in the police tweet was meant to signal the fruits of policing and the presence of unregistered, therefore spurious drugs on the streets.
Yet the contrast between the spectacle of the bust and the sceptical tone in which it was received raises questions about the message being communicated. If the trade in unregistered sex enhancers was taking place in front of the police, and if they were accused of being unprofessional in their policing and focusing on trivial instead of major crimes, then why the bust to begin with?
