army ‘deviants’ Paul Kirk Dr Aubrey Levin, the army psychiatrist who ran a bizarre programme to “cure” gay conscripts, has been linked to secretly – and illegally – testing drugs on homosexuals and other “deviants” in the South African Defence Force (SADF).
Human rights lawyer Jenny Wild this week described Levin’s tests on conscripts at a secret camp he had built called Greefsveld. Situated on the Zimbabwe border, Greefsveld is shrouded in secrecy to this day. Little is known about the activities there, other than that the inmates were all young national servicemen who had been identified as regular drug users or else as homosexuals or pacifists. Conditions were exceptionally hard and inmates were forbidden from walking, but instead had to run everywhere. The entire camp had been built by the hard labour of inmates. Wild, who in 1976 published a study on South Africa’s drug legislation under the auspices of the University of Natal-Durban, discovered Levin was experimenting on conscripts at the facility. According to Wild, Levin’s experiments were instrumental in having then minister of interior Connie Mulder bring into effect the 1971 drug legislation that was known colloquially as the “dagga Act.” The penalties in this Act were, in Wild’s view, “shockingly disproportionate” and included a two-year mandatory jail sentence for possession and five years for “dealing”. In her original study, Wild did not mention Levin by name, only his camp. This week the veteran civil rights campaigner told the Mail & Guardian: “Of course it was Levin. I never used his name, but it is hardly disputed he was behind the drug experiments. He was terrified by what he saw from his experiments, he was really concerned about the pacifism dagga seemed to induce in white conscripts.” In her study Wild writes: “When Connie Mulder introduced the law he called it a ‘national emergency’. The regime had been conducting compulsory tests using dagga on so called ‘deviants’ (young men and homosexuals who did not want to fight in the SADF) at a camp called Greefsveld, and concluded that demotivation of white army conscripts and social interaction between black and white youth would occur if dagga was not criminalised.”