Whoonga (also known as nyaope[1] or wonga) is a form of black tar heroin, sometimes mixed with other substances, that came into widespread use in South Africa[2] in 2009.
Whoonga dealers often sell the drug as a super-powerful marijuana blend. Dealers add powdered substances to the mix to bulk it up. Additives range from actual pharmaceutical drugs and cleaning chemicals to any powder-based substance that can be found. Whoonga/nyaope is very addictive because of its heroin content.[3]
Whoonga is sometimes said to contain antiretroviral drugs (ARVs), particularly efavirenz, which are prescribed to treat HIV, but analysis of samples shows no such content, and police have remarked that dealers are known to add "all sorts of stuff" to a drug to bulk it out. Adulteration with ARVs was the subject of Getting High on HIV Medication, a 2014 documentary video by Vice correspondent Hamilton Morris.[4] The first scientific publications of whoonga use containing ARVs were in 2013[5][6] and 2014.[1]