Families are meant to love and embrace each other and live together in peace.

But this has not been the experience of some families as drugs have taken control of the lives of their loved ones.

They have turned them into monsters and murderers.

Last week, we carried the grizzly story of a 25-year-old man from Tembisa who killed his sister and 13-month-old nephew.

The mother said her daughter's throat was slit and her index finger severed, while one of her eyes were removed. The police told her that her grandson's private parts were missing.

She said her son told her he killed his sister because she had stolen R20 from him. She admitted her son had a drug problem. The public reacted with shock to the story.

As we are trying to make sense of that gory story, a defenceless elderly woman has lost her life in a brutal manner. She was strangled to death by her own grandson in a Limpopo village, and the family suspects dagga made him to do it.

The 36-year-old suspect has been arrested and is set to appear in court today.

Matseke Chuene, the deceased's daughter-in-law, admitted that the suspect was a heavy dagga smoker but had no history of violence.

Chuene thinks he might have smoked the wrong type of dagga, leading him to kill the nonagenarian by strangulation while she was sleeping at night.

This is a scary situation not only to a person on the street, but even to those who are supposed to be protected by their loved ones in their own homes.

We are wondering how these drug dealers out there react to such horrific stories. These are the acts they created by peddling drugs to these innocent people they later turned into murderers.

Do these sellers feel sorry for the people who lost their loved ones because of their own initiatives?

The abuse of drugs has gone out of control and some residents have taken it upon themselves to fight the scourge and the drug dealers.

Vigilante residents in Hillbrow, which is said to have a big drug problem, have decided to take on drug lords and we fully support them. We are also fully behind the residents who are doing the same in other hard-hit areas such as Westbury, Eldorado Park and Hanover Park.