Indonesia's Drug Fight Pushes Prison AIDS Explosion

Aubrey Belford (AFP)


JAKARTA — Their tattooed skin hanging loosely from hollowed-out limbs, the young men in the clinic at the edge of Jakarta's Cipinang Narcotic Prison lie limply across black vinyl beds.


The half-dozen inmates are in the advanced stages of HIV/AIDS, and are part of a crisis that has seen the disease sweep through Indonesia's overcrowded, squalid and corrupt prisons.

For Indonesian Drug Users, HIV and Addiction Present a Double Burden

Quietly and destructively, starting in the mid-1990s a low-grade form of heroin known as putaw found a thriving market in Indonesia's cities. The sharp increase in injection drug use led to a dramatic rise in HIV/AIDS among users. Today, Indonesia finds itself battling twin epidemics of drug addiction and HIV/AIDS.

For HIV/AIDS advocates and activists in this Southeast Asian archipelago, fighting HIV/AIDS among injection drug users (IDUs) takes place in a world of contradiction. "IDUs are the easiest people to work with—and the most difficult," says Samuel Nugraha, a longtime HIV counselor who is now with the UN Office of Drugs and Crime HIV/AIDS unit in Indonesia and who serves on TREAT Asia's steering committee. "Compared with other vulnerable groups, they have less shame, they're not hidden so it's relatively easy to reach them. But they are addicts, and the addiction itself is often too much to overcome. When it comes to adherence to medication or responsibility, their priority is their addiction."

Indonesia: Drug Offenders Executed, More To Come

Indonesia shot two Nigerian men for drug offences late on Thursday night, and drug officials hope more executions will soon be carried out.

Samuel Iwachekawu Okoye and Hansen Anthony Nwaoysa were executed before midnight on Thursday (26 June) on Nusakambangan prison island, off the coast of central Java.

Indonesia’s Growing Drug Problem

Two years ago, Indonesian authorities tied a 32-year-old Thai woman named Namsong Sirilak and a 62-year-old Indian named Saelow Prasert to palm trees at dawn in northern Sumatra and shot them for trafficking in heroin -- only weeks after the execution of their Indian accomplice, Ayodhya Prasad Chaubey.


That might have been a spectacular answer to Indonesia’s growing problem with illegal drugs, but so far it doesn’t seem to be doing much good. Despite Jakarta’s declaration of war on drugs, traffickers continue to tap into the increasingly lucrative Indonesian market, already awash with cheap speed, ecstasy and heroin as the archipelago nation begins to catch up with the drug use problems that Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines especially have been fighting for decades.