jakarta slum
Jakarta, Indonesia. Credit score: Unsplash/CC0 Public Area

On a balmy day in 2009, Adinda Amalia (not an actual title) and her boyfriend have been arrested after they have been caught injecting heroin in a casual capturing gallery—a derelict property in a South Jakarta slum. The arrests adopted a police raid on the realm.

The couple have been delivered to the native police station. Whereas her boyfriend was overwhelmed and tortured in a separate cell, Adinda was blindfolded, drugged and gang-raped by law enforcement officials over 4 days.

The police demanded Rp95 million (US$6,500) to finish her ordeal and drop all costs—an unfathomable quantity for somebody incomes beneath the poverty line in Indonesia.

My newest analysis exhibits that experiences much like Adinda’s rape, bodily abuse and extortion by the hands of law enforcement officials are rampant in Indonesia.

Worse nonetheless, drug regulation enforcement in Indonesia like crackdowns, arrests for drug use, incarceration, and extrajudicial abuses have been linked with adverse well being outcomes for ladies and elevated their threat of struggling a drug overdose.

Girls, medicine and violence

Indonesia has strictly prohibited drug use and provide because the Nineteen Seventies. Subsequent amendments to the drug regulation, adopted in 2009, acknowledged substance use as a posh medical subject by together with provisions to divert individuals who use medicine away from the felony justice system and into drug rehabilitation.

However in apply, regulation enforcement authorities proceed to actively goal and mete out jail time and civil rights sanctions for individuals suspected of or caught utilizing psychoactive medicine.

Police play a central function within the sensible enforcement of drug legal guidelines. An ongoing government-led “conflict on medicine” launched in 2015 by President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has resulted in a rise in street-level drug regulation enforcement, together with police raids, sweeps and crackdowns, quite a few arrests, and reviews of illegal abuses.

Round half of Indonesia’s 276,000 prisoners are incarcerated for drug-related offenses. Regardless of comprising a small proportion of Indonesia’s whole jail inhabitants, ladies are being incarcerated at a greater annual price than males.

Greater than half of Indonesia’s 14,204 registered feminine prisoners have been imprisoned for drug offenses as of February 2020. That quantity might enhance and additional overcrowd prisons as a result of, in line with the Nationwide Narcotics Board, round one million ladies in Indonesia use unlawful or illicit medicine.

Though ladies are much less possible to make use of, possess or promote medicine in contrast with males, they’re extra possible to be focused by the police. Girls are inclined to expertise harsher remedy than males, particularly illegal abuses reminiscent of rape, violence, and extortion of cash and sexual favors.

My research is predicated on interviews involving 731 ladies from Jakarta, West Java and Banten provinces between September 2014 and June 2015. These respondents are ladies who had injected medicine for a minimum of 12 months as of the time they have been surveyed. The analysis present that almost half of the ladies have been arrested a minimum of as soon as of their lifetime, primarily for drug use and possession for private use costs.

Virtually 87% of the ladies reported that they or their households skilled extortion involving cash and sexual favors in change for a lesser cost, a referral to drug dependence remedy, or having costs dropped.

They have been typically additionally coerced into offering names and addresses of different drug-using friends in change for a diminished cost.

The Dialog Indonesia has requested two Indonesian police spokespersons to answer the analysis’s findings however they refused to remark.

Greater well being dangers

Girls who use medicine are already handled like second-class residents in Indonesia. The predominant discourse frames ladies who use medicine as unfit moms and wives and in any other case morally poor or “dangerous” ladies.

Though they face an elevated threat of HIV, greater remedy dropout and elevated mortality charges in comparison with males who use medicine, they’ve low entry to well being companies.

As well as, amongst ladies dwelling with HIV, going to jail for a drug offense elevated the probability of interrupting antiretroviral remedy by 42.3%.

One other discovering is that ladies who had a historical past of arrest and incarceration had elevated odds of being uncovered to HIV and hepatitis C via sharing non-sterile needles and syringes, in comparison with ladies who had by no means been arrested or incarcerated.

This vicious circle is pushed by elements like worry of arrest, persecution and violence, which can compel customers to share used needles and have interaction in rushed, high-risk injections.

Decriminalize medicine and individuals who use them

Indonesian policymakers must face the information: the nation’s present drug insurance policies and their enforcement have an effect on ladies disproportionately on account of their disastrous penalties to well being and human rights.

The Indonesian authorities ought to decriminalize drug use and possession to mitigate the harms of drug insurance policies and their punitive enforcement.

Decriminalization is now not the controversial coverage alternative it could have appeared a decade in the past.

In 2018, the United Nations system joined many policymakers and students worldwide in calling for decriminalization of drug possession for private use and implementing options to conviction and punishment.

At the very least 30 nations (and greater than 50 native jurisdictions) have applied some type of decriminalization.

Thailand lately grew to become the first Asian nation to decriminalize hashish cultivation and consumption, and launched hundreds of individuals from incarceration for drug offenses.

Eradicating felony penalties for drug use and associated offenses would instantly eradicate the necessity for police intervention in an space that needs to be below the auspices of well being care authorities.

It will additionally cut back jail overcrowding and unencumber assets for police to struggle critical crime and for well being ministries to increase efficient well being interventions.

In parallel, the federal government should put money into gender-sensitive well being and social packages that deal with the basis causes of drug use and help ladies to grow to be economically unbiased, adequately housed, and employed.

Collectively, such efforts can be certain that efficient, health-focused, evidence-based responses to medicine grow to be the norm in Indonesia. This is able to not solely profit ladies whose lives contain medicine but in addition their households and communities.


Decriminalizing laborious medicine in British Columbia follows a long time of public well being advocacy


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