Drug addicts get second chance

Drug addicts get second chance

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): He is only 21 years old but the story of his
life is enough to fill up a book of a thousand and one pages.

Till the age of 15 he was a happy-go-lucky teenager of a
middle-class family in Jakarta. Then one of his friends
introduced him to ganja, or marijuana, after an innocent game of
basketball.

"That one moment changed my entire life, forever. I could not
do without it anymore. When I did not find ganja I took
tranquilizers, Valium..." recalls the youngster, who does not
want his real name to appear in print. He agreed to be called
Fisherman instead.

Soon he was introduced to ecstasy, the designer drug that
promises instant gratification but wrecks entire lives, at a
nightclub in Blok M. After that came other drugs like shabu-shabu
and putauw.

From once a week, Fisherman took to popping pills four times a
week. If there was cocaine around he took that as well, along
with LSD. He was not terribly choosy about his drinks either, as
long as it was alcohol.

"I cannot explain to you what it is like to be on drugs. It is
another world. It cannot be appreciated by anyone except junkies
like myself," says Fisherman, one of 37 patients at Wisma Adiksi,
a therapeutic center in south Jakarta. Before he had turned 20,
it seemed that Fisherman had already spent an entire millennium
in masochism with just sporadic illusions of merriment.

For once the effect of the drug is over then it is hell, warns
Fisherman. Addicts suffer from extreme paranoia, anger and
insomnia. There is excruciating pain in the bones, high fever and
a total sense of helplessness.

Even though he admits to still liking the effects of drugs, he
wants to give up the habit. He wants to cure himself of is the
power that drugs have over him, the total dependency that drugs
demand of the addict. It is just too degrading, he says. He wants
to be in control of his life and is trying to look for happiness
in a more meaningful sense of the word. He realizes now that his
dignity is far more important to him than dreams that drugs offer
for brief moments. He has already lost too many opportunities, he
feels.

Fisherman's parents sent him to study business management in
Melbourne, Australia, but he was caught and disgraced by the
police, who deported him back to Indonesia early last year.

Fisherman has been detoxified twice, but he hopes that his
year-long stay at Wisma Adiksi will also give him the moral and
spiritual strength to say no to his craving for drugs.

After his cure, he plans to return to the campus, but to study
psychology this time.

"I am more interested in getting to know people and what goes
on inside the mind," says Fisherman. However two other 20-year-
old boys in the same rehabilitation program as Fisherman are not
as lucky, as the amount of drugs they have consumed has reduced
them to pathological cases.

"If drug addicts get help early enough they do recover. But
sometimes it is too late," explains Jugantara Salmun, 30, the
manager at Wisma Adiksi.

Wisma Adiksi was opened here a year ago by Dr. Al-Bachri
Husein, a psychiatrist who has been working with drug addicts
since 1974.

Jugantara was himself a junkie till about a decade ago. He was
sent to a therapeutic community in Ipoh, Malaysia, to be cured of
his addiction. He started to smoke marijuana when he was 14. The
second child of a West Java banker, Jugantara remembers being a
bit lost after the birth of his little brother 13 years after
him.

"I did not know where I belonged. I was confused," he says,
adding that he blames no one for his misdeeds as his parents were
always very loving toward all their three sons.

"I come from a very close-knit family but at that time I think
I was looking for a niche for myself. I had these rich friends at
school who bought morphine and gave it to me free of charge. Life
became one big party. I liked it. But by the time I was 18 I had
had enough. I was unhappy. The niche I had created for myself
made me feel empty, useless. I wanted to get rid of the shame I
was living with."

Luckily Jugantara was a good student. He was able to graduate
eventually, to find a job and a wife, and now that he is the
father of two children he considers it a sin even to think of
taking drugs.

Although the temptation sometimes returns. When his father
died recently his first thought was to numb his sorrow with a
dose of drugs. But he is strong enough today to be able to resist
the lethal temptation. As for his school buddies who first
introduced him to drugs, he does not know where they are today,
and says he does not care whether they are dead or alive.

Jugantara got to know Dr. Bachri 16 years ago when he first
went for counseling. "In fact, he still counsels me as my boss in
this place," smiles Jugantara, who increasingly feels there
should be a decent community center to care for drug addicts in
Jakarta, so Indonesians would not have to travel all the way to
Malaysia and Singapore for treatment.

He was happy to see Yayasan Titihan Kespati open last year
with 10 patients. Today 70 men and 30 women receive treatment
there.

Jugantara first worked as a counselor at Titihan Kespati along
with seven experts from New York before joining Wisma Adiksi,
which treats 37 patients. Twenty-eight are enrolled in the six-
month primary phase, while nine have returned for the second six
months of treatment.

The program offered at Wisma Adiksi follows the 12 steps and
12 traditions of Narcotics Anonymous (NA), the community-based
international association for the recovery of drug addicts.
Started in 1947 as part of a U.S. federal hospital program, today
NA has nearly 20,000 registered weekly meetings in 70 countries
around the world.

Jugantara feels that the problem of drug addiction in
Indonesia is very grave, but is under-reported. Some people think
there may be as many as 2 million drug addicts in Jakarta itself.
International agencies working with drug control tend to ignore
the problem in Indonesia as it is not a major producer of
narcotics, nor a major narcotics-derived money laundering center.

However, the country is being increasingly used as a transit
point for Southeast Asian heroin, including for shipment to other
parts of the world. In recent years the sale and consumption of
ecstasy, methamphetamines (such as shabu-shabu) and traditional
narcotics like marijuana has become alarmingly widespread,
especially in urban areas such as Jakarta.

To resolve this grave problem Fisherman offers a simple
solution. His message, especially to young people is, "Don't --
ever -- even start, for you may never be able to stop."