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."