Medan's flourishing drug trade blamed on poor law enforcement

Apriadi Gunawan, The Jakarta Post, Medan

Poor law enforcement has allowed the sale of illegal narcotics to flourish in Medan, North Sumatra, causing a serious concerns for local residents, according to a prominent drugs analyst.

Kamaluddin Lubis, a founder of the Anti-Narcotics Movement (GAN), told The Jakarta Post on Monday that bad law enforcement was apparent in the performance of police, prosecutors and judges, who routinely doled out lenient punishments for drug- related crimes.

"That's why Medan has recently become a trading hub for drugs," he said.

Medan Police Precinct Chief, Sr. Cmr. Badrodin Haiti conceded that the drugs trade in Medan had increased by up to 60 percent as of March 2002. "It continues to rise every year," he said.

The increased trading volume means that Medan now not only gets drugs from Aceh, but from other places, too. Heavy trading in Medan, for instance, has encouraged the cultivation of drugs in nearby areas.

In addition, it has also sharply increased the production of ecstasy.

"There is an abundant production of ecstasy and marijuana in Medan. The marijuana is planted in Sibolangit among other places," he told The Jakarta Post, without elaboration.

However, he said that drugs sales for the past year had a street value of more than Rp 36 billion.

Kamaluddin said that GAN investigations had often found that police officials freed drug traffickers upon arrest, despite ample evidence of crimes that could easily warrant a trial -- if not a conviction.

In the cases in which the suspects did make it to court, once police submitted their dossiers, prosecutors demanded only lenient punishments.

"Once we wrote a letter to the national police complaining of an incident in which a man named T. Tampubolon was freed -- even though it was clear that he was involved in the narcotics trade. Only then did the police re-arrest him, and return him to jail," he said.

But Badrodin denied that his subordinates protected the criminals. "What we're doing now is conducting an intensive crackdown on drug-related crimes," he said.

North Sumatra's Regional Police Chief Insp. Gen. Ansyad Mbai led a ceremony recently in which 1.5 tons of marijuana were burned. The marijuana had been confiscated from 15 drug dealers during recent drug-related arrests.

Badrodin said that, of the 600 criminals currently in the custody of Medan police, some 300 were in custody on drug-related charges -- including cases involving two military officers, and police official.

The executive director of Anti-Narcotics Information Center in North Sumatra, Zulkarnaen Nasution, said that throughout last year, the number of people involved in drug-dealing exceeded 15,900.

Up to 90 percent of drug users, he added, were people under 27 years old.