[Kabar-indonesia] 3.2m Drug Users in Indonesia, 15, 000 Die a Year: Agency [+WSJ Page One]

[JoyoNews at aol.com]

also: JP: Drugs kill 15,000 a year: Agency; and WSJ Page One: 
New Intervention: Novel Police Tactic Puts Drug Markets Out of 
Business [Confronted by the Evidence, Dealers in High Point, 
N.C., Succumb to Pressure; Some Dubbed It Hug-a-Thug]

BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific
September 27, 2006
Source: Suara Merdeka website,
Semarang, in Indonesian 27 Sep 06

Anti-narcotics chief says 3.2 million drug users in Indonesia

Excerpt from report entitled: "3.2 million people use drugs, illegal
substances", published by Indonesian newspaper Suara Merdeka 
website on 27 September

Jakarta: About 3.2 million Indonesians, or 1.5 per cent of the
population, are users of drugs and illegal substances. Of this total,
800,000 use needles.

This was announced by the head of BNN (National Narcotics Agency),
Police Commissioner General I Made Mangku Pastika, during a break in a
hearing with Commission-III of the DPR in Jakarta on Tuesday (26
September).

These figures, he said, were the results of research carried out by
the BNN in conjunction with the University of Indonesia in 2005. "Of
this total, 60 per cent of users are infected with HIV/AIDS. Some
15,000 Indonesians die as a result of overdosing or HIV/AIDS each
year," he said.

He continued that 23 per cent of Indonesia's prison population was
serving time for drug related offences. [Passage omitted]

Made further said that the high number of convicted drug offenders was
the result of a dramatic rise in the number of raids being launched by
police.

"It's the same with traffic offences. When the police intensify
traffic operations, the number of people booked rises accordingly. It
doesn't mean that previously we weren't conscientious, but when Gen
Sutanto took over as national police chief, the number of raids being
launched rose at a remarkable rate".

----------------------------------------

The Jakarta Post
September 27, 2006

Drugs kill 15,000 a year: Agency 

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Each year, more than 15,000 people in Indonesia die from illegal drug use, 
according to the chairman of the National Narcotics Agency (BNN), Insp. Gen. I 
Made Mangku Pastika.

"This means that almost 40 people are killed every day," Pastika said in a 
hearing Tuesday with House of Representatives Commission III on law and internal 
security. 

Pastika was quoting figures from a study conducted by the BNN in 
collaboration with the University of Indonesia between 2004 and 2005. 

He said the survey found that 1.5 percent of the country's population, or 3.2 
million people, used drugs. 

"If our campaign does not succeed then the figure will increase in the coming 
years," Pastika said, adding that the BNN would hold another nationwide 
survey in 2007 to gauge progress. 

The survey also revealed that of the total number of drug users, more than 
800,000 were addicted to heroin. 

"We believe 60 percent of that figure have contracted Human Immunodeficiency 
Virus (HIV), because of their tendency to use needles to take heroin," he 
said. 

Pastika said the country's prisons had seen an increasing number of inmates 
jailed for drug-related crimes. 

Data from the BNN showed 23 percent of the country's inmates had drug-related 
crimes in their records. 

Rehabilitation efforts at prisons and treatment centers have apparently 
failed to curb the use of illegal substances and keep former addicts from 
relapsing, Pastika said. 

"Seventy percent of the drug users were found to be repeat addicts," he 
added. 

The BNN also found that many drug treatment centers had shut down. "We 
suspect that some of the people who run the rehabilitation centers have given up on 
their efforts," he said. 

Nonetheless, he said the BNN felt a new resolve to curb drug trafficking and 
drug abuse in the country. 

Earlier in the meeting, a number of lawmakers criticized the agency for not 
doing enough to curb drug use. 

"This country has turned into a heaven for drug users and drug traffickers," 
lawmaker Nursyamsi Nurlan of the Star Democratic Pioneer faction said. 

Responding to the criticism, Pastika said that the BNN would intensify its 
efforts to unravel drug networks. 

"Instead of making this country a heaven for drug traffickers, we will 
promise them hell," Pastika said. 

--------------------------------------------

The Wall Street Journal
September 27, 2006

Page One

New Intervention

Novel Police Tactic
Puts Drug Markets
Out of Business

Confronted by the Evidence, 
Dealers in High Point, N.C.,
Succumb to Pressure

Some Dubbed It Hug-a-Thug

By MARK SCHOOFS 

HIGH POINT, N.C. -- For over three months, police investigated more than 20 
dealers operating in this city's West End neighborhood, where crack cocaine was 
openly sold on the street and in houses. Police made dozens of undercover 
buys and videotaped many other drug purchases.

They also did something unusual: they determined the "influentials" in the 
dealers' lives -- mothers, grandmothers, mentors -- and cultivated relationships 
with them. When police felt they had amassed ironclad legal cases, they did 
something even more striking: they refrained from arresting most of the 
suspected dealers.

In a counterintuitive approach, police here are trying to shut down entire 
drug markets, in part by giving nonviolent suspected drug dealers a second 
chance. Their strategy combines the "soft" pressure from families and community 
with the "hard" threat of aggressive, ready-to-go criminal cases. While critics 
say the strategy is too lenient, it has met with early success and is being 
tried by other communities afflicted with overt drug markets and the violence 
they breed.

Overt drug markets -- street-corner dealing, drug houses, and the like -- 
constitute one of the worst scourges of poor communities. Such markets foment 
violent clashes between dealers, as well as robbery by addicts desperate for drug 
money. Property values suffer. Businesses and families move out -- or avoid 
moving in. Many residents who remain feel under siege. Police often rely on 
sweeps -- mass arrests of street-level dealers -- to eradicate drug-related 
crime. But those rarely provide more than short-term relief. In High Point, police 
believe that the combination of extensive investigation of the entire market 
and community involvement has helped solve the problem.

In May 2004, after accumulating evidence in the West End, police chief James 
Fealy invited 12 suspected dealers to a meeting at the police station, with a 
promise that they wouldn't be arrested that night. Encouraged by their 
"influentials," nine showed up.

In one room, they met with about 30 clergy, social workers and other 
community members who confronted them with the harm they were doing, implored them to 
stop dealing, and offered them help. The suspects, however, "were slouching in 
their seats and one guy even seemed to be dozing off," recalls Don Stevenson, 
pastor of a local congregation, the First Reformed United Church of Christ. 
"Their attitude was, 'This is just another program and it will blow over.'"

Then the alleged dealers moved to a second room where they encountered a 
phalanx of law-enforcement officials: police, a district attorney, an assistant 
U.S. attorney, and representatives of the federal Drug Enforcement 
Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and others. Around the room 
hung poster-size photos of crack houses that had been the dealers' 
headquarters. In front of each alleged dealer was a binder, laying out the evidence 
against him or her. There were even arrest warrants, lacking only the signature of 
a judge.

The law-enforcement officials made an ultimatum: stop dealing or go to jail. 
Several suspected dealers with violent records had already been arrested and 
were facing maximum charges. The same fate, officials emphasized, awaited 
anyone in the room who returned to dealing drugs. The district attorney promised to 
seek the maximum possible sentences, and the assistant U.S. attorney 
threatened to bring federal charges, which, he stressed, don't allow for parole. 
Police from surrounding areas warned them against trying to relocate operations, 
noting that their names were flagged on statewide law-enforcement computers.

Rev. Stevenson recalls that the alleged dealers "seemed to be paying a lot 
more attention."

The West End street drug market closed "overnight" and hasn't reopened in 
more than two years, says Chief Fealy, who was "shocked" at the success. High 
Point police say they have since shut down the city's two other major street drug 
markets, using the same strategy.

Police in neighboring Winston-Salem, N.C., as well as Newburgh, N.Y., have 
deployed the strategy with success, and word is spreading. Encouraged by the 
National Urban League, which wants to see the approach replicated nationwide, 
police departments in Tucson, Ariz., Providence, R.I., Kansas City, Mo., and 
elsewhere are gearing up to try it.

"It's the hottest thing in drug enforcement," says Mark A. R. Kleiman, a 
University of California, Los Angeles professor who specializes in illicit drug 
issues and isn't involved in the project.

Some police and prosecutors object to the approach.

"Why not slam 'em from the beginning and forget this foolishness?" says Karen 
Richards, county prosecutor in the Fort Wayne, Ind., area. The Urban League 
tried to convince her and the Fort Wayne police to try the strategy, but Ms. 
Richards didn't support it. She draws a distinction between addicts, who she 
believes should get social support, and dealers, who she believes deserve 
incarceration. "Drug dealers are drug dealers," she says. "They won't have an 
epiphany and end up as model citizens."

In Winston-Salem, many officers at first dubbed the initiative "hug-a-thug," 
though few do so now that they've seen it in practice.

In High Point, the West End neighborhood had been a major drug market for 
almost 15 years, with 16 known crack houses operating at the start of the 
initiative. A traffic jam began almost every afternoon, as buyers, many destined for 
homes in the suburbs, converged on the area seeking crack, according to 
residents and police.

Charlie Simpson, who owns and operates a radiator-repair shop in the West 
End, says he frequently saw drug dealers "on all four corners, selling drugs out 
of their pockets." The dealing drove away business "because women were afraid 
to come, men didn't want to bring their wives, plus they didn't want to leave 
their car overnight."

The neighborhood of modest clapboard bungalows became the city's crime 
capital. Lucille Dennis, 89, who has lived in the West End for half a century, says 
that before the initiative, she suffered three break-ins within a year and a 
half, and she stopped sitting on her porch for fear of getting robbed.

After the West End initiative, violent crime -- defined as murder, rape, 
robbery, aggravated assault, prostitution, sex offenses, and weapons violations -- 
dropped. More than two years later, violent crime remains more than 25% lower 
in the area, according to police statistics. Since the initiative, there 
hasn't been a single murder or rape reported in the West End. "I don't know 
exactly how to phrase it," Mrs. Dennis says, "but you just don't see as many people 
riding around doing nothing."

It isn't clear how well such an approach would work in big cities, which have 
much higher absolute numbers of crimes. High Point has about 90,000 residents 
and Winston-Salem has 190,000. In Kansas City, a city of about 500,000, 
Police Chief James Corwin says, "Will it work in Kansas City? I don't really know." 
His police department has almost finished the undercover investigation of a 
drug market it has targeted.

The initiative hasn't eradicated illegal drug use -- and it doesn't aim to. 
"This is not a war on drugs," says Chief Fealy. Rather, he says, the goal is to 
shut down overt drug markets because "street-level dope-dealing is what 
drives a significant amount of crime."

The police had been trying to drive dealers out of the West End for years. 
"We were actually doing a sting every month in [West End] making dozens of 
arrests," says High Point Assistant Police Chief Marty Sumner. "But the market 
persisted."

It's a pattern seen nationwide. In a report published last year by the 
American Enterprise Institute, authors David Boyum and Peter Reuter point to 
government statistics that show arrests per dollar of cocaine and heroin sold in the 
U.S. soared tenfold from 1981 to 2001. Moreover, the percentage of arrests 
that led to incarceration also shot up; in 2001 more than half the inmates in 
federal prisons were convicted of drug crimes, up from just 5% in 1981. Yet, 
during that same two-decade period, the street price of cocaine and heroin, 
measured in constant dollars, dropped by two-thirds, suggesting it isn't more 
difficult to deal. Indeed, the authors estimated that the risk of arrest per 
individual cocaine sale is less than one in 15,000.

When police do sweep in, Chief Fealy says, they often capture "targets of 
opportunity" -- dealers who are easy to nab. Hardened dealers expect dragnets, so 
they rarely conduct sales themselves or have significant amounts of drugs in 
their possession.

Drug dragnets can actually worsen the problem, because some residents resent 
the heavy-handed tactics, which can inflame racial tensions. Many community 
members "wonder whose side are the police on," says Janet Zobel of the National 
Urban League. Either out of a sense of futility or suspicion, many residents 
stop cooperating with the police.

The High Point strategy was the brainchild of David Kennedy, a 48-year-old 
professor at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In the 1990s, when 
he was at Harvard University, Mr. Kennedy helped develop Boston's anti-gang 
strategy, a community-involvement approach credited with drastically reducing 
violent crime.

But the drug initiative was a much harder sell. Mr. Kennedy says he had been 
trying for more than five years to convince police departments across the 
country to try it. When Mr. Kennedy first approached Winston-Salem, "We all told 
him he was crazy," says Police Chief Patricia Norris. Mr. Kennedy says he would 
ask, "When do you think what you're doing now is going to start working?"

Chief Fealy took to the idea the first time he heard it in 2003. He came to 
High Point from Austin, Texas, where he had been assistant chief and commanded 
the security detail for then-Gov. George W. Bush.

Before his job interview in High Point, Mr. Fealy drove around the city and 
was struck by the open drug dealing. "It was just so blatant and in-your-face," 
he says. Poring through crime statistics, he saw "well over 60% of our 
homicides were directly drug-related, and almost 100% of our person-on-person 
robberies." He decided to give Mr. Kennedy's idea a try.

First, police crunch data to find the "hot spots" most plagued by violent and 
drug-related crime. Then they engage in months of undercover research to 
understand the local drug market and identify the players -- big and small. Police 
are accustomed to spending months undercover only to nab a major criminal, 
such as an organized-crime boss. "So putting three months' work into 
investigating 20 corner rock dealers" normally would be considered a waste of time, 
Assistant Chief Sumner says.

But there is a payoff. "A market is something that requires a large number of 
actors," says Mr. Reuter, who is an economist as well as an illicit-drugs 
expert. "If can you can get all the actors out, you can disrupt the system."

Randy Dejournette, one of the alleged dealers invited to come to the 
second-chance meeting at the police station in 2004, says "everybody's gone" from the 
streets in the West End -- and that's one reason he says he doesn't deal now. 
"I'm not going to go out there by myself and sit on the corner and look dumb."

The High Point police knew who were the lookouts, the runners, the petty 
dealers and the big wheels. Analyzing the overall market led them to suppliers 
they might not have found otherwise. Assistant Chief Sumner points to Kevin 
Cotton, a six-foot-two man with a tattoo that read "thug life," who was a major 
source of drugs in a neighborhood targeted by police. An informant told them that 
he not only supplied dealers, but robbed and intimidated them. He "controlled 
the market," Mr. Sumner says. But because he didn't live in the area, "we 
probably never would have focused on him." Police made enough undercover buys to 
warrant federal charges, then arrested Mr. Cotton because they felt his record 
was too violent for him to be offered a second chance. He's now serving 20 
years in federal prison.

Arresting violent offenders is one key to making the initiative work. It 
removes the dominant actors in the market and sets a powerful example. But the 
other key is that police refrain from arresting suspects who haven't become 
hardened, violent criminals. These are often young people -- Mr. Dejournette, for 
example, was 19 when he was invited to the second-chance meeting. For them, 
police try to implement a communitywide intervention, choreographed to send three 
clear messages: If they return to dealing, they'll go to jail; their 
community will help them turn their lives around but won't tolerate drug crime any 
longer; and the police and community are working together to combat dealing.

At the second-chance meeting, police lay out their evidence in a deliberately 
theatrical way. The Winston-Salem police edited hours of undercover 
surveillance footage into a short video that showed each suspect making at least one 
sale. "Raise your hand when you see yourself committing a felony," the 
prosecutor told the suspects, according to two people who were there. They started 
raising their hands, and "that was a thing of beauty," police captain David 
Clayton recalls. "They knew we had 'em."

Alleged dealers are told that they have been put on a special list. "Every 
one of my assistants has your name," the district attorney told the suspects at 
the West End meeting. "And if they don't prosecute you as aggressively as they 
can, I'll fire 'em." Even the public defender -- who would likely represent 
them in court -- warned that the cases were so tight there would be virtually 
nothing he could do to help them.

Immediate enforcement bolsters that message. The three suspected dealers who 
didn't attend the West End community meeting were arrested the next day. One 
person who attended the meeting but tried to sell drugs days later was also 
arrested. Police and community groups advertised the arrests by posting fliers 
throughout the neighborhood with pictures of the suspects.

The threat of going to jail is coupled with a message of support from locals. 
Jim Summey, pastor of the West End's English Road Baptist Church and a leader 
in the community's anticrime crusade, sums up the message: "We are against 
what you're doing, but we're for you."

Mr. Dejournette recalls, "We wasn't expecting that....It did make an 
impression on me."

So did something deeply personal: the fact that his mother, Annette 
Dejournette, was, in her words, "disappointed," "ashamed" and "hurt" by her son's 
actions. She convinced him to attend the meeting even though he had been afraid it 
was a ploy to arrest him.

Ms. Dejournette works as a clerk in a thrift shop. Money is tight, and often 
the electricity or phone will get cut off, her son says. "Momma be sitting 
back crying and stressing, and that make me want to go back outside [on the 
streets] and really do something to stop my momma from crying, but she the one who 
talks me out of it."

The fact that the police are giving nonviolent dealers a second chance has 
encouraged community cooperation. West End residents have been increasingly 
calling police to report minor offenses, such as truancy or drunkenness. Ms. 
Dejournette says she went up to several police officers and city officials and 
"thanked them for trying to help my son."

The Winston-Salem neighborhood where the approach was launched last year has 
proved tougher. The area, centered on the Cleveland Avenue Homes housing 
project, has fewer community institutions, such as churches, than West End does. 
Turnover in its public housing is extremely high. Mattie Young, 78, president of 
the Cleveland Avenue Homes residents' council for almost 18 years, says the 
initiative eradicated open drug dealing during the first four months. But since 
then, she says, it has begun to creep back, especially at night.

Police captain David Clayton says that much of the new dealing may be due to 
one "very dangerous individual" recently identified by residents, whom police 
are seeking. Still, comparing the year before the initiative to the year 
after, major property crimes, such as robbery and burglary, dropped by 35%, 
according to police figures.

In the three neighborhoods where High Point has implemented the initiative, a 
total of 40 alleged dealers attended the second-chance meetings. Since then, 
six have been arrested for dealing. Another 10 have been arrested for various 
other crimes, from robbery to possession of marijuana. The rest -- 24 out of 
40 -- have stayed clear of the law, police say.

After a dispute with his boss, Mr. Dejournette lost a job with the city parks 
department. Now, he says, "I fill out applications, but I never get that call 
back." He works odd jobs, many through a brother who does construction, but 
he doesn't make the $200 a day he says he made running errands for dealers. In 
April, Mr. Dejournette was arrested but not charged for a nondrug offense, so 
he is "teetering on the edge," as Assistant Chief Sumner puts it.

Latisha Fisher, 32, of Winston-Salem, says she had been dealing drugs on and 
off since she was 15. After going to a community meeting and seeing herself on 
a police undercover videotape, she took her second chance. Her first job was 
at a fast-food restaurant. The pay: $6.50 an hour. "I toughed it out" for 
eight months, she says. "My church and family helped me." This summer, she landed 
a job on an assembly line manufacturing earth excavators, making $8.50 per 
hour.

Yon Weaver, a High Point city employee who helps ex-offenders or suspects 
find jobs, says only 10 to 15 companies in the area are willing to hire people 
convicted of a crime. Of the 40 suspected dealers called in to the community 
meetings, about 10 contacted his office for assistance. He knows three have found 
jobs. Some suspected dealers have simply dropped out of sight. Police say 
they don't think dealers merely relocated, because no new drug hot spots have 
emerged since High Point's three markets closed.

Rev. Stevenson says the alleged dealers "are still God's people, and I want 
them to do well and have productive, law-abiding lives." But noting that two 
murders took place within a block of his church before the initiative, he 
doesn't gauge the effort's success by whether dealers turn their lives around.

"It sounds a little ugly," he says, "but my first priority is the community."

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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