Pubdate: Mon, 07 Nov 2005
Source: Australian, The (Australia)
Copyright: 2005sThe Australian
Contact: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/files/aus_letters.htm
Website: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/35
Author: Stephen Fitzpatrick

SILENT BOMB DESTROYING BALI

Long Before The Kuta Explosions, The Island Of The Gods Was Being 
Torn Apart By Heroin And HIV, Writes Stephen Fitzpatrick

WITH the junkie's combination of ease and anticipation, Riky squeezes 
a forearm between calf and thigh as he squats in the corner of his 
Kuta boarding house room, waits a brief moment for the bruised vein 
on the back of his hand to engorge, then plunges the needle in deep.

The heroin starts working within seconds. Riky, 24, who's been 
shooting smack in Bali's most popular tourist district several times 
a day since arriving from his native Sumatra three years ago, 
releases the arm, leans against the tiled white wall and half closes his eyes.

Gently drawing the syringe's plunger back and forth, once, twice, 
three times, blood clouding the barrel and wafting back into the vein 
to guarantee as intense a hit as possible, he draws deeply on a clove 
cigarette.

A tense smile plays on the gaunt man-child's face as the drug washes 
across it; a rooster crows in the courtyard below. Within minutes the 
moment has passed; soon the agitation will begin again, but for now, 
worry is an age away.

"Of course I want to stop," Riky says when the opiate cloud finally 
settles. "But it's hard. So hard. I keep falling."

His friends Irfan and Ginting, also from Sumatra, join Riky in the 
tiny room, just big enough for a single mattress on the floor, a few 
pieces of clothing, some sterile syringes, a Japanese grammar book -- 
Riky prides himself on his rudimentary skills in the tongue -- and an 
Indonesian copy of Cosmo magazine.

The pair, who have waited anxiously outside in the midday sun while 
Riky got his third hit of the morning, are trying desperately to go clean.

It's been three days since they smoked the stuff -- "I'm not game 
enough to inject," says Ginting, "you never know about the doses" -- 
and the raffishly handsome 27-year-old, who has been addicted since 
he arrived in Kuta six years ago, can't even watch his friend go 
through his ritual.

"It makes me want to throw up," he says.

A couple of tablets of Subatex, an oral heroin replacement being 
trialled in Indonesia, got Irfan and Ginting through day two of their 
latest shot at a heroin-free life the previous day.

They bought the pills on Kuta beach from a friend, Dewa Ketut 
Ardatha. He's been clean for 18 months. At 39, "Arda" is a survivor 
of heroin addiction who has now devoted himself to helping Bali's 
thousands of drug addicts.

He has a special arrangement with a local doctor that enables him to 
provide the slow-acting Subatex to users, the logic being that at 
least that helps keep them off the deadly white powder.

But even for Arda, it's not easy. "Addiction doesn't go away," he 
admits. "You have to keep fighting it."

In Riky's room, Irfan and Ginting are struggling with stomach cramps 
and no cash to get rid of them. Ginting tries to find a comfortable 
position to lie on the floor, first front, then back; Irfan props 
himself up on the bed, facing the west, then warily trying the east.

Riky thumbs through his copy of Cosmo.

The trio and up to 20 other friends spend their days on one of the 
world's most famous beaches, selling whatever they can to its 
affluent tourists to support their habits. "I stopped when the only 
thing left to sell was myself," Arda says.

Their gang, one of several along the popular strip, is a small part 
of an Indonesian narcotics addiction explosion that makes the cases 
of the Bali Nine -- who have been charged with conspiring to smuggle 
more than 8kg of heroin to Australia -- almost pale into insignificance.

"They (the Bali Nine) really didn't know the situation here," former 
user, dealer and narcotics convict Marky tells The Australian with a 
smile. "There are a lot of big dealers in Denpasar. If they knew 
that, they would have been able to do it safely; instead they just 
went to the airport not even knowing what was going on there. There 
are other ways of doing it."

Bali-based Australian drugs campaigner Bob Monkhouse -- an avid 
opponent of a scourge the origin of which he locates at the door of 
modernity -- says the epidemic is close to unmanageable.

But he insists it's not only tourists who are responsible; instead, 
Monkhouse warns, Indonesia has a home-grown problem that presages a 
looming disaster.

"It's easy to blame the presence of Westerners in Bali for the drugs 
problem here, but there is the same drugs problem in Malang, in 
Surabaya (large cities in eastern Java), and in Sumatran cities, and 
they don't have that same kind of tourist thing at all," Monkhouse says.

"It's an Indonesian problem, and it's a recent one."

Monkhouse, who has lived in Bali for three decades, runs a 
Denpasar-based non government organisation focused on drug addiction 
and HIV-AIDS: the latter a timebomb inextricably connected to the former.

His NGO, the Bali Health Foundation, operates a needle exchange 
program which he laments has reached only 20 per cent of the 
province's estimated 5000 intravenous drug users.

"You need about 75 per cent for true effectiveness," he acknowledges. 
"Until we've reached that number, really we're going backwards."

Well over half of Bali's injecting users are HIV-positive; Monkhouse 
says these people are spreading the virus further -- both through 
drug use and sexual activity.

Bali psychiatrist Denny Thong fears an epidemiological catastrophe is 
not far off: he warns that the spread of HIV through syringe sharing 
is "a tsunami" about to hit the Island of the Gods.

"I always say that we already had a bomb in Bali before 2002, but 
it's a silent bomb, and nobody cries," Dr Thong says. "We already had 
more people died from HIV here (than in the bomb)."

Police crackdowns in Denpasar's red-light and organised crime 
district of Kampung Flores in recent months have pushed the problem 
further underground, Monkhouse says.

"Six months ago it was easy to find junkies on the streets of 
Denpasar, which in a way was good because it meant you could help 
them," he says. "Now they're becoming harder to find -- they're still 
using but they're doing it with more secrecy. That doesn't help at all.

"You have to be getting dirty needles in and replacing them with 
clean ones to be doing any good," he says.

Bali police chief I Made Mangku Pastika, accompanying his troops on a 
raid of a Kampung Flores gang hideout in July, warned that criminal 
elements would have "tough medicine" dished out if they continued to 
promote their illegal businesses of drugs, gambling and prostitution.

Most observers say the pressure has only forced the drug trade 
elsewhere, including to Denpasar's main jail in the suburb of 
Kerobokan, near the tourist resort areas of Kuta, Legian and Seminyak.

Heroin has always been available at the jail but several addicts told 
The Australian it was now easier for outsiders to buy there than ever 
before. It was also safer and cheaper, they said.

Jail doctor Anak Agung Gede Hartawan admits there are inmates using 
heroin, but says it's a problem of resourcing. "At other jails 
(abroad) there are proper facilities provided for prisoners," he 
says. "Here everything comes from the outside -- food, everything. 
It's not surprising drugs also come in."

Bali has two methadone therapy centres -- one in the jail and one in 
the central hospital, at Denpasar -- and the Subatex that has put 
some spark back into the life of Arda's Kuta beach gang is also 
helping address the addiction epidemic.

"These are really beautiful medications; they help catch the ones who 
want to give up," enthuses Dr Thong, at 65 years of age, officially 
retired, but as the province's pre-eminent mental health expert 
unwilling to let go the responsibility he feels towards his "army".

"You know it's very dangerous actually, what I'm doing," he says. 
"You're trying to pull down the market, and some people do not like 
it. I get threats, sometimes, but I've got a strong army behind me.

"I've got pimps, I've got prostitutes. My dream, when I die, is that 
I'll be in an open field and all the people coming to mourn me will 
be the drug addicts and the prostitutes."

Including, presumably, Riky, Irfan and Ginting, even though all three 
are adamant they are too "ashamed" to go to Dr Thong for treatment. 
"I don't want my situation known," Ginting says. "I have to fight it 
myself." He takes up again a discussion with Arda about how to get 
hold of another Subatex tablet before dark; the medication, he says, 
changes everything.

"You can sleep, you can eat, you want to wash. It's amazing," he says.
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