New Indonesian legislation to equate drug dependency with mental illness

The Indonesian parliament is currently drafting new legislation on mental health which proposes defining drug dependence as a mental health issue. As such, people who use drugs will be defined as people with psychiatric illness, for which treatment will be administered in a mental health care facility. This proposal has divided not only the Indonesian public. The argument put forward by proponents of this new law is that classifying addiction as a mental illness is a positive move away from criminalisation, and as such, should be accepted as a progressive step.

However, many of those in the drug using community strongly disagree. The proposed re-definition of 'addiction' has huge potential implications for harm reduction drug treatment services, for the meaningful involvement of the drug-using community in policy processes and programming, and for what's deemed "proper treatment" for addiction (i.e. pharmacological treatment over evidence-based harm reduction programming). Even more worrying is that UNODC Indonesia appears to support for this draft legislation.

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