[Rainman]

In addition to his proclaimed moral crusade against prostitution (starting with the closure of the infamous Alexis Hotel), recently inaugurated Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan has also said he would take a hardline stance against drugs and would shut down any nightclubs where narcotics were found to be used.

Which is why he has decided to shut down Diamond, a nightclub (or as they’re still referred to by the local media, discotheque) in West Jakarta that was temporarily shut after a Golkar politician and two other men were found with crystal meth during a police raid pending the results of their investigation. Regulations give the government the right to shut down any establishment where narcotics have been found more than once and although police concluded the drugs came from outside the club, Anies decided to shut it down permanently anyways.

The new governor said it was essential to take a zero-tolerance approach against drugs because of the large and growing number of users in the capital.

“So it is estimated that more than 500,000 people are now drug users, 40% percent are employees, 20% are students, this is information from the head of the Jakarta branch of the National Narcotics Agency (BNNP DKI),” Anies said at City Hall today as quoted by Antara.

With the population of Metro Jakarta estimated to be about 10 million, that would mean the government believes around 1 in 20 people living in Jakarta is a drug user.

The new governor went on to say that the Chairman of the Indonesian Child Protection Commission (KPAI) mentioned that, in the last three years, the number of child drug traffickers increased by 300% and that the number of drug cases increased from 12,929 in 2014 to 17,300 in 2016.

The 500,000 user statistic from BNNP DKI comes from May of last year, but we could find no explanation for the agency’s methodology for coming up with that number. In the past, the government has been found to have used grossly unscientific surveys to estimate that 50 people per day are killed by drugs in Indonesia, a statistic often invoked by officials as a justification for the use of the death penalty for drug dealers.

Of course, the government’s attempts to increase public panic over narcotics with ever increasing numbers are at odds with their other stated justification for the death penalty, which is that it acts as a deterrent for future drug crimes.