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ctivists have urged the government to change its paradigm and strategy in the fight against narcotics and oplosan (bootleg liquor) from repression and propaganda to infrastructure and human resource development.

 Rudhy Wedhasmara of East Java Action (EJA), an organization focusing on helping drug users and alcoholics, said that the call emerged during a recent NGO network national meeting in Jakarta from Dec. 19 to 23.

 '€œFollowing the enactment of the law on narcotics in 2009, the funds allocated to the National Narcotics Agency [BNN] continue to increase but the number of drug users also keeps increasing year after year,'€ Rudhy said on Monday.

 He said the BNN'€™s budget had increased from Rp 723 billion (US$57 million) in 2011 to Rp 1.072 trillion in 2013. At the same time, drug suspects also increased, from 32,763 in 2011 to 35,436 in 2013.

'€œThis shows that increases in budget, jail terms and anti-narcotics institutions cannot alone reduce the supply of and demand for narcotics in society,'€ Rudhy said.

 He argued that repressive policies had in fact led to some drug users being blackmailed.

Rudhy said that the meeting also recommended that the government be more serious in dealing with the distribution of oplosan.

'€œThrough regulations at the national and regional levels, bans have been applied to curb oplosan distribution. And yet, oplosan continues to claim more and more victims,'€
he said.

He added that there were a total of 147 regional bylaws in Indonesia that banned or limited the distribution of alcoholic drinks.

Chairman of the Islam Defender Front'€™s (FPI) Bekasi branch, Budi Santoso, concurred, saying that the government had tended to take a regulatory approach to stop oplosan from taking lives.

Unfortunately, he said, regulation had not been followed by education on the dangers of consuming alcohol, including oplosan, to students and the young.

'€œThe regulations are not effective at the implementation level because of people'€™s lack of knowledge about oplosan,'€ explained Budi, who is also a member of the FPI'€™s oplosan research team.

Budi said that methanol, a chemical agent contained in oplosan, was more toxic than ethanol. Methanol is used as a substitute for ethanol in oplosan because it is cheaper.

He suggested that one way of limiting the number victims of oplosan was by reactivating boy and girl scouts and other extracurricular activities among school students.

'€œThat way, younger generations can avoid falling into the trap of the culture of oplosan drinking, which is widely practiced in villages,'€ Budi said.