Guilty as charged:  Australian national Nicholas James Langan (right) and his Indonesian friend Hanung Pekik Hermantoro are sentenced to one year'€™s imprisonment each by the Denpasar District0 Court, Bali, on Thursday. They were found guilty of possessing 0.9 grams of ganja. (JP/Zul Trio Anggono)

The Denpasar District Court sentenced on Thursday Australian national Nicholas James Langan and his Indonesian friend Hanung Pekik Hermantoro to a one-year term of imprisonment for smoking marijuana. The sentence was lighter than the four-year prison term demanded by the prosecutor.

Both Langan and Hermanto were arrested on Batu Bolong beach in North Kuta in late January as they shared a marijuana joint. Police seized a used marijuana joint weighing 0.1 grams and 0.86 grams of marijuana wrapped in brown paper.

The court found them guilty of violating Article 127 of Law No. 35/2009 on narcotics.

'€œDefendants Hanung Pekik Hermantoro and Nicholas James Langan were proven guilty of committing a crime together, abusing a type 1 narcotic. Each of the defendants is hereby sentenced to one year in prison,'€ presiding judge Cening Budiana said in the verdict.

According to the verdict, the two defendants were punished because they were acting against government efforts to eradicate narcotics. The judge said that '€œthe defendants were polite during the trial process and openly admitted their crime'€.

Both prosecutor Denny Iswanto and the defendants'€™ lawyer Nyoman Sayoga said that they were still considering whether to appeal the sentence. The defense lawyer insisted that the verdict was too harsh.

During the trial process, a medical doctor at Bhayangkara Hospital in Bali told the court that the defendants were drug users who consumed marijuana.

The defendants told the judge that they suffered from drug addiction.

Langan told the judge that he has been addicted marijuana for 10 years. Langan also expressed his remorse when he given the chance to convey a statement.

'€œI have done something stupid. What I did by smoking marijuana has bought shame on my family and shown disrespect to Indonesian law,'€ said the Australian.

Langan said that he came to Bali to relax and to deal with a number of stressful conditions affecting his life in Australia. '€œSir, I have in the past had a problem with marijuana and alcohol addiction. I came to Bali to energize my body and to fight these terrible addictions. I am sorry to say I failed at the first hurdle. Sir, I am not a narcotics trafficker,'€ Langan told the judge during the trial several weeks ago.

The verdict was criticized by activists from the Bali Health Foundation (Yakeba), an NGO dedicated to the rehabilitation of drug users and supporting HIV and AIDS prevention programs.

Yakeba director Kadek Adi Mantara said that judges should send drug users to rehabilitation centers instead of sending them to jail. Such a policy would be in line with the government'€™s priority to rehabilate drug users, so long as they were not involved in drug trafficking.

The Supreme Court Circular No. 4, issued in 2010, also stipulates that a drug user could only be taken to court if he or she possessed at least 5 grams of marijuna.

'€œThey only had less than 1 gram of marijuana,'€ said Mantara.

'€œThere is also a regulation stipulating that drug users should be rehabilitated. They are no longer jailed because prison is not a solution,'€ Mantara said.

Mantara questioned the wisdom of both prosecutor and judge in sending the drug users to the jail.

'€˜'€˜The Bhayangkara hospital issued a letter saying that they were drug users. So why weren'€™t they
sent to a rehabilitation program?'€ he added.

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