President Joko Widodo has used some shocking statistics about drug use in Indonesia to justify his uncompromising “no clemency” policy for drug offenders on death row.
In an interview with CNN marking his first 100 days in office earlier this week, the president said, “Imagine every day we have 50 people die because of narcotics, of drugs. In one year, it’s 18,000 people who die because of narcotics. We are not going to compromise for drug dealers. No compromise. No compromise.”
Wow, 50 people per day, dead because of drugs? 18,000 people a year? Really?
No. Not really.
There’s an excellent article up on The Conversation today that takes a hard look at the statistics that the Indonesian government has been citing recently to paint the picture of a drug crisis in the country and to justify the use of the death penalty on drug smugglers such as Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan, two members of the Bali Nine who are up for execution next.
Claudia Stoicescu, a PhD Candidate in Social Intervention at the University of Oxford, does a great job of researching and picking apart the methods used to come up with figures such as the one Jokowi used in the above interview.
You should read the the article to get her full analysis, but the TLDR version is that the numbers the government are citing are based upon projections from old studies that used severely flawed methodologies to begin with.
For example, the 18,000 people dying of drugs per year figure? That comes from a seven-year-old “study” done by the Centre for Health Research and National Narcotics Agency (BNN):
The study authors then applied the median number of friends who died (three) to their 2008 estimate of “drug addicts”, arriving at a figure of 14,894. Divided by 365 days, this amounts to 41 “people dying because of drug use every day”.
The Conversation: Indonesia uses faulty stats on ‘drug crisis’ to justify death penalty
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