The Danger of the Kampung and the Promise of Work: Examining Drug Recovery and its Limits in Aceh, Indonesia

This presentation will be featured at Indonesia 2025, on the 17.09.2025.

Author: Louis Plottel

Abstract:

In Aceh, Indonesia, a small but committed group of addictions professionals are working to expand the drug recovery system. The
province hosts public and private recovery centres run by a number of social organizations, including the national health service (Dinkes), the police (Satpol PP), and publicly registered charities (Yayasan). This mixed recovery landscape has had mixed results; the majority of residents at Aceh’s recovery centres relapse on their drug of choice, methamphetamine, within their first year of release.

In this presentation, I consider the limits of Aceh’s drug recovery system considering the broader social and economic landscape of Aceh today. I argue that drug recovery centres are but a band aid solution for the factors that drug users identify as the catalysts for their cycles in and out of addiction, namely: a stagnant economy, limited job prospects, the social environment of their home villages (kampung), and unresolved histories of violence and natural disasters. I compare drug users’ narratives of addiction and recovery to those presented by addictions specialists, showing that these narratives sometimes diverge in drastic and interesting ways. In particular, I argue that drug users emphasize the promise of a stable job as a path to recovery, whereas addiction specialists tend to emphasize psychological interventions and religion as paths to recovery.

This shows that while drug users highlight social and environmental factors as the underlying cause of their drug use, addiction specialists work with a different paradigm that emphasizes personal responsibility and psychology. I argue that this ideological mismatch limits the success of drug recovery in Aceh, and that drug users’own narratives of addiction must better inform addiction recovery systems. This presentation is based on 16 months of ethnographic research at three drug recovery centres across Aceh province, including the collection of dozens of life history interviews with active and ex-drug users.