Devi Asmarani, Jakarta – Illegal drugs are moving out of Jakarta's inner-city slums into the suburbs.
Recent police raids found that many houses on the outskirts have been turned into simple factories churning out Ecstasy, a drug popular in nightclubs.
Small-scale entrepreneurs are taking over from major crime groups which have been busted, but police are concerned that the home-made pills could be even more lethal than those produced by the syndicates. These pills were more likely to contain poisonous substances, they said.
Jakarta police have raided six houses producing the drug so far this month. The recent arrest of drug kingpin Ang Kiem is said to have opened up business opportunities for small-time producers.
Police raided the Indonesian-born Dutch national's two drug factories, which were capable of producing millions of pills a day. Much of their produce was sold abroad, including in the United States.
Jakarta's Narcotics Division police chief Carlo Tewu told The Straits Times: "There was a shortage of supply while the demand remained high domestically. Many of the Ecstasy producers we arrested recently are not part of larger syndicates.
"They are freelancers, risk-taking entrepreneurs with smaller capital who see potential in the Ecstasy business while the larger ones are not running."
The drugs are produced in smaller quantities in private homes in residential neighbourhoods. At the most, two to three people work at these homes, making as few as 50 pills a day. "They produce the pills on demand, it's not mass production. That is why even their next-door neighbours often do not have the slightest idea what is going on inside these houses," he said.
He cited a case in which a woman had not realised that her husband was making Ecstasy in one of the rooms of their house.
The producers usually sell to patrons of the numerous discotheques and nightclubs in the capital and in the surrounding industrial towns of Tangerang, Bekasi and Depok.
Raw materials for the pills are readily available but because of a lack of "quality control" some do not even contain the essential element, the chemicals MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine). Sometimes, the pills are merely made of cold medicine. But such a pill can be deadly if it contains a poisonous chemical.
"Anyone can produce Ecstasy, as long as it looks like pills and is small. And because they are sold at nightclubs, it is harder to detect the real from the fakes. We have even seen mosquito coil chopped and shaped into little pills and sold at a club," he added.
There are no recorded victims of the home-made Ecstasy. But police said most victims of drug-related incidents do not report to the police and hospitals treating drug-overdosed patients are not obliged to report to the authorities either.
The police estimate about 1.3 million people in Jakarta use illegal drugs. Eighty-five per cent of them are students of university and high schools. In all, approximately three million Indonesians consume illegal drugs. Indonesia is also becoming known as a producer of narcotics.
President Megawati Sukarnoputri has made the fight against drugs one of her government's priorities. Early this year, she required her party members and some government officials to take drug tests.