On 6-10 July, 2015, fifteen activists participated in video advocacy training provided by the HCLU and the Indonesian Drug Users’ Network (PKNI) in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Since 2007, the HCLU/Drugreporter team has put increasingly more effort into spreading the knowledge of video activism that we have gained by producing hundreds of drug policy reform and harm reduction advocacy videos. Filming, editing, and disseminating online videos is not only easy and affordable, but it is also a powerful advocacy tool for activists in the field.
Our goal is to enable drug user activists and drug policy reformers to produce their own audiovisual content, and in the long run, to form a videographers’ network, so that they can cooperate with us and each other.
In July 2015, we worked together with the PKNI to hold video advocacy training for fifteen participants, who arrived from 10 different cities in Indonesia. Most participants were either current or former users of illicit drugs, some of them on substitution treatment, others, professional outreach workers or activists, but they all have a common goal: To fight against the new drug war launched when the Joko Widodo government declared a national drug emergency earlier this year, citing faulty statistics from the National Narcotics Board, and executing 14 people for drug offences.
After practicing interviewing in front of a methadone clinic in Jakarta.
As I was sitting in the van that we rented to bring training participants out to a methadone clinic and needle exchange program and to a voluntary rehab center, to practice interviewing and filming in a real location with real interviewees, I saw, for a kilometer-long stretch of the journey, nothing but posters with ‘Say no to drugs’ messages, such as:
“Say No to Drugs”
“Freedom (from drugs) or death”
“Protect your career and future. Stay away from drugs!”
Other posters advertised compulsory reporting/treatment for drug users. But I was wondering what had really changed, apart from the words, with the advent of this new war on drugs.
Our participants said the police had become tougher on drug users in general. There are more raids on drug-use hot spots, but also in apartment buildings, schools, and community health clinics. There are more people being detained for drug offences, more police corruption, more extortion, intimidation, and breaches of confidentiality.
Practicing interviewing and composition on each other.As of May 2015, 36% of prisoners in the country’s 427 overcrowded detention facilities were serving time for drug use. One of the participants in our group has just returned home after four years’ imprisonment for possession of half a gram of heroin. As they say, however, the easiest place to obtain drugs is in prison. Another participant smuggled in his dose of heroin by carrier pigeon, while in jail. That doesn’t, however, mean that using drugs in prison is in any way safe: sharing needles in prisons is commonplace – you rent a syringe to use, and then you have to give it back so that it can be rented out again.
Even though, since 2009, people caught with small amounts of drugs have the right to be sent to drug treatment instead of imprisonment, this does not often happen in practice – especially for those who can not afford to pay the judge the required bribe. And the type of coercive treatment that is provided is not evidence-based or effective. It seems as if the coercive treatment centres are more interested in keeping up the stats, than treating people. There are about 74,000 injecting users in Indonesia, but the National Narcotics Bureau plans to put 400,000 drug users in treatment centres by 2016. While I was in Jakarta, PKNI was assisting in a case where two teenagers escaped from one of these centres, and the staff retaliated by locking up their grandmother instead.
Another effect of the drug war seems to be a sharp decrease in the availability of heroin. All of a sudden, heroin disappeared, or was only available for six times its previous price. This has not, however, led to a decrease in drug use, as the authorities had claimed would happen. Many drug users have now switched to injecting buprenorphine, crushed antidepressants, and amphetamine-type stimulants instead. I wonder how long this shortage of heroin will last, or whether it will in fact result in the appearance of new psychoative substances, injectable synthetic cathinone derivatives, such as has happened in Eastern Europe with devastating consequences, like the skyrocketing prevalence of HIV, due to much more frequent injecting.
Learning editing.The new drug war has already had an impact on harm reduction programs: the people in hot spots, who could previously be contacted by outreach, are now scattered; they continue to use, but they are more afraid of the police, and more afraid to engage with health and support services. It is essential to maintain that contact with needle exchange and substitution programs, which have already proved to be effective in Indonesia: Methadone programs have helped reduce HIV rates among injectors from 42% in 2011 to 36% in 2013.
The above-mentioned are some of the issues that the participants of the training would like to film about. Thanks to the support of the Open Society Foundations and the National Aids Commission of Indonesia, we were able to train them in all the important aspects of video activism. With the help of Fazrie Permana, the co-trainer from Indonesia, on the first day we talked about pre-production, how to prepare for our films and make plans. On the second day, we distributed small Zoom Q4 type cameras, tripods and clip-on microphones, and taught participants how to compose their shots and how to conduct interviews. They first practised on each other, and later we all went out to conduct real interviews in the city. For a day and a half, they learned how to edit, using Premiere Pro CC, and they produced their own first films from the footage they had shot the previous day. The plan is that from every ten locations in Indonesia, they will provide one video a month, and they will upload them to PKNI’s YouTube channel. While I was there, we also took the time to film about the drug war, and carry out important research about women’s drug use in Indonesia. Look forward to these movies coming soon on Drugreporter.
The PKNI Staff.I believe that the most useful way of using our own resources is to train people like the members of PKNI. If they can just document in video what they see on the streets every day, or document their strategic litigation cases, or their lawyers’ efforts to keep people out of jail, or their work to secure hepatitis and HIV treatment for all, and their protests, events and actions – or if they simply show their community as it is, full of amazing people, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters – then attitudes will change, and society will change, and our work will not have been in vain.
István Gábor Takács
HCLU – Drugreporter
