Indonesia's drug fight pushes prison AIDS explosion

Source: AFP

JAKARTA — Their tattooed skin hanging loosely from hollowed-out limbs, the young men in the clinic at the edge of Jakarta's Cipinang Narcotic Prison lie limply across black vinyl beds.

The half-dozen inmates are in the advanced stages of HIV/AIDS, and are part of a crisis that has seen the disease sweep through Indonesia's overcrowded, squalid and corrupt prisons.

The root of the problem, activists say, is a war on drugs that treats injecting users -- many of them already HIV positive -- with the same harsh punishments as dealers, flooding jails where opportunities to get drugs and spread the disease are plentiful.

"People who are selling drugs, buying drugs, bringing drugs, abusing drugs, whatever, are being locked in the same place in the same situation -- no treatment, no nothing," said Baby Jim Aditya, the head of Partisan, a non-governmental organisation dealing with public health.



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