Indonesia

Indonesia
Ganja (گانجا)
Flag	File:Flag of Indonesia.svg
Capital	Jakarta
Continent	Asia
Gene Pool	Southeast Asian
Cannabis Status
Legal Status	Illegal
Status Since	1927
Enforcement	Active eradication campaigns
Documentation
Growing Regions	0
Growing Areas	0
Accessions	0

Indonesia harbours one of the most documentarily rich cannabis cultures in Southeast Asia, yet one of the least studied. In Aceh, on the northernmost tip of Sumatra, ganja has been roasted into goat curry, brewed into diabetes tea, and intercropped with coffee in highland gardens for centuries — uses so embedded in Acehnese daily life that a vice-presidential statement in 2007 defending them attracted no controversy: "It's alright to use it as a food seasoning." The Dutch botanist Georgius Rumphius, stationed on Ambon in the 1670s and 1680s, produced the first detailed botanical description of cannabis in the Indonesian archipelago — including a record of a compact, curled-leaved variety from the Papuan and Sula Islands that has never been followed up by modern research.

The first colonial prohibition was not driven by any documented social harm: the Dutch pharmacologist Willem Boorsma, commissioned in 1912 to investigate the cannabis situation in the Dutch East Indies, found that widespread consumption was limited to Aceh and parts of Sumatra, and that no measures to stop cultivation were warranted. The 1927 prohibition came instead from international opium treaty obligations, and cannabis was regulated primarily as an opium surrogate — a logic that has never been revisited despite cannabis being placed in the same Schedule I category as heroin and crystal methamphetamine under the current 2009 narcotics law.

Today, Indonesia's primary cannabis cultivation zone remains Aceh Province — the same region Boorsma documented in 1912 — where annual eradication campaigns destroy millions of plants yet multi-generational growing continues. Between 2009 and 2012 alone, 37,923 people were imprisoned for cannabis use — approximately 26 persons sentenced per day. The country's landrace cannabis varieties have never been formally characterised or systematically collected, and face ongoing threats from eradication, genetic erosion from modern hybrid introduction, and the progressive severing of traditional agricultural knowledge under four decades of active prohibition.

No systematic botanical survey of Indonesian cannabis populations has ever been conducted. Rumphius's 17th-century description of Ginji Papoua — a compact, resinous, curled-leaved variety from the Papuan region — remains the only historical botanical documentation specific to eastern Indonesian populations, and its relationship to modern cannabis in Papua has never been investigated.

Cannabis in Indonesian Culture

Main article: Cannabis in Indonesian culture

Vocabulary and Regional Names

The standard Indonesian term for cannabis is ganja (also spelled gandja or gendji in older Dutch colonial sources), derived from Sanskrit ganja through the same transmission pathway as Khmer kanhcha:, Thai kancha:, and Lao kan xa. The term reflects introduction from the South Asian cultural sphere, likely through the same maritime trading networks that brought Hinduism and Buddhism to the archipelago in the early centuries CE.

Regional variation in terminology is significant. In urban slang, cimeng is widely used, particularly among younger users in Java. The word bang appears in Dutch colonial sources alongside ganja to describe the smoked preparation, particularly in Aceh. On Ambon, Rumphius recorded the term hayal (modern Indonesian: khayal) for the recreational state of well-being induced by cannabis tea — a state described as imagination or fantasy.

The Historical Dictionary of Indonesia records cannabis as having been "native to the Caspian Sea, but reported from Java in the 10th century," used as both a source of fibre and an intoxicant, though less common than tobacco, opium, or betel.

Culinary Use

Main article: Cannabis in Acehnese cuisine

Acehnese traditional cannabis use is distinguished by an unusually rich culinary tradition. Cannabis seeds are used to enhance the flavour and moisture of local dishes, most notably gulai kambing (goat curry) and Acehnese noodles. Cannabis flowers are soaked in palm wine, kept in bamboo branches, and consumed as a tonic. Cannabis is mixed into coffee and brewed as a tea, particularly in relation to diabetes treatment — a use grounded in the 16th-century holy books Mujarabat and Tajul Muluk, translated from ancient Malay, which reference cannabis as a remedy for "sweet blood."

In 2006, the BNN documented a remarkable range of cannabis-containing foods seized during eradication programmes in Aceh: cannabis oil, a local toffee-like confection, curry, fried noodles, meatball soup, and peanut sauce — the majority prepared with cannabis seeds and/or oil rather than flowers. Acehnese households commonly grow several cannabis plants in their backyards specifically for culinary and household use rather than commercial sale.

Outside Aceh, Dutch colonial sources document shopkeepers and warung (small shop) holders in Java mixing cannabis leaves with opium to enhance the aroma and narcotic effect of dried tobacco wrapped in banana leaves. This practice was widespread enough that many Javanese who did not cultivate cannabis were familiar with terms like ganja, gandja, or gendji.

Rumphius documented an additional culinary and medicinal preparation on Ambon: dried cannabis leaves combined with nutmeg and brewed as tea for asthma, pleuritic chest pain, and bile secretion.

Medicinal Use

Main article: Cannabis in Indonesian traditional medicine

Cannabis has documented therapeutic applications across several traditions in the Indonesian archipelago. The oldest written sources are the Acehnese holy books Mujarabat and Tajul Muluk, translated from ancient Malay in the 16th century. These texts, which local respondents in Aceh cite as foundational references when asked about cannabis, specifically recommend cannabis as a herbal remedy for "sweet blood" — understood by local communities as diabetes.

Rumphius's Herbarium Amboinense records the following medicinal applications on Ambon in the 17th century:

• Gonorrhoea: Cannabis roots consumed as treatment
• Asthma, pleuritic chest pain, bile secretion: Leaves combined with nutmeg, brewed as tea
• General well-being: Cannabis tea consumed recreationally to induce hayal (a state of imagined ease)

In the late 19th century, advertisements in Dutch-language newspapers published in the Dutch East Indies promoted cannabis cigarettes manufactured by Grimault in Paris as remedies for asthma, coughing, throat illnesses, breathing difficulties, and sleeplessness — directed primarily at the European colonial population, reflecting contemporary European medical practice rather than indigenous use.

Smoking and Social Use

Main article: Recreational cannabis in Acehnese culture

The dominant preparation method in Aceh and Sumatra was mixing cannabis leaves with tobacco and smoking in lintingan (rolled cigarettes), using nipa palm leaves, or corn or banana leaves as wrappers. Stronger effects were reportedly achieved with corn or banana leaf wrappers compared to nipa palm. Chopped cannabis leaves were sometimes first soaked in water and dried before rolling.

Rumphius observed that among Muslim populations on Ambon, cannabis smoked with tobacco produced variable effects: from aggression to sadness and melancholy — an observation that mirrors contemporary anxious commentary on cannabis effects while confirming deep integration of smoked cannabis into social life.

The recreation state sought was described as hayal or khayal — a word meaning imagination or fantasy, implying a sought-for perceptual shift rather than escape from difficulty. This contrasts instructively with the Khmer framing in neighbouring Cambodia, where Martin recorded users explicitly distinguishing the effects from opium and describing the purpose as "to avoid being sad, to experience a feeling of well-being."

Acehnese cannabis was also smoked or consumed as a tonic by immersing flowers in palm wine kept in bamboo sections — a preparation that suggests both slow-release consumption and a degree of craft in preparation that goes beyond simple drying and smoking.

Textiles

No systematic documentation of cannabis fibre use for textiles in the Indonesian archipelago has been located. The Dutch colonial botanical inventory De nuttige planten van Nederlandsch-Indië (Heyne, 1916) registered Cannabis sativa without noting fibre use as a primary application in the region. Boorsma's surveys of Acehnese and Sumatran cannabis use through the 1910s make no reference to textile applications. Given Martin's parallel finding that cannabis fibre was "completely unknown in Khmer country," it appears that across mainland and island Southeast Asia, cannabis was valued entirely for its seed, leaf, and flower rather than its stem fibre — in contrast to the textile traditions of highland minorities in southern China and northern mainland Southeast Asia.

The Religious Dimension

A distinctive feature of Acehnese cannabis culture is its grounding in Islamic textual tradition rather than existing in tension with it. The Mujarabat and Tajul Muluk — standard references in Acehnese traditional medicine, consulted by local healers for religious sanction for medicinal practices — explicitly endorse cannabis for diabetes treatment. When researchers from Lingkar Ganja Nusantara (LGN) conducted interviews in Aceh, respondents consistently cited these books when discussing cannabis, not as a defence against accusation but as a matter-of-fact statement of what the relevant authorities say.

This stands in contrast to the popular international framing of cannabis prohibition as a natural expression of Islamic values. The Acehnese case — where cannabis cultivation persisted through the post-independence period, through the Aceh conflict, and through four decades of active national prohibition, in one of the most devoutly Islamic regions of the world's most populous Muslim-majority country — presents a more complicated picture.

Knowledge Under Threat

Unlike Cambodia's catastrophic Khmer Rouge-era knowledge destruction, Indonesia's traditional cannabis knowledge erosion has been gradual and structural. Prohibition criminalises the open transmission of cultivation knowledge between generations. Eradication campaigns destroy both crops and the seed stocks that carry accumulated varietal selection. The progressive replacement of traditional Acehnese mixed-crop agriculture with BNN-promoted monocultures of cacao, patchouli, and soybeans eliminates the agricultural context in which cannabis cultivation knowledge was embedded.

The 2015 founding of Yayasan Sativa Nusantara (YSN, Sativa Nusantara Foundation) — the research arm of Lingkar Ganja Nusantara — and the issuance of Indonesia's first government research license for cannabis represents the first institutional attempt to document this knowledge before its loss. The scope of that license and the research conducted under it has not been publicly detailed.

Legal History

Colonial Indifference and the Boorsma Commission

The Netherlands East Indies colonial government's initial relationship with cannabis was one of studied indifference. The colonial administration's regulatory energies were focused on opium, which was controlled through a state monopoly (the Opium Regie) that generated substantial revenue. Cannabis attracted attention primarily as an opium surrogate: as opium controls tightened in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, cannabis use expanded among populations priced out of or legally excluded from opium.

Concerns about "Indian hemp" were raised at the International Opium Conference in The Hague in 1912. The colonial government commissioned Willem G. Boorsma, Head of the Pharmacological Laboratory of the Department of Agriculture, Industry and Trade, to examine the situation of cannabis across the Dutch East Indies. Boorsma's study, published in the 1915 departmental yearbook and in a series of journal articles, found no significant problems: widespread consumption was limited to Aceh and East and West Sumatra, with small-scale cultivation for personal use found mainly among Indian communities in those areas. The result was not prohibition but increased administrative scrutiny — regional administrators were required to report annually on the cannabis situation in their areas.

In practice, however, preconditions were set when leasing land that forbade cultivation of all plant-based psychoactive substances, including Indian hemp, without government authorisation.

The First Prohibition: Aceh 1924

The first legal prohibition of cannabis in what is now Indonesia came at the provincial level. In 1924, the Aceh region enacted an ordinance under which the cultivation, possession, storage, transport, and sale of cannabis were punishable with a fine of 100 guilders. This was a locally specific response to what colonial administrators in the region perceived as social concerns around Acehnese cannabis use, and preceded the national framework by three years.

The Verdoovende Middelen Ordonnantie (1927)

The national prohibition came with the Verdoovende Middelen Ordonnantie (Narcotics Decree) of 1927, driven by the inclusion of cannabis in the 1925 International Opium Convention rather than by any domestic policy crisis. The decree's primary focus was opium and its derivatives; cannabis was regulated as a secondary concern, principally in its role as an opium substitute. The decree prohibited cannabis cultivation and established restrictions on use, possession, and distribution — though penalties were modest by later standards.

Under the 1927 Ordonnantie, penalties included a maximum fine of 1,000 guilders or six months' imprisonment for cultivation, and 3,000 guilders or three months for import, export, possession, preparation, or use.

Cannabis-related arrests began to increase during the 1930s as colonial enforcement efforts intensified.

Post-Independence: The Colonial Framework Retained

Following Indonesian independence in 1945, the new government retained the colonial narcotics legislation without revision. This continuity was not the result of considered drug policy — it reflected the general pattern of newly independent states inheriting colonial legal frameworks by default while directing political energy toward more urgent nation-building priorities.

Fifteen years after the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the Indonesian government passed its first independent narcotics law.

Law No. 9 of 1976 on Narcotics

Law No. 9 of 1976 classified cannabis as a controlled substance restricted to medical and research purposes only. Unlike later legislation, it contained no formal scheduling system. Penalties under this law included: personal use, up to two years' imprisonment; cultivation and small-scale distribution, up to six years and a fine of Rp 10 million; dealing and trafficking, 20 years to life and a fine of Rp 30 million.

Law No. 22 of 1997 on Narcotics

Law No. 22 of 1997 introduced formal scheduling, placing cannabis in Schedule I — the most restrictive category, permissible only for research under strict conditions — alongside heroin and cocaine. Penalties escalated dramatically: small and large-scale possession and cultivation carried sentences of 10–15 years; production and distribution extended to the death penalty.

The Current Law: Law No. 35 of 2009

The governing legislation is Law No. 35 of 2009 on Narcotics. Cannabis remains in Golongan I (Group I). The 2009 law was stated by its architects to prioritise rehabilitation over prosecution — Article 127 specifies a maximum four-year sentence for personal use alongside mandatory rehabilitation obligations. In practice, this provision has been systematically circumvented. The law's ambiguous language enables prosecutors and police to reclassify personal users as dealers or traffickers, exposing individuals carrying small quantities to the far heavier penalties of Articles 111–116 — up to and including the death penalty for quantities above 1 kg or five plants.

Between 2009 and 2012 alone, 37,923 people were imprisoned for cannabis use — approximately 26 sentenced daily — while Indonesian drug policy organisations estimated that only 17 out of thousands of arrested users in 2014 were directed into rehabilitation rather than prison. The Supreme Court issued a Circular in 2009 and 2010 attempting to formalise a threshold of five grams as the boundary for user rather than dealer classification, but this Circular does not bind the BNN or National Police, and compliance has been minimal.

Timeline of cannabis legislation in Indonesia

Period	Legislation	Cannabis status	Key penalties
1924	Aceh Provincial Ordinance	Prohibited (province only)	Fine of 100 guilders for cultivation, possession, transport, sale
1927–1976	Verdoovende Middelen Ordonnantie	Cultivation prohibited; use/possession restricted	Up to 1,000 guilders or 6 months (cultivation); up to 3,000 guilders or 3 months (use/possession)
1976–1997	Law No. 9/1976	Restricted to medical/research; no scheduling	Personal use: 2 years; cultivation/small supply: 6 years; trafficking: 20 years–life
1997–2009	Law No. 22/1997	Schedule I (research only)	Personal use: 4 years; large-scale possession/cultivation: 10–15 years; trafficking: death penalty
2009–present	Law No. 35/2009	Golongan I (research only)	Personal use: 4 years (Art. 127); >1 kg or 5 plants: life or death (Art. 111–116)

The War on Drugs

The Indonesian government formally declared a war on drugs in 2002 under President Megawati. An independent National Narcotics Board (Badan Narkotika Nasional, BNN) was established in March 2002 and in 2003 expanded into provincial branches (BNP), rolling out the P4GN anti-drug programme (Pencegahan dan Pemberantasan Penyalahgunaan dan Peredaran Gelap Narkoba) to village level.

In 2007, the BNN itself proposed reviewing the legal status of cannabis — citing its culinary uses in Aceh and arguing it was not as harmful as commonly supposed. Religious protesters took to the streets. Vice President Jusuf Kalla defended cannabis only as far as food seasoning: "It's alright to use it as a food seasoning." The proposal was immediately dropped.

In 2015, President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) escalated the war on drugs dramatically, executing 14 drug traffickers and ordering 100,000 users into rehabilitation — a number planned to double annually. The BNN was authorised to conduct mass forced rehabilitation. Civil society organisations documented the resulting proliferation of forced urine tests, fraudulent controlled medicine sales, patient confidentiality breaches, and extortion by officers competing to meet quantitative targets.

Current Legal Status

Under Law No. 35 of 2009, cannabis cultivation, possession, and distribution are criminal offences at all scales. Cultivation of more than 1 kg or five plants triggers mandatory minimum sentences and potential life imprisonment or death. Personal possession is technically limited to four years under Article 127, but is routinely prosecuted under Articles 111–116 at officers' discretion, which carry significantly heavier sentences.

Entrapment and extortion by law enforcement and security officers are documented as widespread. The Supreme Court's five-gram threshold for user classification is not binding on enforcement agencies and is routinely ignored. No medical cannabis framework exists. The 2015 YSN research license represents the only formal legal space for cannabis-related work.

Cultivation History

Traditional Use Period (Pre-1927)

Cannabis cultivation in the Indonesian archipelago during the pre-prohibition period was primarily concentrated in northern Sumatra, particularly Aceh. Boorsma's surveys from the late 19th and early 20th centuries document small-scale, household-integrated cultivation for domestic consumption — seeds saved and replanted across generations, plants intercropped with rice, vegetables, and other smallholder crops.

On Ambon, Rumphius documented cannabis cultivation using seeds transported from Java — suggesting active seed trade between islands in the 17th century, and a degree of deliberate cultivation management rather than wild harvesting. In Java's urban centres, cannabis was not widely cultivated but was present in trade and in the practice of enhancing tobacco with cannabis and opium in warung settings.

The Acehnese culinary and medicinal tradition described by Boorsma — seeds in food, flowers in palm wine, leaves in coffee and tea — implies cultivation selected at least partly for seed and leaf production rather than solely for smoked flower, which represents a different selection pressure than found in commodity-producing regions.

The Colonial Prohibition Period (1927–1945)

The 1927 Ordonnantie drove cultivation underground in Aceh without eliminating it. The 1930s saw the first systematic cannabis-related arrests as colonial enforcement intensified following the international treaty framework. The Second World War and Japanese occupation (1942–1945) disrupted colonial administrative structures and enforcement entirely, almost certainly allowing a temporary expansion of informal cultivation.

The Aceh Conflict Period (1976–2005)

The decades-long armed conflict between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, GAM) from the late 1970s to the 2005 Helsinki Peace Agreement created conditions that simultaneously protected and destabilised traditional cannabis cultivation. Remote highland growing areas became militarily contested zones where state enforcement was intermittent or absent, allowing cultivation to persist and, in some accounts, to expand under conflict conditions.

GAM was alleged to have partially financed its operations by levying taxes on cannabis cultivation and cooperating with trafficking networks. In 1988, a GAM sub-district commander was arrested and reportedly showed investigators hectares of cannabis fields connected with GAM operational funding — though the validity of this confession has been questioned.

The Indonesian government launched Operation Nila I in 1989, targeting both GAM and cannabis cultivation simultaneously. Subsequent attacks by GAM were characterised by Indonesian authorities as retaliation against eradication programmes.

However, the relationship between any single actor and the cannabis trade in Aceh was far more complex than official narratives suggested. Indonesian military and police forces were themselves extensively involved in cannabis trafficking alongside, in competition with, and independent of GAM: a police helicopter pilot was arrested after transporting 40 kg of cannabis destined for the police chief of Aceh Besar regency; in 2002, an army truck carrying 1,350 kg of cannabis through Binjai, North Sumatra, was intercepted, resulting in a firefight between police and military in which six police officers and one soldier were killed. Multiple actors — military, police, rival GAM factions, local warlords, criminal entrepreneurs — participated in shifting alliances around cannabis revenues, while the rural farmers and cannabis growers dependent on cultivation for subsistence remained, as in Cambodia's Kirivong, the most consistently disadvantaged parties in the system.

By 2004, an estimated 30 per cent of Southeast Asia's cannabis supply originated in Aceh.

The 2005 Helsinki Peace Agreement was followed by intensified eradication operations as Indonesian authorities consolidated control over previously contested highland areas — making the post-conflict period one of heightened rather than diminished enforcement pressure on Acehnese cannabis farmers.

The Nila Rencong Operations (2006–2007)

The largest documented eradication campaign in Indonesian history was conducted under the Nila Rencong Operations — three major operations carried out in Aceh in collaboration with the provincial BNN and Acehnese provincial police, following the 49th Commission on Narcotic Drugs meeting and with UNODC endorsement.

Seizure data compiled by the BNN and UNODC for the period document the scale: 1,109,307 cannabis plants seized in 2006, escalating to 1,869,595 in 2007. These operations were followed by alternative development programmes administered by the UNODC and the Mae Fah Luang Foundation (2006–2010), including reconstruction of irrigation systems and promotion of alternative agricultural livelihoods. The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) opened an office in Jakarta in 2011 and began providing counter-narcotics assistance including for cannabis eradication in North Sumatra.

The effectiveness of these programmes has been persistently contested. Local researchers note that crop substitution programmes face structural failure because alternative crops carry significantly lower market values than cannabis. Civil society organisations have documented cases of staged eradication operations conducted primarily for media coverage rather than substantive enforcement impact.

Geographic Shift to Dispersed Production (2010s–present)

Following the Nila Rencong operations, cannabis cultivation in Aceh adapted rather than collapsed — dispersing across a wider range of highland districts and into smaller, more concealed plots. Commercial cultivation has also expanded into other Sumatran provinces: Bengkulu (West Sumatra), Lampung Province, and Mandailing Natal (North Sumatra). Cannabis cultivation areas typically do not exceed one hectare; many farmers cultivate rented or informally occupied land, abandoning sites after harvest and switching to new locations to evade enforcement.

In 2015, the BNN reported eradicating 64 hectares of cannabis plantations nationally, with 60 hectares claimed as converted to alternative crops in Aceh.

Growing Practices

Traditional Agronomy

Boorsma's surveys and subsequent observations document small-scale, integrated cultivation as the baseline Acehnese model. Cannabis was intercropped with rice, coffee, cacao, and food crops within mixed smallholder systems — a polyculture framework in which cannabis contributed seeds, leaves, and flowers to household use rather than constituting a monoculture cash crop. Household backyard cultivation for domestic culinary and medicinal use has been consistently documented from Boorsma's era through modern field reports.

The Lake Toba basin cultivation in the Batak highlands represented a distinct agronomy: highland altitude cultivation (approximately 900 m) under cooler temperatures than coastal Sumatra, integrated into Batak mixed farming systems with different selection pressures and cultural contexts than the Acehnese tradition.

Among the documented traditional practices is intercropping cannabis with coffee. In Aceh, cannabis and coffee have been described as providing complementary income in highland smallholder farming — a combination that attracted international press attention in the early 2010s and that has practical concealment advantages under prohibition conditions without being explicable solely as a concealment strategy.

Modern Prohibition-Era Cultivation

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Varieties and Genetics

No systematic botanical collection, genetic characterisation, or chemotype analysis of Indonesian cannabis landraces has ever been conducted.

Botanical Classification

The earliest botanical documentation is Rumphius's two-variety system recorded in the Herbarium Amboinense (1741): Ginji Maia, the taller fibre-type, and Ginji Papoua, a compact, resinous variety from the Papuan and Sula Islands. This two-type distinction — between a tall, fiber-leaning type and a compact, resinous type associated with the eastern archipelago — is the only historical botanical differentiation in the Indonesian record and has never been followed up by modern systematic study.

Boorsma's chemical analyses from the 1890s and 1910s constitute the earliest chemical characterisation of Indonesian cannabis, documenting the presence of cannabinoids and alkaloids in samples from Sumatra and Java. The analytical methods of the period did not permit the chemotype characterisation possible with modern gas chromatography or mass spectrometry.

Morphology

Acehnese cannabis is described in collector literature as tall (commonly 2–4 metres under natural conditions), narrow-leafleted, and adapted to equatorial tropical photoperiods with correspondingly extended flowering periods.

The Lake Toba population — sometimes referred to in collector and seed trade contexts as the "Elephant" strain — has been characterised by reports of unusually large leaf structure, including exceptionally wide leaflets, as its primary distinguishing morphological feature. Whether this represents a distinct genetically stable variety or phenotypic plasticity within a broader North Sumatran population is not established. The provenance reliability of material circulating under the "Elephant" or "Lake Toba" designation in the international seed trade is uncertain.

A compact, dwarf phenotype has been documented in North Sumatra in plants grown as understory or border plants in coffee fields. Whether this represents phenotypic expression under specific light conditions or a genetically distinct cultivar selected for concealment under mixed-crop conditions has not been determined.

Ginji Papoua is distinguished in Rumphius's description by curled and wrinkled leaves — a morphological feature noted as characteristic and used to distinguish it from the taller, smoother-leafed Ginji Maia. This description has been connected in recent scholarship to morphologically anomalous cannabis populations documented in Australia (Australian Bastard Cannabis), with the curled/wrinkled leaf trait as the linking characteristic. The significance of this potential connection for understanding Austronesian-mediated cannabis dispersal in the Indo-Pacific region remains an open research question.

Quality Tiers

No systematic documentation of quality tiers in Indonesian cannabis equivalent to the Cambodian or Lao systems has been located. Acehnese cannabis produced for household culinary and medicinal use represents a different quality context than cannabis produced for commercial smoking markets. The price gradient documented in the TNI briefing — from Rp 300,000/kg ($22) at Acehnese farmgate through Rp 1,500,000/kg ($110) in Medan to over $220/kg in Jakarta and $513/kg in Surabaya — reflects distribution economics and enforcement risk markup rather than quality differentiation, though higher-quality flower almost certainly commands additional premium in urban markets.

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The Market

Cannabis Price Points (Indonesia)

Year	Price	Location	Context	Source
c. 1912	Unrecorded	Aceh	Household/farmgate	Boorsma
2014	Rp 300,000/kg (US$22)	Aceh (farmgate)	Commercial landrace	BNN via TNI
2014	Rp 1,500,000/kg (US$110)	Medan (wholesale)	Commercial landrace	BNN via TNI
2014	~US$220/kg	Jakarta (wholesale)	Commercial landrace	BNN via TNI
2014	~US$513/kg	Surabaya (wholesale)	Commercial landrace	BNN via TNI
2014	Rp 100,000/paket (~US$7)	Urban (retail)	5–6 joints	BNN via TNI

The tenfold markup between Acehnese farmgate and Jakarta wholesale price illustrates the enforcement risk premium layered into the supply chain. Cannabis remained significantly cheaper than ecstasy ($29/tablet), heroin ($36/250mg), or crystal meth ($29/250mg) — which, combined with its perceived status as a natural plant-based substance, contributes to its position as the most widely used illicit drug in Indonesia, accounting for approximately 66 per cent of total drug consumption in the country.

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Supply Chain

Domestic Supply Chain

The documented Acehnese supply chain operates as follows:

1. Small-scale cultivation by household farmers and larger-scale operators in highland Acehnese districts, often with military or police protection obtained through bribery
2. Drying and basic processing at or near cultivation sites
3. Sale to traders at farmgate (Rp 300,000/kg) or transport to Medan wholesale markets
4. Distribution by road network from Sumatra to Java and eastern Indonesia, with Sukabumi in West Java identified as the primary Sumatra-to-Java entry point
5. Urban retail through paket (fixed-price packages) at approximately Rp 100,000 per package (5–6 joints)

Synthetic Displacement

With intensifying law enforcement from 2015 onward, high-quality traditional cannabis became increasingly scarce on Indonesian urban markets. Synthetic cannabinoids — primarily synthetic cannabis marketed under names such as "Gorilla tobacco" — expanded rapidly to fill this gap, reaching peak popularity between January and May 2015. This displacement of a well-characterised plant product by uncharacterised synthetic analogues represents a direct harm-multiplication consequence of prohibition enforcement.

Enforcement

Eradication Campaigns

The BNN conducts annual eradication operations targeting cannabis cultivation throughout Indonesia. Aceh Province receives disproportionate enforcement attention as the primary producing region. Operations combine aerial surveillance, ground penetration of highland cultivation areas, crop destruction, well and irrigation infrastructure demolition, seed confiscation, and farmer arrests.

The largest documented campaigns — the Nila Rencong Operations of 2006–2007 — destroyed over 1.1 million plants in 2006 and nearly 1.9 million in 2007. By 2015, the BNN reported 64 hectares eradicated nationally in that year.

The BNN's stated 2016 intention was to shift enforcement focus from farmers to "investors" allegedly controlling cannabis cultivation — an acknowledgement that the upstream actors financing and organising production had not been the primary targets of previous enforcement.

Enforcement Challenges

Acehnese highland cultivation areas present terrain challenges analogous to those documented in Cambodia's Kirivong: remote mountain plots requiring significant approach time, cultivators who typically abandon sites before authorities arrive, and local communities that do not assist in identifying plot owners.

The institutional barriers are more systemic. The BNN, National Police (Polri), Ministry of Health, and Ministry of Social Affairs operate in fragmented and sometimes competing institutional frameworks, with overlapping responsibilities and contested resources, particularly around rehabilitation programme authority. Police officers trained under DEA and international programmes "return to an environment of scarce resources and pervasive corruption." Prison overcrowding from cannabis-related prosecutions — with national prison capacity at 145 per cent in September 2015, exceeding 260 per cent in Jakarta and several other provinces — consumes the institutional resources ostensibly available for enforcement.

Selective Enforcement and Military Involvement

The enforcement record in Aceh reveals a consistent pattern in which small-scale farmers bear enforcement burden while institutionally protected actors conducting large-scale trafficking operate with impunity.

The Military Trafficking Problem

The most extensively documented cases of protected trafficking involve the Indonesian military (TNI) and police rather than civilian political patrons. The 2002 Binjai firefight — in which a military truck carrying 1,350 kg of cannabis was intercepted by police, resulting in a gunfight that killed six police officers and one soldier — is the most dramatic documented instance of military cannabis trafficking, but it occurred in a documented pattern. A police helicopter pilot was separately arrested for transporting 40 kg of cannabis destined for the Aceh Besar police chief.

The TNI briefing documents that security forces — military and police — "were reported to have promoted cannabis cultivation in rural areas and purchased cannabis from farmers at much lower prices than on the black market." This protection system — in which security forces simultaneously enforce prohibition against unprotected farmers and extract rents from the production they notionally suppress — mirrors patterns documented in Cambodia's Koh Kong and Kirivong operations in the same period.

The Heng Pov Parallel

In July 2006, Heng Pov — the former chief of Indonesia's Anti-Drug Police — fled Indonesia and alleged that "high-ranking government officials and well-connected businessmen were involved in drug trafficking, but were not prosecuted due to government pressure." The BNN noted the difficulty of assessing the credibility of these claims. Heng Pov has not been prosecuted.

A prominent criminologist, Adrianus Meliala, stated publicly that "the police, who are supposed to fight drug crime, are drug dealers and consumers."

Contrast with Small-Scale Enforcement

In the same period, cannabis users caught with quantities sufficient for personal use faced routine prosecution, extortion, and imprisonment. The Supreme Court's five-gram threshold for user classification was ignored by officers who instead categorised buyers sharing cannabis with friends as dealers and traffickers, triggering sentences of five to twenty years. An Acehnese farmer selling 1 kg of cannabis at farmgate for US$22 faced potential life imprisonment; the military officer transporting 1,350 kg across North Sumatra in an army truck faced, apparently, no consequences at all.

Civil Society Response

Lingkar Ganja Nusantara (LGN) has since 2011 documented the traditional and cultural contexts of Indonesian cannabis, provided legal advocacy for arrested users, and in 2015 obtained the first government research license for cannabis through its foundation Yayasan Sativa Nusantara (YSN). LGN's book Hikayat Pohon Ganja: 12,000 tahun menyuburkan peradaban manusia (The Tale of the Cannabis Tree: 12,000 years enriching human civilization) represents the most comprehensive public documentation of Indonesian cannabis culture.

The Indonesian Drug Users' Network (PKNI) provides legal advocacy for arrested users and has systematically documented the gap between the law's stated rehabilitation intent and its punitive application in practice.

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Growing Regions

Main article: Landrace cannabis growing regions of Indonesia, See also: Landrace cannabis growing areas of Indonesia

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Growing Areas

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Conservation Status

Main article: Landrace cannabis conservation in Indonesia

Indonesia's traditional cannabis landraces face severe and compounding threats from multiple directions:

• Eradication campaigns: Annual destruction of millions of plants across Acehnese highland districts eliminates cultivated populations, destroys irrigation infrastructure, and disrupts seed-saving. The Nila Rencong Operations of 2006–2007 alone destroyed nearly 3 million plants in two years.
• Genetic erosion through modern varieties: Introduction of modern high-THC hybrid varieties — primarily through seed imports serving the domestic urban commercial market — has displaced traditional landraces in accessible areas and introduces hybridisation pressure in others.
• Cultural disruption: The criminalisation of a multi-generational agricultural and culinary practice severs the intergenerational transmission of cultivation knowledge, selection criteria, and use practices. The Acehnese culinary tradition — seeds in curry, flowers in palm wine, leaves in tea — cannot be openly practiced or taught under current law.
• Synthetic displacement: The 2015 surge in synthetic cannabinoid use, driven directly by cannabis market disruption from enforcement, reduces demand pressure on traditional varieties while posing substantially greater health risks to users.
• Absence of ex situ preservation: No confirmed ex situ preservation programme for Indonesian landrace cannabis exists. Material claiming Indonesian provenance in international collector networks lacks reliable provenance verification or population-representative sampling.

Indonesia: Landrace cannabis eradication map

Conservation status: Endangered — Active eradication targeting primary producing regions; no known preservation efforts; genetic erosion ongoing; traditional cultivation knowledge under sustained structural pressure. The Lake Toba and Papua populations are effectively unassessed; their status may be worse than Endangered.

See Also

• Southeast Asian Gene Pool
• Herbarium Amboinense
• Ginji Papoua
• Aceh — Province-level article
• Lake Toba — Growing area article
• Indonesia/Accessions
• Portal:Current Events

Bibliography

The following works constitute the essential bibliography for cannabis in Indonesia. Items marked * are highest-priority sources for further research.

• * Rumphius, G.E. (1741). Herbarium Amboinense, Vol. V, t. 77. Amsterdam. Digitised at Botanicus.org. — The foundational botanical source; contains the Ginji Papoua description and Ambon medicinal/recreational use documentation. The only pre-modern botanical description of Indonesian cannabis.
• * Putri, D. and Blickman, T. (January 2016). Cannabis in Indonesia: Patterns in consumption, production, and policies. Drug Policy Briefing No. 44. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute. [1] — The most comprehensive modern overview; covers traditional use, legislation, cultivation, enforcement, and civil society. Primary source for legal and enforcement sections.
• * Boorsma, W.G. (1917). Pharmacologisch laboratorium. Jaarboek van het departement van landbouw, nijverheid en handel 1915. Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, pp. 21–29. — The colonial government's own commissioned assessment; found no significant cannabis problem. Critical for understanding that the 1927 prohibition was not driven by domestic policy need.
• Boorsma, W.G. (1892). Eenige bijzonderheden omtrent cannabis sativa, var. indica. Teysmannia, III, pp. 792–799. — First chemical characterisation of Indonesian cannabis; Acehnese and Sumatran samples.
• Boorsma, W.G. (1918). Over het voorkomen en het gebruik van Indische hennep in Ned.-Indië. Teysmannia, VI, pp. 324–334. — Broadest geographical survey of cannabis distribution and use patterns across the Dutch East Indies.
• Cribb, R. and Kahin, A. (2004). Historical Dictionary of Indonesia. Scarecrow Press. — Contains the 10th-century Java reference.
• Heyne, K. (1916). De nuttige planten van Nederlandsch-Indië: Tevens synthetische catalogus der verzamelingen van het museum voor economische botanie te Buitenzorg. Batavia: Ruygrok & Co. — Major colonial botanical inventory; registers Cannabis sativa across the Dutch East Indies.
• Kingsbury, D. and McCulloch, L. (2006). "Military Business in Aceh." In Reid, A. (ed.), Verandah of Violence: The Background to the Aceh Conflict. Singapore: NUS Press, pp. 212–217. — Documents military involvement in illegal commerce including cannabis trafficking in the conflict period.
• Lingkar Ganja Nusantara (2012). Hikayat Pohon Ganja: 12,000 tahun menyuburkan peradaban manusia. Jakarta: LGN. — Foundational Indonesian-language text on cannabis cultural history; primary civil society documentation.
• Schulze, K.E. (2004). The Free Aceh Movement (GAM): Anatomy of a separatist organization. Policy Studies, No. 2. Washington: East-West Center. — Contains the estimate that Aceh produced 30% of Southeast Asian cannabis in 2004; authoritative on the GAM conflict structure.
• Veth, P.J. (1869). Schets van het eiland Sumatra. Amsterdam: P.N. van Kampen. — Early Dutch documentation of cannabis use in Sumatra including Aceh; cited by Boorsma.

Archival Leads

• Nationaal Archief, The Hague: Colonial administrative records of the Netherlands East Indies (Gouvernement van Nederlandsch-Indië). Contains administrative correspondence on cannabis, narcotics regulation, and the drafting of the 1927 Ordonnantie. Catalogue search terms: Indische hennep, ganja, gandja, Verdoovende Middelen.
• Delpher (KB National Library of the Netherlands, digitised Dutch colonial press): De Sumatra Post is extensively digitised and contains documented cannabis-related articles including the 1924 Aceh ordinance announcement ("Een gandja-verordening in Atjeh," 26 November 1924) and 1930s enforcement records. OCR search for gandja, ganja, hennep across the Dutch East Indies newspaper collection has not been systematically conducted.
• Tijdschrift voor Nijverheid en Landbouw in Nederlandsch Indië and Teysmannia: Dutch colonial scientific journals containing Boorsma's articles and potentially other botanical and pharmacological documentation of Indonesian cannabis. JSTOR and Hathi Trust have partial holdings; Leiden University library (KITLV collection) likely holds complete runs.
• KITLV (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies), Leiden: Holds the Colonial botanical collections and related archival material, including records of the Buitenzorg (Bogor) botanical garden which registered Cannabis sativa.
• Jaarboek van het departement van landbouw, nijverheid en handel (Annual reports of the Department of Agriculture, Industry and Trade): Contains Boorsma's 1917 pharmacological laboratory report and potentially additional annual reports on cannabis surveillance mandated by the colonial government post-1912. Held at Leiden and partially digitised.

References

Indonesia Southeast Asian Endangered Southeast Asia Indonesian Illegal 2 Herbarium Amboinense Putri & Blickman 2016