Drugs trade is akin to fool’s gold

 IT should be made abundantly clear to any intending cross-border drug smuggler that while Papua New Guinea and Indonesia are the closest of neighbours they are poles apart when it comes to drug offences and penalties.

In PNG, while the public might be crying out for badly needed change of law to increase penalties, one can get away with a slap-on-the-wrist jail term. 

Across the border a drug offender of the worst sort faces death.  

That is the grim contrast. 

Somehow, not content with trading their marijuana locally, a number of crafty and enterprising Papua New Guineans are now testing Indonesian law enforcement by smuggling their produce cross the border to willing buyers in the Papua province.  Many have succeeded and brought in millions of rupiahs so the illegal trade is indeed enticing.

The National’s story this week about 17 PNG men detained in an Indonesian jail for drug smuggling should send a stern warning to others.  In a related story, 15 men transporting drugs were arrested in West Sepik who were en route to West Papua to sell their goods.  

It was even more daring of the group to have tried to cross the border using a stolen government vehicle. 

One member of the latter group is from Sentani in Papua province, the apparent dealer or go-between in the planned marijuana trade. The rest are from East Sepik, according to police. Trading between Papua New Guineans and Indonesians at the Batas border trade post has increased over the years and along with it illicit trade.

People travelling in from mainly the Momase and Highlands region have used the trade post and on occasions driven all the way to Jayapura in search of reasonably priced electronics, household and clothing items. 

But amid that healthy business was an underground drug trade flourishing which has now surfaced and proven beyond speculation.

West Sepik provincial police commander Robert Gesa said there was a big market for PNG marijuana, which is known across the border as PNG gold. A kilogram of “PNG gold” (marijuana) can fetch around K300.  

What PNG agricultural commodity currently earns that kind of money at the moment? 

No wonder the strong urge to cultivate and trade the illegal drug. 

But the drug business is akin to fools trading fool’s gold. 

Gesa said people were taking advantage of the good price by smuggling drugs across the border without realising the penalties awaiting those caught by Indonesian authorities.

“Their rules are very strict and I want PNG people to see and read in the media about how Indonesia deals with drug smugglers,” Gesa said. 

He was alluding obviously to recent media reports of Indonesian tough stance on drug offenders. The high profile drug case involving Australian citizens caught smuggling heroin out of that country is one such headline in the media in recent times.  

“It is not like PNG where you can get away with drug smuggling,” the Sandaun provincial police commander has said. It is a timely warning. 

As if to confirm the senior policemen’s comments, a district court in Mt Hagen sentenced a man from Bogia in Madang to five months in jail.

The convicted pleaded for leniency on the grounds that he was caught in the drug trade out of necessity to provide for his wife. However, the magistrate told him, “Selling marijuana to earn a living for you and your family is not a good reason because you can do many other things to earn an income.” 

The drug smugglers now held in Indonesia have taken a huge risk in the hope to slip into and out of the country without detection. Just because some have succeeded and made handsome returns does not mean that anybody else can do likewise.

According to Wikipedia, in January 2015 Indonesia carried out six executions, among them one Dutchman, one Brazilian, one Vietnamese, one Malawian and one Nigerian for drug-related crimes.  

That is the gravity with which that country treats drug offences, which is a very unlike the several months of imprisonment in a PNG prison for crimes of similar nature.