Illegal Drugs

Drugs and Indonesia do not mix. The penalties for getting it wrong are out of all proportion to any pleasure, and enforcement against foreign nationals, in Bali especially, is relentless.

The governing statute is Narcotics Law No. 35 of 2009, now charged alongside the new Criminal Code (Law No. 1 of 2023) in force since January 2026. Cannabis (ganja) sits in Golongan I, the top category, identical in law to heroin and methamphetamine. A prescription or legal purchase abroad counts for nothing: cannabis vapes, CBD and THC products all trigger arrest at the airport.

Penalties scale with the charge. Personal use can draw up to four years, and the law allows court-ordered rehabilitation for proven addicts, though in practice most still go to prison. Possession or cultivation runs four to twelve years plus fines into the billions of rupiah. Trafficking carries life or death.

Executions have been suspended since July 2016, and under the new code a death sentence now carries a ten-year probation before it can be commuted to life. This is not leniency. Courts keep handing down death sentences, and around 600 people sit on death row, most of them for drugs. The famous cases are all closed now: the surviving Bali Nine were repatriated to Australia in December 2024, the two ringleaders having been executed in 2015; Briton Lindsay Sandiford was sent home in November 2025; Schapelle Corby was deported in 2017. Each served long, hard years first.

The old belief that cash buys a way out is itself a trap: attempting to bribe police, prosecutors or judges is a serious crime, and anti-corruption stings remain active. In the clubs you will be offered ecstasy, sabu (methamphetamine, now the dominant trade) or ganja, sometimes by a companion who asks you to buy for them while a plain-clothes officer waits nearby. The answer is always no.

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