Yogyakarta (ANTARA) - The National Narcotics Agency (BNN) personnel on Saturday (February 17) raided several houses and apartment units exclusively rented in Yogyakarta City as part of the agency's drug misuse prevention efforts.

"The raid targeted apartment units and rented houses whose tenants are not directly supervised by their landladies," Head of BNN-Yogyakarta Office's Drug Eradication and Intelligence Unit Sen.Coms.Arief Darmawan said.

The absence of the landladies' direct supervision has made the rented properties potentially misused by drug users, Darmawan said in his statement that ANTARA received here Sunday.

During the raid, the BNN officers conducted a random urine test on several tenants. One of them tested positive for amphetamine and methamphetamine while three others tested positive for benzodiazephine.

"We are digging deeper into the cases of these four suspected drug users," he added.

ANTARA reported earlier that while the government has pinned its hopes on the youth to help Indonesia beat the fierce competition among nations in the current era of disruption, the nation's youth are wrangling with a grave problem: drug abuse and addiction.

This challenging reality was confirmed by the National Narcotics Agency (BNN) and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences' (LIPI's) joint survey in 2019, which revealed that there were over 3.4 million drug users in Indonesia.

The survey conducted in 34 provinces indicated that about 180 out of every 10 thousand Indonesians in the age group of 15 to 64 years were addicted to drugs.

The government is well aware of this alarming threat of drug abuse and addiction. Since his first leadership term, President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) has even been reminding the nation of the grave impacts of drug consumption on Indonesia.

Users of crystal methamphetamine, narcotics, marijuana, and other types of addictive drugs come from different communities and socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, data has shown.

Drug users and drug dealers include even university students, as has been observed in several cases in Jakarta, East Java, and North Sumatra.

In July 2020, for instance, the South Jakarta Metropolitan Police nabbed seven members of a drug syndicate for selling dried cannabis to university students in the West and South Jakarta areas over the course of a year.

The suspects belonged to a university network of drug syndicates who sold the illicit drugs to students directly and through an online service.

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Translator: Luqman H, Rahmad Nasution
Editor: Tia Mutiasari
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