Addiction Training for Health Professionals as an Antidote to the Addiction Health Burden in Indonesia

While Indonesian policy-makers consider various options to target the ‘national substance-use epidemic’, ranging from crocodiles to guard drug offenders in Indonesian drug-prisons to scaling-up of rehabilitation services, an academic partnership between the major universities in Indonesia and academic partners in the Netherlands launched a national postgraduate addiction medicine curriculum. Recently, Irwanto and colleagues stated that the current governmental response to the ‘national drug emergency’ is dominated by a criminalizing viewpoint on substance use disorders (SUDs) and includes mainly ineffective punitive interventions. They plead for more evidenced-based approaches to SUDs in Indonesia.