Corruption, education and economic inequality are the other conditions. There are countries with legalised drugs, such as Portugal, that don’t face addiction problems. In developed countries, where levels of education are higher, people are better equipped to make good decisions. People can treat drug use as a luxury, much like going to the movies (or, perhaps a better analogy – the casino), instead of an escape. There’s a lower chance of them overdosing and dying, and there are more resources in place to help addicts.

However, to a lot of people who haven’t been past primary school – if that – it doesn’t matter how intelligent you are if the facts just aren’t at your fingertips. Also, a lot of people tend to learn by trial and error – they take an approach according to the best of their judgment, or according to the advice of people around them, and modify accordingly. This works great for a lot of things, like learning to surf (hello Bali!) or to do a lot of jobs, but with drugs, not only is there the problem of individual physiology, there’s also the case that addiction clouds judgment.

Furthermore, when there’s less people below the poverty line, drug use is less likely to be destructive – it becomes an affordable expense. Finally, corruption gives a loophole to enforcement policies – I’m not sure how much of it actually takes place, but the existence of corruption in a government means enforcement is less likely to work out. These are all problems that exist in Indonesia, quite separately from drug abuse. The above is all speculation, and I don’t have any data besides the correlation to back it up. But from what I have seen of those countries, I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis to make.

The existence of corruption also removes a lot of the legitimacy of the state to enforce any law, especially ones which bear the death penalty. It can become a tool of the corrupt state to basically legally murder people. And there is a continuum along which this can be done, to maintain legitimacy or at least a façade of it: for example, the existence of the mandatory death penalty means that mules also face the squad. Someone plants the drugs on the guy, he’s a dead man. Whether or not Indonesia has done it or will do it is one thing. The fact is that it is a possibility that is open in a country as corrupt as this one (even in an authoritarian state, transparency will reduce the possibility of this or at least the ease; one can be authoritarian but not corrupt). I don’t have a parallel example off the top of my head, so anyone can feel free to correct me here.

To me, the best alternative is life imprisonment without possibility of parole. It’s well known why this is considered superior, but I’ll run quickly through again: Lower cost (the cost of executions is largely due to appeals etc which can and have taken more than a decade), possibility to reverse incorrect convictions, possibility of rehabilitation and lower damage to international relations. Definitely not something Indonesia can do right now –perhaps in a couple years, when everyone has forgotten about this, but more realistically, cleaning up the corruption act and ensuring that laws do what they’re supposed to will definitely be the bigger and more rewarding task ahead of Jokowi.

Thanks for reading, folks. This just flowed right onto the paper, so to speak. TLDR: “What’s best for Indonesia” as the question instead of “What’s the right thing to do”. Answer: Still not executing these guys.