Pot in Pans by Robyn Griggs Lawrence

Author:Robyn Griggs Lawrence [Lawrence, Robyn Griggs]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2019-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

Indonesia: “Alright to Use It as a Food Seasoning”

Cambodia’s neighbor to the south, Indonesia, was also considered a hassle-free place for backpackers with Western passports to find and use cannabis well into the 1980s, even though cannabis had been illegal since Indonesia joined the 1925 International Opium Convention.

The law did little to stop farmers in the fertile Aceh region in northern Sumatra, who continued to cultivate cannabis and send it out to be sold freely from market kiosks and vegetable carts, as they always had. The Acehnese people smoked cannabis mixed with tobacco and also used it with other herbs in homemade remedies. They soaked cannabis flowers in palm wine and kept the tincture in bamboo branches to drink as a tonic and consumed cannabis and nutmeg tea to alleviate asthma, chest pain, and bile secretion. The Acehnese also used cannabis recreationally, drinking a tea made from dried cannabis leaves that induced a sense of well-being known as hayal, a state of imagination or fantasy.

In the kitchen, the Acehnese made use of cannabis from morning to night. They mixed it with coffee; used it to enhance flavor and moisture in goat curries, fried noodles, peanut sauce, and soups; and made a toffee-like sweet called dodol aceh. They ate fresh fan leaves alongside other greens and tossed them into soups and stews. Cannabis leaves were a key ingredient in mie aceh, a popular street food. In his cookbook about the cuisine of the Spice Islands, Cradle of Flavor, James Oseland wrote that cannabis provided an “earthy, green taste” to dishes such as masam jing (hot and sour fish stew with bamboo shoots) but noted that stinging nettles could be substituted for diners who didn’t want a cannabinoid buzz.51

The Indonesian government began to get tough on cannabis in the late 1970s, when rebels from the separatist group Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka) began funding their operations through illicit cannabis cultivation and sales. Indonesia had been under increasing international pressure to crack down on cannabis crimes since it joined the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and in 1976, it did, with a law introducing life sentences for dealing and trafficking cannabis. In 2002, President Megawati Sukarnoputri imposed some of the world’s harshest penalties, including capital punishment, for cannabis crimes. Yet the nation’s cannabis users remained, for the most part, undeterred.

Nearly two million people used cannabis in Indonesia in 2014, making it the country’s most used illicit substance. In Aceh, ganja continued to be a lucrative cash crop, with an expanding cottage industry of entrepreneurs finding creative ways to use the plant. One company mixed it with the region’s other mainstay, coffee, to make kopi lawak, which means “coffee buffoonery” and is a play on kopi luwak, the fermented Indonesian gourmet coffee made from the excrement of civet cats. Many households continued to grow cannabis in their backyards alongside garlic and eggplant, though they often had to bribe the military not to destroy their plants. In certain restaurants throughout Aceh, diners in the know could order dishes made with ganja.

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