Banda Aceh (Indonesia) (AFP)

Agus plunges a wooden spoon into a wok filled with coffee and cannabis and roasts his "kopi ganja" (ganja coffee) with great care: this now prohibited mixture remains very popular in the conservative province of Aceh in Indonesia.

The smuggling mixture is very successful with local consumers but also with buyers from other regions of the Southeast Asian archipelago who pay it up to 1 million rupees (66 euros) per kilo, explains -t it.

However, making "kopi ganja" is a risky business in this province, the only one in Indonesia to apply sharia law, Islamic law, where drinking alcohol or kissing in public can be punished by flogging.

Agus, who does not want to reveal his real name, works in an underground but flourishing sector. Aceh is the first cannabis producing region in the country with a cultivated area equivalent to the territory of Singapore, according to official estimates.

Cannabis was once so widespread in Aceh that locals grew it in their vegetable patch.

But those days are over. Cannabis was banned in the 1970s, and Indonesia has passed some of the toughest drug laws in the world, up to and including the death penalty for drug traffickers.

If some countries have legalized the use of cannabis in recent years, such as Canada, or Thailand for strictly medical use, this is not on the agenda in Indonesia.

In Aceh, the police chase cannabis growers, imprison them and regularly burn the stocks of confiscated marijuana: more than 100 tonnes last year.

Despite the risks, Agus, a veteran who has given up a highly skilled job making cannabis coffee, says he is unlikely to end up in prison.

"How can you ban something that you find everywhere?" He asks?

"The repression forces people to smuggle (cannabis), but they still use it."

- Perfect dosage -

The main concern of Agus is to obtain a perfect dosage for its mixture: 70% java coffee and 30% marijuana. "If you put more than 30% ganja, you lose the taste of coffee," he told AFP.

Its recipe gives a pleasant drink, but not as powerful as if we smoke cannabis or if we eat the local "space cakes": the "dodol ganja", sweet mixture of cannabis, sticky rice, palm sugar and coconut milk.

"This stuff can really make you hallucinate," he warns.

If the consumption of cannabis in Aceh resists the prohibitions, its origin remains a mystery.

Some sources claim that it was brought by Dutch settlers hundreds of years ago as a gift to the sultan of this jungle-covered region.

But local historian Tarmizi Abdul Hamid notes that the use of cannabis in traditional medicine, to drive out pests from crops or in the kitchen, is evidenced by manuscripts that precede the arrival of the Dutch.

For example, one of these texts "ensures that ganja can be used to treat baldness or against too high blood pressure," he notes.

- Profitable culture -

At the start of the 21st century, cannabis literally found itself on the pro-independence guerrilla front in Aceh.

Fauzan was picking his cannabis crop when bullets whistled in his field during a skirmish between the army and the rebels in 2002, a few years before a peace agreement that ended the conflict bloody.

He estimates that 80% of the inhabitants of his native village of Lamteuba, some 50 kilometers from the provincial capital Banda Aceh, were formerly cannabis growers.

The inhabitants of this separatist stronghold concealed the paths leading to their crops and built hiding places to hide their harvest from the control of the authorities.

"This village is a paradise. You can plant anything there, it grows." "We plant a cannabis seed in the ground, leave it, and come back for the harvest," says Fauzan.

But, fearing arrests and after being robbed several times, he abandoned this culture.

He now plants peppers to feed his family and works for a government campaign to convince farmers to give up cannabis in favor of vegetables and other plants. But difficult to convince the peasants to abandon this lucrative culture.

"If the government does not take care of people and does not help them, it is likely that they will resume their old habits," he admits.

For Iqbal, a cannabis enthusiast, the only effect of the prohibition was to develop the talent of locals to hide marijuana, in coffee or a noodle dish.

"We cannot end the ganja in Aceh", assures the one who does not want to give his real name.

"It's easier to get rid of methamphetamine by destroying a laboratory. But when the police destroy a field of cannabis, it grows elsewhere."

© 2020 AFP