Life is Healthy

Baby Virgarose Nurmaya started using heroin in high school when she was just 15 years old. Now 29, her long black hair falls across her soft features as she quietly recalls the past. She is soft-spoken and smiles constantly, but the deep scars on her forearms remain, signs of her struggle with drugs.

A heroin addict for 10 years, Nurmaya has worked hard to turn her life around. She now works for the STIGMA Foundation, a nongovernmental organization that reaches out to drug users. Run out of a small house in South Jakarta, the group is funded by overseas agencies and the Australian government.

Nurmaya says she had no idea about the risks when she started using heroin.

“A girl I knew was taking heroin and I just wanted to try. I never had any education about it, I never knew I might get addicted or have withdrawal symptoms. There was no information back then. I didn’t know that it was possible to get HIV from sharing needles.”

Drug dealers rent out needles for as little as Rp 2,000 (21 cents) per use. Most drug users will rent needles and share them rather than buy their own. Nurmaya says the drug dealers have no time to sterilize the needles and HIV is easily spread this way.

Nurmaya says at the worst point of her 10-year addiction she was doing anything she could to pay for her drugs. “I was stealing, making my parents give me money, working odd jobs. I was still living at home so had no living costs, all my money went to my addiction. I would leave home and come back when my money ran out.

“A single dose of heroin cost me Rp 50,000 back then. A heavy user will need a heavier dosage. I was using five doses a day for a long time.”

Nurmaya speaks with an unhurried and gentle tone. She emphasizes that her parents were supportive of her during her addiction but they eventually reached their breaking point. “In 1999 they found out about my drug habit and tried to help me. But then they became tired. They lost everything and had invested so much. So in 2003, they just threw me out and said, ‘anything you want to do, do it, but don’t come back here.’ ”

“In 2005, I went back home and demanded money from my mother to pay for my drugs. She said no and I turned violent, smashing the glass out of the living room cabinet.”

Nurmaya says this incident made her finally want to give up her drug addiction. She felt she had lost control of herself.

“I fell to the ground with blood coming out of my arm. My mother just looked at me and didn’t help me. She said it would be better to lose me as a daughter then to have me like this. That was a really hard thing to hear and it made me decide to quit.

“I knew that if I didn’t stop then, I would never stop. When I saw my mother so sick of me I just thought, thank God I’m not dead and I have a chance to change things.”

Nurmaya went cold turkey in 2005, ridding her body in 10 days of the heroin that had taken over her life. She has now been clean for more than three years.

Her work with STIGMA involves research and development into harm reduction services, like providing clean needles and thorough information for intravenous drug users. Nurmaya says the NGO doesn’t try to rid people of their drug habit but to educate and inform them on the risks they are taking and the rights that they have.

“Even if you are doing drugs, if you want to use them safely so you don’t get HIV, that’s the first step. It doesn’t work if you tell a user to quit — they have to be aware of what they are doing and want to stop.

“STIGMA is constantly battling against cultural and religious beliefs; those with HIV are often seen as sinners or as abnormal. People from conservative backgrounds tend to see HIV as a moral problem and not a health problem.”

STIGMA has 22 staff, most of them former drug users. Nurmaya says this helps in reaching out to the community. “We know where the drug users hang out, we know what it is like to go through withdrawal and we can give that advice to people if they want it.”

Harm reduction services are already available in public health clinics, and STIGMA uses this as a forum to provide information to drug users through brochures and word of mouth.

STIGMA will publish a research paper in early March exploring ways female drug users can be provided with better access to harm-reduction services.

Many drug users are female, but because of domestic issues it is difficult for them to access services through NGOs and public health clinics. Up until now, there have been no specific methods for approaching women.

Stigma is working to formulate better ways to reach the female drug using community. One step they have taken is to use female outreach workers.

The new research focuses on why female injecting drug users are a hidden population that is so difficult to reach.

Recommendations of the research include:

• Improving gender sensitivity within the Harm Reduction programs
• Reducing discrimination against women based on marital status
• Creating policy to empower women in terms of their basic rights to health and protection
• More participation from the media to inform female intravenous drug users of their rights

STIGMA Foundation

Jl. H. Nawi I No 1 A, Gandaria Selatan
South Jakarta,
Tel. 021 765 1501

www.stigma-foundation.blogspot.com