What Indonesia's drug law means for a Bali holiday

Most summaries of Indonesia's drug law still print a four year minimum for holding cannabis. Open the statute that actually applies today, and there is no minimum at all, because the statute that used to say so was replaced on 2 January 2026.

The floor disappeared on 2 January 2026

UU 35/2009, the narcotics law, is still in force, but its own status page on peraturan.bpk.go.id carries a line most summaries never open: Dicabut sebagian dengan UU No. 1 Tahun 2023, partially repealed by the new national Criminal Code. That code, UU 1/2023, commenced three years after its own promulgation under its Pasal 624, which lands on 2 January 2026. On that date Pasal 112 and 113, the possession and import articles a traveller is most likely to meet, were repealed outright. Their replacements, Pasal 609 and 610, sit inside the Criminal Code itself.

Read as originally enacted in 2023, Pasal 609 still kept a floor, four years and a category IV fine minimum. It never took effect in that form. The same day it commenced, a second statute, UU 1/2026 tentang Penyesuaian Pidana, rewrote it. Pasal 609 ayat 1, current text:

Setiap Orang yang tanpa hak memiliki, menyimpan, menguasai, atau menyediakan: a. Narkotika Golongan I bukan tanaman, dipidana dengan pidana penjara paling lama 12 (dua belas) tahun dan/atau pidana denda paling banyak kategori VI.

Anyone who, without right, holds, stores, controls or supplies a Group I narcotic not in plant form faces imprisonment of at most 12 years and/or a fine of at most category VI. No floor in either the prison term or the fine, and the two penalties are joined by "and/or," not "and": a court can impose either, both, or neither beyond a nominal sentence. Fines are set in categories under Pasal 79 of the Criminal Code, not rupiah directly. Category VI is Rp 2,000,000,000, category V is Rp 500,000,000. A reader who meets "kategori VI" in an Indonesian source with no rupiah figure attached is reading the current law correctly.

Six articles absorbed, ten rewritten in place

The Criminal Code did not repeal all sixteen articles it displaced in the same way. As enacted, UU 1/2023's Pasal 622 ayat 1 huruf w repealed the whole block, "Pasal 111 sampai dengan Pasal 126," all sixteen. UU 1/2026, Pasal I angka 55, rewrote huruf w before it ever took effect, narrowing it to six:

Pasal 112, Pasal 113, Pasal 117, Pasal 118, Pasal 122, Pasal 123 Undang-Undang Nomor 35 Tahun 2009 tentang Narkotika... dicabut dan dinyatakan tidak berlaku.

Only Pasal 112, 113, 117, 118, 122 and 123 are declared repealed. Read in the original statute, those six are the Golongan I, II and III possession articles (112, 117, 122) and their matching production and import articles (113, 118, 123): three pairs, one pair per golongan, fully absorbed into the two consolidated articles, Pasal 609 for possession and 610 for production and import, that now cover all three golongan at once. The other ten articles inside the original sixteen, 111, 114, 115, 116, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125 and 126, were left standing under their own numbers, and had only their penalty clauses swapped elsewhere, in Lampiran II. This narrowing is a deliberate legislative choice, not an inference from a status page: the repeal clause names the six articles it cancels, in the text of the law itself.

The death penalty ceiling, and where Golongan II fits

Pasal 609 ayat 2 raises the ceiling above 5 grams to life imprisonment or a term of at most 20 years, still with no floor and still fine at most category VI. Pasal 610, covering production, import, export and distribution, keeps the same 2009 thresholds, 1 kilogram or 5 plants in plant form, 5 grams otherwise. Ayat 2:

a. Narkotika Golongan I dalam bentuk tanaman yang beratnya melebihi 1 (satu) kilogram atau melebihi 5 (lima) batang pohon, atau Narkotika Golongan I bukan tanaman yang beratnya melebihi 5 (lima) gram dipidana dengan pidana mati, pidana penjara seumur hidup, atau pidana penjara paling lama 20 (dua puluh) tahun dan/atau pidana denda paling banyak kategori VI; b. Narkotika Golongan II yang beratnya melebihi 5 (lima) gram dipidana dengan pidana mati, pidana penjara seumur hidup...

The old Pasal 113, repealed in 2026, reached only Golongan I. Its counterpart Pasal 118, five articles down and repealed the same day, was the Golongan II article, and its ayat 2 already carried the same range since 2009: importing more than 5 grams of a Golongan II narcotic was punishable by death, life, or five to twenty years. So the clause above was not added by the 2026 amendment, nor by the 2023 code: it was already written into Pasal 610 when UU 1/2023 was enacted, and into UU 35/2009 before that. What UU 1/2026 removed was only the floor sitting beneath it, five years and a category V fine minimum. Morphine and oxycodone are listed as Golongan II narcotics, so importing either above that weight falls within capital range, as it has since 2009. An earlier version of this page called that a change against the 2009 statute. It was not.

The old statute still prints repealed numbers

Lampiran II of UU 1/2026 rewrites the penalty clause of at least 24 articles across UU 35/2009, far beyond the ten still standing from the repealed block. Ten sit inside the original sixteen, 111, 114, 115, 116, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125 and 126. Fourteen more sit outside it entirely, 128, 129, 131, 133 to 143 and 147, offences the Criminal Code never touched at all. Pasal 111, plant form possession, is the example inside that block a traveller is likeliest to meet. Original 2009 text:

dipidana dengan pidana penjara paling singkat 4 (empat) tahun dan paling lama 12 (dua belas) tahun dan pidana denda paling sedikit Rp800.000.000,00 (delapan ratus juta rupiah) dan paling banyak Rp8.000.000.000,00 (delapan miliar rupiah).

Current text, from Lampiran II:

dipidana dengan pidana penjara paling lama 12 (dua belas) tahun dan/atau pidana denda paling banyak kategori VI.

Same mechanism as Pasal 609: the floor is gone, and the penalty is disjunctive. Anyone who opens UU 35/2009 on its own, including its own official PDF, sees the 2009 wording with its four year, Rp 800 million floor. The current penalty exists only in Lampiran II of a different law. Compounding this, the status page for UU 35/2009 lists the Criminal Code's partial repeal but carries no line noting that UU 1/2026 amended it too, so a check that stops at the narcotics statute's own status page would miss the rewrite entirely.

Personal use and possession still overlap

Pasal 127 was not touched, since it sits outside the range the Criminal Code repealed. It still reads:

Setiap Penyalah Guna: a. Narkotika Golongan I bagi diri sendiri dipidana dengan pidana penjara paling lama 4 (empat) tahun.

Personal use of a Group I narcotic carries at most 4 years, with judges directed towards rehabilitation for proven addicts. The same physical act, holding the drug you were about to use, also fits Pasal 609's possession offence, now a ceiling of 12 years with no floor rather than a floor of four. Nothing in either statute says which article applies to which facts. That choice still belongs to the prosecution, and it decides more of the outcome than either ceiling does.

Cannabis is still Group I, by name

The Golongan I annex to UU 35/2009 was not amended by either 2026 statute. Points 8 and 9:

Tanaman ganja, semua tanaman genus Cannabis dan semua bagian dari tanaman termasuk biji, buah, jerami, hasil olahan tanaman ganja atau bagian tanaman ganja termasuk damar ganja dan hasis. Tetrahydrocannabinol, dan semua isomer serta semua bentuk stereo kimianya.

The whole cannabis genus, every part of the plant, resin, hashish, and THC in all its forms, still sits in the same group as heroin and cocaine. Pasal 8 ayat 1, also untouched, still closes the medical door for the entire group: "Narkotika Golongan I dilarang digunakan untuk kepentingan pelayanan kesehatan." Group I is barred from health services, so a foreign medical cannabis prescription has no legal force in Indonesia.

What we could not establish

• The full pre-2026 text of Pasal 116, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125 and 126,
• matched word for word against Lampiran II's replacement clauses. Their
• new penalties were read in full; their old wording was confirmed to
• exist but not cross-checked line by line the way Pasal 111 was here.
• Sentencing practice in Bali's courts under the new range, which articles
• are actually charged, and how often rehabilitation is ordered instead of
• imprisonment. No court statistics for the post-2026 period exist yet.
• Whether the "and/or" structure in Pasal 609 and 610 has produced any
• fine-only sentences in practice. The text permits it; no ruling was
• found either way.