Inside Bali's Cannabis Courts: Sentencing Patterns After Foreign Arrests

October 19, 2026

Photo by QuinceCreative via Pixabay.

Every few months another headline runs out of Bali or Lombok: a tourist caught with a vape cartridge, a grinder, a baggie of flower, facing years behind bars under a law most visitors never bother to read before booking a flight. The warnings have been public for years -- embassy notices, travel forums, viral videos from detained backpackers -- and still the arrests keep coming. 2026 was no exception, and it gave policy watchers something more useful than another cautionary tale: a cluster of rulings out of Denpasar District Court dense enough to actually compare against each other.

The timing matters because Indonesia spent much of the past two years rolling out a new national Criminal Code, the KUHP, billed in international coverage as a sweeping modernization of the country's justice system. Narcotics offenses, cannabis included, weren't part of that modernization. The drug statute that's governed these cases since 2009 is still the one doing the work in 2026, untouched by the reforms getting the headlines elsewhere in the code.

What's changed instead is visible only if you line the year's cannabis verdicts up side by side. Denpasar's courts drew a line in 2026 between someone caught holding or smoking cannabis and someone caught growing it -- a distinction the statute gestures at but doesn't spell out nearly as sharply as the sentences themselves do. And running underneath all of it is a fact that no amount of judicial leniency changes: cannabis in Indonesia sits in the same legal tier as heroin and cocaine, with no medical carve-out, no personal-use threshold, and no sympathetic-facts exception written into the law.

Why the New Criminal Code Changed Less Than It Seemed To

Photo by Firman Marek_Brew via Pexels.

The rollout of Indonesia's revised KUHP generated a wave of coverage suggesting the country was loosening its approach to criminal justice broadly, and by extension, to drugs. That reading doesn't survive contact with the actual text. The new code reworks procedure, sentencing guidelines, and penalty structures across a long list of offense categories -- but narcotics law was carved out and left to stand on its own, governed by Law No. 35 of 2009, exactly as it was before the KUHP existed. Nothing about how cannabis is scheduled, charged, or punished shifted when the new code took effect.

Under that 2009 law, simple possession of cannabis still carries a sentence of four to twelve years in prison. Trafficking -- a category that can sweep in cultivation, distribution, or even possession of a large enough quantity -- carries a mandatory minimum of five years, with the statute's ceiling running all the way to the death penalty. Cannabis is classified as a Group I narcotic, the same tier reserved for heroin and cocaine, the most restrictive category Indonesian law maintains. There's no medical exception written anywhere into that classification, no allowance for CBD products regardless of THC content, and no threshold quantity below which possession is treated as a non-criminal matter.

That framework is the fixed backdrop against which every case below plays out. Whatever leniency shows up in a sentence, it isn't coming from a softened statute. It's coming from judges working within discretion the law still gives them -- discretion that, as the following cases make clear, gets applied very differently depending on whether a defendant is accused of holding cannabis or growing it.

A Year's Possession for 36 Grams: The Parks Case

On September 22, 2026, Denpasar District Court sentenced Tyeisha Kieonne Parks, a 38-year-old American, to one year in prison for possession and use of 36.71 grams of marijuana. She was charged and convicted under Article 127, paragraph (1) of Law Number 35 of 2009 -- the provision that applies to drug users rather than dealers or cultivators, and one that in practice gives judges more room to route defendants toward treatment rather than pure incarceration.

Prosecutors had asked for 1.5 years. The court came in meaningfully below that, landing on a one-year term, and paired it with an order for six months of rehabilitation at the Anargya Reka Sanbali Foundation, a stint credited against the overall sentence rather than tacked on separately. Neither prosecution nor defense appealed, which closed the case out quickly and left the verdict standing as the final word.

What makes the Parks case worth flagging isn't the amount involved -- 36.71 grams is a meaningful quantity, not a trace amount -- but how far the outcome sat below what Article 127 technically allows. The statute's possession provisions carry a four-year floor on paper. A one-year sentence, offset further by rehabilitation credit, shows a court treating the case as a personal-use matter deserving a measured response rather than reaching for anything close to the statutory range. That gap between what the law permits and what the judges actually imposed is the pattern running through nearly every simple-possession case to come out of Denpasar this year -- consistent enough that it looks less like an outlier and more like how these cases are now routinely handled, at least when cultivation or distribution isn't in the picture.

Cultivation Draws a Harder Line: The Abdoelrazak Case

Three months before the Parks verdict, the same courthouse handled a case that landed nowhere near as gently. On June 23, 2026, Denpasar District Court sentenced Nirul Rashim Abdoelrazak, a Dutch national, to three years in prison and a fine of Rp510 million for cultivating hydroponic marijuana in a residence in Denpasar. When prosecutors filed charges on May 19, 2026, they'd asked for nine years. The court cut that demand by roughly two-thirds -- and the resulting sentence was still triple what Parks received for possession, plus a fine running into the hundreds of millions of rupiah.

Abdoelrazak's defense rested substantially on medical necessity -- an argument that he was growing the plant to manage his own declining health. The court rejected that defense outright. Indonesian narcotics law carries no mechanism for recognizing medical need as a legal justification for cultivation, regardless of how credible the underlying health claim might be, and the judges said as much in reaching their verdict. His declining health did factor into the sentencing calculation as a mitigating circumstance -- part of why the term landed well under the prosecution's nine-year request -- but mitigation isn't the same as acquittal, and the distinction mattered here. Sympathy shaved years off the number; it didn't change the verdict.

His wife and co-defendant, Kseniia Varlamova, was tried separately, keeping the two cases from being evaluated as a single unit even though they arose from the same cultivation operation.

Set next to Parks' one-year term, the Abdoelrazak case draws the clearest line available in this year's docket: Denpasar's courts are treating cultivation as categorically more serious than possession, independent of sympathetic personal circumstances, independent of how far below the statutory maximum the final number lands. Holding cannabis gets you toward the low end of judicial discretion. Growing it does not.

The Medical-Use Argument That Indonesia Doesn't Recognize

Photo by Caleb Simpson via Unsplash.

Medical justification keeps surfacing in these cases, and it keeps failing as a legal strategy, regardless of how documented the underlying condition is. In May 2026, a 53-year-old Australian woman was arrested on Lombok carrying 59 ml of cannabis vape liquid, which she said she used for chronic pain management. Under the statute, that quantity and form exposed her to up to 20 years in prison. That same month, in Badung, an American cancer patient was arrested for possessing liquid marijuana, facing up to 12 years -- with police on record stating there is no medical exemption available under Indonesian law, full stop.

Neither case involved trafficking quantities or any allegation of sale. Both involved adults managing serious health conditions with cannabis obtained or carried for what they described as treatment purposes. Neither circumstance altered the charges filed against them. A third case from March 2026 underscores the same point from a different angle: a Palestinian man was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison and a 200 million rupiah fine for possessing 10.96 grams of marijuana -- a modest quantity by any measure, charged and punished under the full weight of the statute regardless.

Taken together, these cases establish something worth internalizing before anyone boards a flight to Bali or Lombok with cannabis products in their bag: Indonesian law draws no distinction between smoked flower, vape liquid, tincture, or extract. Form doesn't reduce exposure, and neither does a doctor's note from home. Prosecutors open these cases under the same Group I framework whether the defendant is a tourist with a joint or a cancer patient with a vape pen. Judges may later extend leniency in sentencing, as the Parks case shows -- but that leniency arrives after the charge, not instead of it. For anyone weighing personal risk, the only safe assumption is that intended medical use buys no protection at all.

How Cannabis Compares to Harder Drugs in the Same Courtroom

In 2026 Denpasar-area drug cases, sentences escalated sharply with the severity and scale of the offense—minor cannabis possession drew just 1–2.5 years, while cocaine smuggling convictions brought 9–11 years, highlighting Indonesia's harsh stance on drug trafficking versus simple possession.

Cannabis cases don't happen in isolation in Denpasar's courtrooms -- they sit alongside harder-drug prosecutions that make the relative treatment of marijuana easier to see. On February 26, 2026, the same court sentenced two British nationals to 11 and 9 years respectively for cocaine smuggling, sentences that dwarf anything handed down for cannabis that year, cultivation cases included. Indonesia has held a de facto moratorium on carrying out executions since 2016-2017, but the country still has roughly 530 people sitting on death row, the large majority convicted of drug offenses -- a reminder that the statutory ceiling for narcotics crimes, cannabis among them, isn't a theoretical maximum nobody actually faces.

Enforcement on the ground runs through BNN, the National Narcotics Agency, working alongside regular police units, with sustained operations concentrated in the tourist corridors of Bali and Lombok where foreign arrests cluster. Those operations haven't slowed down, and officials haven't signaled any intent to deprioritize cannabis relative to other narcotics.

What has shifted, informally, is how courts calibrate cannabis sentences once a case actually reaches verdict. Line up 2026's numbers -- a one-year term for 36 grams of possessed marijuana against 9-to-11-year terms for cocaine smuggling -- and it's clear judges are treating cannabis as meaningfully less serious in practice than the statute's formal Group I classification would suggest. That recalibration happens entirely at sentencing, though. It's worth noting that prosecutors aren't the ones extending this leniency: charging decisions in cannabis cases still routinely open near the statutory maximum, as seen in the nine-year demand against Abdoelrazak and the 1.5-year request against Parks. Whatever mercy shows up in these cases comes from the bench, not from how the state chooses to charge them in the first place.

Put the 2026 docket side by side and the pattern is hard to miss: judges in Denpasar are carving out real, substantial leniency for people caught simply holding or using cannabis, cutting prosecution demands by a third or more and routing sentences toward rehabilitation rather than pure confinement. That discretion runs out fast the moment cultivation enters the picture. Abdoelrazak's three years and half-billion-rupiah fine, delivered even after his medical necessity defense was flatly rejected, is the clearest evidence that growing the plant gets treated as a different category of conduct entirely -- not a bigger version of possession, but a different offense in the court's eyes, mitigating health circumstances notwithstanding.

None of this reflects any change in Indonesian drug law itself. The KUHP reforms that generated so much optimistic coverage left Law No. 35 of 2009 fully intact where narcotics are concerned. Cannabis remains a Group I substance, legally indistinguishable from heroin or cocaine in classification even if courts are now informally treating it as less severe in practice. There's still no medical exception on the books, no quantity threshold that converts possession into a non-criminal matter, and no sign from BNN or the legislature that cultivation or trafficking penalties are headed toward revision anytime soon.

For foreign visitors trying to read these cases as a signal about personal risk, the honest takeaway is narrower than it might look from outside. A one-year sentence for 36 grams isn't evidence that Indonesia has gone soft on cannabis -- it's evidence that one judge, in one case, with a cooperative defendant and an uncontested set of facts, chose to use the discretion the law allows. That mercy is specific to the circumstances it was given in. It doesn't transfer to someone carrying a larger quantity, someone growing their own supply, or someone unlucky enough to draw a less sympathetic bench. Anyone weighing the math before packing a vape pen for a trip to Lombok should plan around the statute as written, not around the best outcome a stranger happened to receive this year.