On the surface, international aid seems like a noble cause.
International aid is defined as money administered with the promotion of the economic development and welfare of developing countries as its main objective. But a new report called Aiding Executions?’, published in June by Harm Reduction International and the Institute for Journalism and Social Change, may challenge that definition.
The report shows how donor governments spent around $60 million between 2015 and 2024 on ‘narcotics control’ projects in 14 countries that retain the death penalty for drug offences. At the same time, international aid has been slashed around the world. Estimates suggest that funding reductions internationally could lead to more than 22 million avoidable deaths by 2030. One of the areas that has been hardest hit by funding cuts is harm reduction programmes.
The result today is that wealthy governments are funding capital punishment for drug offences in developing nations even as they cut money for hospitals, outreach clinics, and community workers that prevent the harms associated with drug use.
Indonesia is emblematic of the contradiction between defunding harm reduction and funding capital punishment. On the one hand, it requires aid to keep its harm reduction institutions alive. On the other, it has some of the world’s harshest drug penalties, one of which is landing on death row.
In May 2025, Fandi Ramadhan, an engineer aboard the Sea Dragon tanker was arrested when the ship was intercepted carrying almost two tonnes of methamphetamine. It was Indonesia’s largest ever seizure, publicly celebrated by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), whose donor-funded training helped make it possible. Prosecutors sought the death penalty for all six crew members.
Few people see both sides of the ledger better than Sahrul Syah, known across the Indonesian harm reduction movement as Gonz. Starting in 1998, he and a handful of activists built Indonesia’s response to drug-related harm from the ground up. They worked tirelessly to persuade ministries, police commanders, and the National Narcotics Board (BNN) that people who use drugs deserved clean needles, health care, and dignity rather than prison time. Much of that work relied on international funding.
Almost thirty years later, TalkingDrugs spoke to Gonz, who is now forced to support outreach workers in central and eastern Indonesia by phone and email from home in Bandung, West Java. Funding cuts mean there is no money to do the work in person.
“When you said cut,” he said of the American aid freeze that began in January 2025, “everything gets worse.” By his estimate, support reaching communities of people who use drugs has fallen by 75 to 90%.
To the bone
The United States dissolved USAID, its international development agency, in 2025, terminating 86% of its nearly 6,200 awards. A UNAIDS survey found that 77% of harm reduction programmes for people who inject drugs, including HIV services, had been “severely disrupted” by April 2025. In South Africa, the collapse was immediate, with harm reduction workers calling it “a calamity”. The Global Fund, a lifeline for countries the US’s AIDS response organisation PEPFAR never reached, fell almost $6bn short of its latest fundraising target.
Indonesia sat squarely in the blast radius. The US had been investing around $11 million annually in the country’s HIV response. When the freeze hit, all USAID-funded community-led activities were suspended, and community organisations reported widespread scaling-back and closures.
Gonz watched it happen from the inside. The sums were never large; colleagues across JANGKAR, the Indonesian Harm Reduction Network he serves as national secretary, reported grants of less than $25,000 to cover one or two years of work, but they made it work.
With that aid, they developed referral systems linking communities to hospitals, support groups for women who use drugs and for children whose parents do, and built bridges between institutions that made everything stick. All of that is now in jeopardy.
Embed from Getty Images
Aiding executions
But not all funding was cut equally. Some money kept flowing, as it has been for years. The ‘narcotics control’ aid tracked in the Aiding Executions? report paid, among other things, to enhance “Iranian Law Enforcement capacities”, to purchase drug control equipment in Sri Lanka, and for narcotics control training in Sudan.
Just over half of the money came from the United States, with most of the remainder from Japan and South Korea. The top recipients were all in Asia: Pakistan got $24.2 million, Iran received $10 million, and Myanmar $8.7 million. And the report warns these figures are the tip of the iceberg: donors reported more than another $330 million in ‘narcotics control’ spending in unspecified countries.
UNODC, it turns out, does not publish to the International Aid Transparency Initiative at all.
When Washington froze all foreign assistance in January 2025, counter-narcotics programmes were briefly caught in the same net as everything else. But it didn’t stay that way. The health money remained in the cancelled category but the drug war’s money came back, and then some.
In the final 2026 budget, Congress held the US foreign-assistance narcotics account flat at $1.4 billion even as it cut the overall international affairs budget by 16%. The administration’s next budget request keeps counter-narcotics front and centre of what remains of American aid.
That pattern repeats wherever you look. Inside the UN, UNODC’s own budget documents project its overall programme delivery to fall by 17% in 2026–27 amid what it calls unprecedented financial pressures, yet its drug programme fund is projected to grow by 4.9% over the same period.
In June, more than 60 organisations urged UNODC and the Commission on Narcotic Drugs to unequivocally condemn the death penalty for drug offences and ensure no technical assistance risks contributing to death sentences. Aiding Executions? goes further, concluding that ‘narcotics control’ should cease to be an eligible category of aid spending altogether.
No moves have yet been made to make those proposals a reality.
Stay of execution
In Indonesia, though the death penalty still officially exists for drug offenses, the country is in an unofficial moratorium. The country has not executed anyone since July 2016, when four men convicted of drug offences were shot by firing squad. In March, Fandi Ramadhan was sentenced to five years in prison, not death, though the prosecution is appealing
This doesn’t mean nobody is sentenced to death; rather, those convicted are now indefinitely placed on death row. Aiding Executions? estimates there are more than 450 people in Indonesia sentenced to death for drugs since 2022, putting the country in the global top five of death row arrests.
When I put the report to Gonz, he hesitated. In his experience, the death penalty is “not common” for the communities JANGKAR serves. He worries more about the global harm reduction movement fragmenting into regional blocs and losing international coherency. “We must go back to the principles of harm reduction,” he said.
What Indonesia needs, according to Gonz, is solidarity across its large, disparate populations. He’s seeking the community-led advocacy that harm reduction movements everywhere are now being forced to sustain without donors. “We have to strengthen each other,” he asserted, even as he wrings his hands and worries where the next dollar will come from.
Without aid, Gonz isn’t quite back to square one, but he’s close. Now he’ll have to do the same work he was doing in 1998, explaining, city by city, why people who use drugs deserve health care rather than handcuffs. The difference is that this time, the money isn’t coming.
The systems he spent a quarter-century building have been defunded by the very governments happily paying for the raids, the technology, and the operations that keep the death row full and the threat of executions for drug offences very much alive.
