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As a rising trade in illegal or knockoff jamu, a traditional herbal drink, floods the market, licensed makers of the popular concoction are calling for better checks.

Charles Saerang, chairman of the Association of Indonesian Jamu Producers (GP Jamu), said on Monday that there needed to be more stringent regulation of the industry in light of the large amount of unlicensed jamu currently for sale.

He said that because the ingredients for the assorted varieties of the drink were widely available across the country, the market was ripe for anyone to produce and offer their own jamu — often sold as knockoffs of popular established brands.

“It’s this availability of the ingredients and the ease of processing them that fuels the trade in fake jamu,” Charles said.

He added that it would take more than just routine raids on markets to crack down on the illegal business.

“Besides having law enforcers come down, there also needs to be pressure brought to bear on the illegal producers by the Health Ministry, the Industry Ministry, the Trade Ministry and even the Agriculture Ministry,” he said.

Charles also warned that the illegal jamu trade posed a threat to the continued operation of legitimate producers. Companies affiliated with GP Jamu employ around three million people at their 1,300 factories nationwide. The combined annual turnover of the GP Jamu members is around Rp 10 trillion ($1.12 billion).

“In order to maintain these kinds of figures, we need to establish greater cooperation between jamu producers and the government to tackle the challenges facing the industry,” said Charles, the president of Nyonya Meneer, one of the country’s oldest and biggest jamu producers.

Last Saturday, police in Bogor raided an illegal jamu factory operating in Ciomas subdistrict. They seized thousands of pills comprising a mixture of jamu, over-the-counter drugs and prescription drugs.

The products churned out by the factory had already gone into circulation in the market before the raid, police said.

Two of the jamu brands it produced, marketed as Merah Delima and Pil Panatik, came complete with bogus Health Ministry registration numbers on the packaging and claimed to treat a variety of ailments, from high uric acid and rheumatism to high cholesterol, toothache and fever.

The factory owner, Asep, who was arrested by police, said he mixed herbal ingredients with the prescription painkillers Piroxicam and Mefenamic acid, as well as Allopurinol, a prescription drug to treat high uric acid, to make the jamu pills. Another ingredient was the over-the-counter analgesic Paracetamol.

Asep said he bought the raw ingredients for all the drugs from wholesalers at Pramuka Market in Central Jakarta.

“At the factory, I ground up and mixed all the ingredients in a mill, then put them into a sintering machine to produce the pills,” he said.

He added that he did not know if the jamu he made had any adverse side effects.

“I just mixed up all the ingredients at random. I don’t know if they have any side effects at all or what they were,” he said.

Charles said the case highlighted the dangers of allowing the unlicensed jamu trade to flourish unchecked.

“Jamu producers know that they should never mix herbal ingredients with chemical additives,” he said.

“Genuine jamu is a purely organic, natural product.”

T. Bahdar, the Health Ministry’s director of pharmaceutical products and distribution, said consumers could easily distinguish between fake and genuine jamu by looking for a registration number on the product packaging from the Food and Drug Monitoring Agency (BPOM).

“Because it’s considered a food and beverage product, there should be a registration number from the BPOM, not from the Health Ministry,” he said.