THOUSANDS of suspected drug pushers have perished in alleged shootouts with the police in the “war on drugs.” Should this fact not have deterred others from pushing, too?
That question reminds us of the familiar quotation, “Poverty knows no law.” A metaphorical equivalent in Tagalog says, “Ang taong gipit, sa patalim kumakapit.”
Indeed, some people are so financially depressed that they push shabu regardless of risk to life and limb. A typical case of police entrapment led to the arrest last Thursday of a barber with 430 grams of shabu (worth P5.1 million) at his rented house in Barangay Singcang, Bacolod City.
The incident prompted me to see my barber to ask how much he earns. On a good day, he said, he could take home P500. Unfortunately, it’s not as good most of the time.
What about the poorer isang kahig, isang tuka breadwinners like taxi, tricycle and traysikad drivers? We have heard and read of some of them drug-pushing, willingly risking their lives to secure “a better future for the family”; otherwise, they would die of hunger.
On the other side of the equation are the illegal drug users who also go to jail when caught.
Following the death of his drug-addicted son, a close friend confided to me that he had spent a fortune for the boy’s rehabilitation in the United States, but to no avail. His son’s craving for illegal drugs was of such magnitude that he would always backslide.
What has gone wrong with President Rodrigo Duterte’s campaign promise to eliminate illegal drugs in “three to six months”?
We’ve heard Duterte admonish drug dealers to quit or “I will kill you,” which has no doubt emboldened the police to take the law in their own hands – as in the apparent murder of Albuera, Leyte mayor Rolando Espinosa for “resisting arrest” while already behind bars.
Killing drug suspects sans due process will not solve the drug problem. The only way to do it is to prevent drug supply from coming in. Alas, the government has shown nothing but laxity in that direction.
Everybody remembers the 604 kilos of shabu (worth P6.4 billion) that had passed through the Bureau of Customs before getting intercepted in a Valenzuela City warehouse. The ensuing Senate probe prematurely ended with “Pulong” refusing to take off his polo shirt amid accusations that his back would reveal a drug syndicate’s dragon tattoo.
Just last week, two successive interceptions stunned us. Tuesday (August 7) saw the composite team of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) and Philippine National Police (PNP) operatives intercepting a container with more or less 500 kilos of shabu worth P4.3 billion taken out of two magnetic scrap lifters at the Manila International Container Terminal (MICT).
The following day, PDEA found four more magnetic scrap lifters in a warehouse in General Mariano Alvarez in Cavite, but already emptied of shabu (as determined by sniffer dogs) that might have weighed one ton – worth P6.8 billion as estimated by PDEA head Aaron Aquino, who bewailed “connivance” between drug lords and Customs officials.
“The P6.8 billion worth of illegal drugs are now circulating anew in our streets,” Aquino groaned.
Strangely, we have yet to hear (as of this writing) Duterte comment on the aforesaid capers. Despite the exposure of suspected drug lords in the social media, the government has done nothing against them.
There was a time when the streamline newspapers published the captioned picture of a certain Peter paying a courtesy visit to his kumpare Digong in July 2016. If, as rumored, Peter belongs to the so-called Chinese Triad, then what we have is a fake “war on drugs.” (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
