HOW MUCH shabu does it take to get yourself to prison and stay there during the trial of your criminal case?
All it takes is a sachet of .01 gram, even less if we are being literal about it.
The law imposes life imprisonment for drug trading regardless of the volume involved – whether it is for less than a gram or for a hundred kilos or more.
The street value of methamphetamine being peddled in sachets is said to be about a hundred pesos.
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The Supreme Court itself has expressed alarm over the prosecution of drug trade involving “miniscule amounts” clogging court dockets all over the country.
Ask any litigator and he will tell you that violations of Republic Act no. 9165 are never absent from the daily calendar of criminal cases.
Most of them involve sachets that weigh less than the five-centavo coin. The visual equivalent is a pinch of salt.
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The Supreme Court has rendered acquittals for failure of the police to strictly observe the chain-of-custody rule in drug cases.
Extreme caution must be exercised in adjudging the guilt of someone accused of trading small amounts of shabu. The retail nature of these transactions makes them susceptible to “substitution, adulteration, and planting of fungible evidence.”
Courts trying these drug cases are exhorted to apply rules on drug documentation with strict rigidity.
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Thousands of our countrymen getting arrested and prosecuted for miniscule drug transactions do not make as much a dent on the overall drug infrastructure as the recent bust of “ninja cops” protecting a stockpile of shabu in Tondo estimated to be worth almost 7 billion pesos.
That itself makes all those small-time street arrests almost hypocritical.
These rogue policemen make a killing by refunneling the recovered drugs to the supply chain. There is also an over-abundance of reusable drugs that may be “planted” to buttress that periodic performance report.
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News is out that 49 police officers led by a General were involved in the pilferage of more than 40 kilos of shabu, which is a part of the 990 kilos seized in Tondo in October last year.
The average price of shabu per kilo is said to be 6.9 million pesos. That would be the value of a house-and-lot for each of those cops.
More than 40 kilos were pilfered before the 990 kilos could be inventoried. It is logical to assume that the total hoard discovered in the safekeep of one police master sergeant Rodolfo Mayo was more than one ton of shabu.
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The public needs to see through the successful prosecution of the cases against ninja cops.
The scales of justice have keeled towards prosecution of small-time drug peddlers. This has strained resources – eating up almost half the attention of judges, prosecutors, and public attorneys, to the prejudice of other equally important cases. This has also crowded up sparse detention places.
In the meantime, those entrusted with the duty to seal off the sources of these illegal drugs are the ones swimming in lard.
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Justice Leonen said it right:
We are swamped with cases involving small fry who have been arrested for miniscule amounts. While they are certainly a bane to our society, small retailers are but low-lying fruits in an exceedingly vast network of drug cartels. Both law enforcers and prosecutors should realize that the more effective and efficient strategy is to focus resources more on the source and true leadership of these nefarious organizations./PN
